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Rabbit, Baked
Skin, draw, and wash thoroughly a young rabbit, and let it lie in milk and water for an hour or two. Drain it, and cut it up into small neat joints convenient for serving. Pepper these lightly, place them in a single layer in a baking-tin, and cover each piece with a rasher of bacon. Put the tin into a moderately-heated oven, and bake the rabbit until it is done enough. Arrange the rabbit and bacon alternately in a circle on a hot dish, and pour the gravy in the tin over them. Serve very hot, with mashed potatoes as an accompaniment. Time to bake, from three-quarters of an hour to one hour. Probable cost, 7d. to 9d. per pound. Sufficient, one rabbit for two or three persons.
A plain roasting-tin dish that depends entirely on the bacon for fat and on the oven for restraint. Rabbit is very lean, and the gap between tender and dry is narrow.
- Oven temperatureA "moderately-heated oven" here means about 350F (180C). Higher and the lean joints tighten and dry before the bacon has rendered over them.
- The milk and water soakSoaking in milk and water is recommended in a number of Victorian cookery books, to whiten the flesh and mute the gamey flavour of wild rabbit. Farmed rabbit, which is what most butchers are likely to sell now, is mild and pale already; an hour in salted water is enough, or skip it entirely.
- Buying and jointing"Skin and draw" assumes a whole animal from the game dealer. Order it skinned and gutted, or buy it jointed. A whole rabbit divides into two forelegs, two hind legs, and the saddle cut across into two or three pieces.
- DonenessThree-quarters of an hour to an hour is right for a young rabbit at 350F, but check the thick part of a hind leg: the juices should run clear and the meat pull easily from the bone. Older or wild rabbit will be tough at that time and is better braised than baked.
- BaconUse streaky rather than back bacon, unsmoked if you want the rabbit to taste of itself. It is doing the work of basting, so do not trim the fat, and lay it so it covers the exposed meat rather than curling off it.
- The gravyA lean rabbit under bacon yields very little in the tin. Deglaze the tin over a burner with a splash of stock or cider and scrape up the browned bits, or there will be almost nothing to pour.
- Cost and yieldThe 7d. to 9d. per pound is a Victorian price and of historical interest only. One rabbit for two or three people still holds; allow one hind leg or the equivalent per person.
Rabbit was one of the cheapest meats in Victorian Britain, and the recipe treats it with the same matter-of-factness as it treats mutton. The milk-and-water soak that opens the recipe belongs to a whole family of nineteenth-century instructions for blanching and mildening flesh, applied to rabbit, tripe and sweetbreads alike, and it reflects a period taste for pale, delicate-looking meat rather than pronounced game flavour. Wrapping lean meat in bacon before roasting is the domestic descendant of barding, the older practice of tying sheets of pork fat over game birds and hares, and it survives for the same practical reason: a rabbit carries almost no fat of its own. The dish's pairing with mashed potatoes, and the quoted price per pound, place it squarely in the household economy the book was written for.