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Rabbit, Baked, with Rice
Cut up a fat young rabbit into neat joints, and pepper these rather highly. Dissolve three or four ounces of bacon fat or good dripping in a saucepan, put in the pieces of rabbit, and let them steam over a gentle fire until they are lightly browned and half cooked. Take them up, drain them, and put them aside. Wash half a pound of rice, and put it into a saucepan with a quart of nicely-flavoured stock and half a blade of mace. Let it simmer until it is tender and has absorbed the liquor, then let it cool, and stir in with it a large slice of fresh butter and the yolks of four eggs. Butter a deep dish, lay the pieces of rabbit into it, pour over them a large spoonful of chutney, and then spread the rice on the top. Lay the beaten yolks of two eggs upon the rice, and bake the preparation in a brisk oven. Serve very hot in the dish in which it was baked. Time to bake, half an hour. Probable cost, 3s. 4d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A Victorian rabbit pilaf under an egg-enriched rice crust, closer to a baked kedgeree than a pie. The hinge is that the rabbit goes into the dish only half cooked and finishes under the rice, so the initial browning must be gentle and unhurried rather than a hard sear.
- Brisk ovenRead it as a hot oven, roughly 400-425F (200-220C). Half an hour at that heat sets and lightly gilds the egg-washed rice while the rabbit finishes through.
- The rabbitA "fat young rabbit" would be a small one, roughly 2.5-3 lb, jointed into two forelegs, two hind legs and the saddle cut across into two or three pieces. An older or leaner animal may still be tough after this treatment; if that is what you have, braise the joints until tender before they go into the dish.
- DonenessRabbit is a meat that wants to reach about 160F (71C) at the thickest part of the hind leg. Half-cooking then thirty minutes covered in hot rice will usually get there in a farmed animal, but the leg joints are worth checking before the dish goes to table.
- Bacon fat or drippingThree or four ounces is 85-115 g, a generous amount by modern habit but it is doing the work of both browning and basting. Butter and oil in equal parts will stand in, though you lose the cured savour.
- "Steam over a gentle fire"Not a fry. Cover the pan and let the joints colour slowly in the fat so they give up some juice and stay moist; a hard brown crust here will only toughen in the oven.
- The riceHalf a pound is about 1 1/4 cups of long-grain rice, and a quart of stock is 4-5 cups depending on whether the measure is read as US or imperial; either way it is a wetter ratio than a pilaf. That is deliberate: the rice should be soft and cohesive enough to spread as a lid, not separate and fluffy.
- Blade of maceMace is the lacy outer covering of nutmeg. Half a blade is a small piece; fish it out before the yolks go in, or substitute a scant pinch of ground mace.
- The egg yolksFour yolks stirred into the rice must go in only once it has cooled to warm, or they scramble. The two beaten yolks on top are a glaze and will brown fast, so watch the last ten minutes.
- ChutneyA "large spoonful" of chutney, an Anglo-Indian touch typical of this book; a sweet fruit chutney suits it. It is the main source of acid and sugar in the dish, so do not leave it out.
- Yield and costFive or six portions, as stated. The 3s 4d is a Victorian price, quoted so a housekeeper could budget against the day's meat bill; it has no modern equivalent worth calculating.
Cassell's dictionary was compiled at a moment when rabbit was still ordinary butcher's meat in Britain rather than a specialist purchase, cheap enough that recipes for it could sit unremarked among the beef and mutton. What marks this one is the company the rabbit keeps: rice simmered in stock with mace, bound with egg yolks, and a spoonful of chutney laid under the crust. The chutney is the Anglo-Indian inheritance working its way into plain English cookery, arriving in the domestic kitchen as a bottled condiment. The construction itself, a savoury meat under a rice lid baked until set, is the same idea that produces the baked pilafs of the eastern Mediterranean, though there is no need to claim a direct line; enriching rice with egg and butter to make it hold together is a solution cooks have reached independently wherever rice and eggs are both cheap.