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Rabbit, Cold, to Dress
Joint the meat, beat up an egg or two with a little grated nutmeg, pepper, and salt, some parsley minced fine, and some bread-crumbs; dip the meat into the batter, sprinkle with crumbs, have ready some sweet beef-dripping hot in a pan, and fry the meat to a light brown; thicken a little gravy with flour, put a large spoonful of ketchup to it, lay the fry in a hot dish, pour the gravy round it, not over it, and serve hot; garnish with lemon and toast.
This is a leftovers recipe: it assumes you already have a cooked rabbit in the larder, and turns it into a crisp fried dish. Two details do the real work — the fat must be fresh, and the gravy goes around the meat, never over it.
- Start with cooked meat"Cold" here means the remains of a boiled or roasted rabbit. The frying is only to brown the coating and heat the joints through, so keep it brief; a long stay in the pan dries out meat that is already cooked, and rabbit has very little fat to protect it.
- Sweet dripping"Sweet" in Victorian usage means not rancid, not sugary. Beef dripping is still sold and works well, but any neutral fat with a high smoke point will do. The recipe specifies only that the fat be hot; a moderate frying heat is what is wanted -- a crumb dropped in should sizzle at once without browning instantly.
- KetchupIn a book of this date ketchup usually means mushroom or walnut ketchup: thin, dark, salty, closer to Worcestershire than to tomato sauce. A tablespoon of mushroom ketchup or Worcestershire gives the intended savoury depth; tomato ketchup will make the gravy sweet.
- The coatingThe egg is beaten with the seasonings, parsley and some crumbs to make a thick batter, then the dipped joints are sprinkled with more dry crumbs, as the recipe directs. Letting the coated pieces stand a few minutes before frying helps the crust set.
- Gravy round, not overThis is the hinge. Pouring gravy over fried crumbs softens them within a minute. Flood the base of a hot dish and set the joints on top, or serve the gravy separately.
- Thickening the gravy"A little gravy" presumably means stock or the strained liquor from cooking the rabbit, thickened with flour; the recipe gives no quantities. Cooking the flour in a little of the dripping first keeps it from tasting raw.
- Garnish"Toast" here is most likely sippets: small pieces of fried or toasted bread set around the dish. With lemon they cut the fat, which matters more than it sounds with a dripping-fried dish.
- YieldOne rabbit jointed gives about four modest portions. The same treatment suits cold chicken or cold veal.
Cassell's, like other household dictionaries of its period, devotes a run of entries to what to do with meat that has already been on the table once -- cold beef, cold fowl, cold rabbit -- because a joint or a rabbit fed a family across several days and waste was a moral as well as a financial matter. Rabbit was cheap, widely trapped and sold in numbers in British markets through the nineteenth century, which is why it appears in several guises rather than as a delicacy. The egg-and-crumb coating with fried bread sippets around the dish is a familiar genteel dressing-up of leftovers: it gives a re-served plate the appearance of a fresh course. The mushroom and walnut ketchups called for in such gravies were bottled store-cupboard staples long before tomato ketchup came to dominate the word, and recipes for making them at home occupy their own entries in books of this kind.