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RABBIT CAKE (a breakfast, luncheon, or supper dish)
Take the white meat from two young rabbits. Put the bones into a saucepan, cover them with cold water, add an onion, a bunch of sweet herbs, and a little pepper and salt, and let these ingredients stew gently until the gravy is strong and pleasantly flavoured. Strain, thicken with a little flour and butter, stir one or two spoonfuls of cream into the gravy, and let it boil until it is smooth and of the consistency of custard. Take the weight of the meat in fat bacon, cut this into small pieces, and melt these in a saucepan over a gentle fire. In two or three minutes put the pieces of rabbit into the pan with them, accompanied by a bunch of parsley, a sprig of thyme, a bay-leaf, and a little pepper, and stir all with a wooden spoon until the meat is sufficiently cooked. Turn the contents of the saucepan into a mortar with half the quantity of panada (see PANADA), pound all together to a smooth paste, and rub this through a hair sieve. Moisten the forcemeat with a small quantity of the sauce made from the bones, and bind it together with the yolks of two or three eggs. Taste the forcemeat, to ascertain whether or not it is pleasantly flavoured, and, if further seasoning is required, pound the mixture again after it is added. A few mushrooms or truffles cut small may be added if liked. Butter two round moulds of different sizes, and press the forcemeat into these. Cover them, put them into a large pan containing boiling water three or four inches deep, and keep this boiling until the forcemeat is sufficiently cooked. Let it get cold. When wanted, turn the larger cake upon a dish, put the smaller cake on the top of it, and place a ring of clear aspic jelly on the top of all. Garnish the dish with aspic jelly cut into dice, and, if liked, place a border of rice round the cake. When prettily ornamented it is ready for serving. Time to boil the cakes, half an hour to an hour and a quarter, according to size. Probable cost of rabbits, 7d. to 9d. per pound. Sufficient for eight or nine persons.
This is a cold rabbit forcemeat — closer to a moulded mousse or pâté than anything a modern reader would call a cake. The work is in the pounding and sieving, and a food processor does in two minutes what the mortar and hair sieve did in twenty.
- The hinge: gentle heat throughoutThe hinge: gentle heat -- Cook the meat in the bacon fat only until just done. The original directs that the water in the pan be kept boiling, but a bare simmer is safer for an egg-bound forcemeat: at a hard rolling boil it can curdle, and the finished cake weeps fat and liquid instead of slicing cleanly.
- PanadaGenerally, in this period, a paste of bread or flour cooked in milk or stock until it leaves the side of the pan; the book carries its own entry (see PANADA). It is the binder that keeps the puree sliceable. "Half the quantity" is ambiguous in the original -- it is usually read as half the weight of the rabbit meat, which gives a firm but not stodgy result.
- Two young rabbitsA young farmed rabbit runs 2 1/2 to 3 lb whole and gives perhaps 10 oz of white meat from the loin and forelegs. Two rabbits is therefore roughly 1 1/4 lb of meat, and the recipe wants an equal weight of fat bacon — use unsmoked fat back or streaky, since modern smoked bacon will dominate the delicate flavour.
- Mortar and hair sievePound in a food processor, then push through a fine drum sieve or a chinois with the back of a ladle if you want the old smoothness. Skipping the sieving leaves a coarser, more rustic pâté, which is perfectly good but not what the book is after.
- Doneness, not clock timeThe stated half hour to an hour and a quarter depends entirely on mould size. Cook to 160-165F at the centre on an instant-read thermometer; the mixture will be set and slightly domed. If you prefer the oven, a covered bain-marie at 325F behaves more predictably than a pan on the hob.
- AspicPowdered gelatine sets a clarified rabbit or chicken stock without the labour of the old egg-white raft -- a 1/4 oz sachet (about 2 1/2 teaspoons) per 2 cups of well-flavoured stock gives a jelly firm enough to dice. Chill the ring and the dice separately on a tray before assembling.
- Cooling and keepingChill the moulds thoroughly, at least six hours and preferably overnight, before turning out; warm forcemeat will collapse. Eat within three days and keep it refrigerated — this is fully cooked meat, not a preserved terrine.
- YieldEight or nine as the book says, if served cold as one dish among several. As a plated first course with the rice border it stretches to a dozen.
Rabbit was a cheap meat on the Victorian and Edwardian table -- this book quotes 7d to 9d a pound -- and cookery writers worked hard to dress it up as something other than a stew. The tiered mould, the sieved forcemeat, the aspic ring and the border of rice are all borrowed from the French repertoire of cold entrees, where a pain or gateau of poultry or game meant exactly this: a bound puree cooked in a bain-marie and served cold, sliced. Calling it a "cake" reflects that usage rather than anything sweet. Its billing as a breakfast, luncheon or supper dish is telling: a cold moulded forcemeat could be made the day before, kept in a cool larder, and brought out for any of the informal meals a household ate without ceremony.