Rabbits
Rabbits, which are in the best condition in midwinter, may be fricasseed like chicken in white or brown sauce. To make a pie, first stew till tender, and make like chicken-pie. To roast, stuff with a dressing made of bread-crumbs, chopped salt pork, thyme, onion, and pepper and salt, sew up, rub over with a little butter, or pin on it a few slices of salt pork, add a little water in the pan, and baste often. Serve with mashed potatoes and currant jelly.
A compressed set of three methods rather than one recipe, written for cooks who already knew how to fricassee a chicken. The details that matter are about fat and age, since rabbit has almost none of the first and varies enormously in the second.
- Fat is the whole problemA rabbit carries almost no intramuscular fat and dries out well before a chicken would. The salt pork pinned over the back, the butter, the water in the pan and the frequent basting are not garnish; skip any of them and the saddle turns to string.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no oven temperature. Roast at 325-350F: higher heat only accelerates the drying. A 2.5-3 lb farmed rabbit takes roughly 1 to 1.25 hours stuffed, to 160F at the thigh.
- Wild versus farmed"Midwinter condition" refers to wild rabbit taken in season. Farmed rabbit, which is what a butcher sells now, is younger, milder and more tender, and suits roasting better. Any wild rabbit of uncertain age should go to the fricassee or the pie, where long stewing does the work.
- Handling wild rabbitTularemia is carried by wild rabbits and is contracted through cuts while skinning and dressing, not through properly cooked meat. Wear gloves for butchering, and cook the meat through.
- The fricasseeJoint into two forelegs, two hind legs and the saddle in two or three pieces. Brown for the brown sauce, leave pale for the white, then simmer covered in stock 45 minutes to an hour until the legs give at the bone.
- The pieStew till tender means until the meat pulls off the bone easily, then pick it and use the strained cooking liquid as the base for the gravy. Rabbit bones are numerous and fine; pick carefully before the crust goes on.
- Salt porkSalt pork varies widely in saltiness. Taste the stuffing before salting further, and blanch the slices briefly if they are very salty. Thick-cut unsmoked bacon substitutes cleanly.
- YieldOne rabbit roasted serves two, three at a stretch. Two rabbits are usual for a pie or a fricassee for four to six.
Rabbit appears in Buckeye Cookery (1877) among its poultry and game receipts, and in the American Midwest of the period it was more often hunted than bought; the note about midwinter condition reflects the common view that wild rabbits are in best condition in the cold months. The instruction to treat it "like chicken" runs through nineteenth-century English and American cookbooks and reflects the similar size of the two birds and beasts on the table. The currant jelly is the giveaway that this is game cookery proper: sharp fruit preserves were served with venison, hare and wildfowl, a convention generally traced to English practice and carried over into American books of the period.