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Rabbit, Baked, and Macaroni
Cut a rabbit into joints, or truss it if preferred; butter it well, and lay it in a baking-dish on some slices of ham. Place it in a moderately-heated oven, and let it remain there, basting now and then with more butter. Take a quarter of a pound of Naples macaroni, break it in pieces about two inches in length, and throw these into a stewpan of boiling stock. Let the macaroni simmer till tender, then strain it; mix with it one ounce of white sugar, and two ounces of fresh butter, season to taste, and add to the rabbit a table-spoonful of brandy and a table-spoonful of lemon-juice. Place the macaroni in the dish with the rabbit, bake until the macaroni is of a pleasant brown colour, and send to table in the dish in which the rabbit was baked. Time, the rabbit must be at least half an hour in the oven before the addition of the macaroni.
A Victorian one-dish roast that finishes with sweetened, buttered macaroni browned around the meat. Two things need attention: the rabbit's cooking time, which the original understates, and the sugar, which is deliberate rather than a misprint.
- Oven temperatureA "moderately-heated oven" is 350-375F. The final browning of the macaroni benefits from raising it to 425F for the last ten minutes, or a short pass under the broiler.
- Timing, corrected"At least half an hour" before the macaroni goes in is a minimum, not a total. Jointed farmed rabbit needs roughly 45-60 minutes at 350F to reach 160F at the thickest part of the leg; a whole trussed rabbit needs longer. Wild rabbit is leaner and tougher and does better braised covered than roasted dry.
- Naples macaroniLong, thick, hollow tubes sold in straight lengths, which is why the recipe tells you to break them. Ziti or rigatoni are the closest current equivalents. A quarter pound is 4 oz dry, about 1 to 1 1/4 cups of short tubes.
- Cook the macaroni shortIt gets a second cooking in the oven, so pull it while still firm — a couple of minutes under the package time. Save the stock it simmered in; a few spoonfuls poured into the dish keeps the pasta from drying out while it browns.
- The sugarOne ounce is about 2 tablespoons, which reads as a lot against 4 oz of pasta. Sweet treatments of macaroni were common enough in English cookery of the period that this is unlikely to be a misprint, but if you want the dish to sit as a savoury, cut it to a teaspoon or leave it out and lean on the ham and butter.
- The ham bedThe slices are there to baste the rabbit from below and to season it. Use thick-cut dry-cured ham or unsmoked bacon; supermarket sandwich ham is too wet and too lightly salted to do the job.
- Brandy and lemonAdd them over the rabbit when the macaroni goes in, not at the start, or the alcohol and acid cook off before they season anything.
- YieldOne rabbit of about 2 1/2 to 3 lb with this quantity of macaroni serves three, or four modestly with a green vegetable.
Rabbit was cheap and plentiful in the Victorian kitchen — sold by poulterers and hawked from carts — and Cassell's gives it many treatments: curried, jugged, potted, in pies, and here in an Italianate bake. "Naples macaroni" points to Naples, a major centre of macaroni production, whose tubes reached England in long straight bundles and were treated as a dry good rather than a staple. The sugar and butter in the macaroni are unlikely to be a slip: sweetened macaroni, sometimes finished with sugar, cream and spice, appears in English cookery from the eighteenth century onwards, and the savoury-only pasta we expect today had not yet settled in. The brandy and lemon juice are characteristic high-Victorian household style, a small extravagance to lift a very ordinary piece of meat.