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RABBIT, BROILED (a la Maintenon)
Cut up a fresh young rabbit into neat joints convenient for serving. Put these into a stewpan, pour over them as much good stock as will barely cover them, and put with them a bunch of parsley, one or two sticks of celery, two onions, a blade of mace, a sliced carrot, six or eight peppercorns, and half a dozen mushrooms. Let them simmer gently for half an hour. Take them up, drain them, and let them cool. Cut as many pieces of writing-paper as there are pieces of rabbit, butter these, and lay inside each one a piece of fat bacon. Lay the rabbit on this, and sprinkle over it a little white pepper and grated nutmeg. Fold the paper round the meat, and broil the pieces of rabbit over a clear fire until the bacon has had time to cook sufficiently. Serve in the papers. Thicken the gravy with a little brown thickening, and send it to table in a tureen. Time to broil the rabbit, ten minutes. Probable cost of rabbits, 7d. to 9d. per pound. Sufficient for two or three persons.
An early form of cooking en papillote, with the twist that the rabbit is fully cooked in stock first — the paper stage is essentially a finishing step. Read it that way and the short timing makes sense.
- The hinge: the rabbit is already cookedTen minutes over the fire is only long enough to render and cook the bacon and scent the meat with nutmeg and pepper. Judge the simmering stage, not the broiling, for doneness — the joints should be tender at the end of the half hour, and farmed rabbit will be; wild rabbit may want 45 minutes to an hour.
- "Writing-paper"Nineteenth-century writing paper was rag-based and sturdier than modern wood-pulp paper, which is why it could take butter and heat. Use parchment paper, buttered on the inside as directed. Foil will hold the parcel but blocks the light browning the paper gives.
- Broiling over a clear fireA "clear fire" means coals burned down past flame, with no smoke and no flare-up. On a charcoal grill, wait for a light ash coating and keep the parcels on the cooler side; under a domestic broiler, set them 5-6 inches from the element. Paper scorches at the edges — that is expected — but it should not catch.
- Fat baconA fatty piece rather than a thin modern rasher; Victorian bacon was often unsmoked ("green"). Fat salt pork or unsmoked back fat, cut about 1/8 inch thick, one piece per joint, is a close stand-in. Smoked bacon may overwhelm the mace and nutmeg.
- Brown thickeningA brown roux made in advance and kept on hand: equal weights butter and flour cooked slowly to the colour of a hazelnut shell. Whisk small pinches into the strained simmering stock until it coats a spoon, then let it cook two or three minutes to lose any raw-flour taste.
- A blade of maceOne piece of the dried outer covering (aril) of nutmeg; a small pinch of ground mace stands in if you have no blades. Fish it out with the vegetables before you thicken the gravy.
- JointingTwo front legs, two hind legs, the saddle cut across into two or three pieces, and the ribcage: six to eight pieces, which suits a rabbit of roughly 2 1/2 to 3 lb. That is about what "sufficient for two or three persons" implies.
- ServingThe parcels go to table closed, for the diner to open; the tureen of gravy is poured over after. Plain boiled potatoes or a purée of celeriac suit it better than anything sauced.
The name points to Madame de Maintenon, Louis XIV's second wife, whose name was attached in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to a family of dishes cooked in buttered paper cases — lamb cutlets à la Maintenon are the best-known survivor. The attribution is culinary tradition rather than documented cookery on her part; French kitchen nomenclature handed out courtly names freely. What is real is the technique: paper cases were often used for cooking small cuts over coals without drying them. Rabbit was priced here at 7d. to 9d. a pound, broadly comparable to the cheaper butcher's meats of the period, and it remained an everyday urban protein in Britain until myxomatosis devastated the wild population in the 1950s.The two-stage method — poach in stock, then finish in paper, and serve the poaching liquid as gravy — is also a frugal one: nothing of the rabbit is wasted.