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Rabbit En Papillotes
Take some young and tender rabbits, cut them into joints, and let them marinade some hours in parsley, mushrooms, chives, and a clove of garlic, all chopped fine, together with pepper, salt, and oil. Cover each piece of rabbit with some of this seasoning and a slice of bacon cut very thin; wrap each separately in well-buttered white paper; broil over a gentle fire, and serve in the paper as hot as possible. Probable cost, rabbits, 7d. to 9d. per pound.
A straightforward papillote: the paper is the cooking vessel, and it has to be sealed and greased well enough to survive direct heat. Everything else follows from that.
- The paper"Well-buttered white paper" means a sheet of unwaxed, uncoated paper folded into a sealed parcel; today use parchment, cut generously and buttered on the inside face. Fold the edges over twice and crimp so no oil escapes and no flame reaches an open edge. Foil works and is safer over live coals, but it steams rather than lightly toasts the parcel, so the flavour is duller.
- "Broil over a gentle fire"In Victorian usage broiling is cooking on a gridiron over coals, not the overhead element of a modern broiler, which would scorch the paper before the meat cooked. The book gives no temperature; "gentle" implies a moderate, steady heat rather than a fierce one. A covered grill at moderate heat, turning the parcels once, or a moderate oven of about 375F, will give a similar effect.
- Timing and donenessThe book gives none. Jointed young rabbit in a parcel takes about 25-35 minutes at 375F depending on the size of the pieces; the saddle pieces cook faster than the hind legs. Rabbit is very lean and dries out quickly past 160F internal, so check the thickest leg joint rather than cooking by the clock.
- The marinadeParsley, mushrooms, chives and garlic chopped fine with oil, pepper and salt is a duxelles-adjacent paste rather than a wet marinade. For two rabbits figure roughly 4 oz mushrooms, a good handful of parsley, a small bunch of chives and one clove of garlic. "Some hours" is all the book says; two to four in the refrigerator works, and overnight is fine.
- The baconThe thin slice over each piece is there to baste the lean meat, so it needs to be genuinely thin and unsmoked if possible. Streaky bacon or pancetta cut on a slicer, or thin sheets of pork back fat, do the job; thick-cut smoked bacon will not render in time and will dominate the herbs.
- Sourcing the rabbit"Young and tender" mattered because old wild rabbit is tough and needs stewing. Farmed rabbit, which is what most butchers sell, is uniformly young and suits this method; a whole one runs 2.5-3 lb and jointing gives two front legs, two hind legs and the saddle cut into two or three.
- Yield and servingOne rabbit feeds two to three. Serve the parcels unopened on the plate and let each person cut them at the table, which is the whole point of the technique -- the trapped aroma is released in front of the diner.
- The price note7d. to 9d. per pound is pre-decimal British currency, seven to nine pence in a shilling of twelve. It tells you rabbit was cheap everyday meat rather than the specialist purchase it is now.
En papillote -- literally "in a paper wrapper" -- was a French restaurant technique that English cookery books absorbed through the nineteenth century, usually for veal cutlets, red mullet or, as here, small game. The seasoning paste of parsley, mushrooms and chives bound with oil is essentially a cold version of the duxelles-and-herb mixture French cooks packed round meat in paper cases, and the thin bacon slice does the work that a lean animal cannot do for itself. Rabbit's place in a book like Cassell's reflects how ordinary it then was: wild rabbit was abundant, cheap and sold by the pound in city markets, and a household that could not run to game birds could still put something out of the fields on the table. The paper-case treatment is a way of giving that cheap meat a restaurant flourish, which is very much the register in which Cassell's wrote for its aspiring middle-class readers.