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Rabbit, Fillet Of
Bake a rabbit for one hour, baste frequently; then cut it into neat joints, and put them into a stewpan with two dessert-spoonfuls of thickened brown gravy, half an ounce of butter, a small lump of sugar, a tea-spoonful of chopped parsley, two table-spoonfuls of mushroom ketchup, and pepper and salt to taste. Put in all the gravy from the pan the rabbit was baked in, and simmer for five minutes. Arrange in a pyramid on a hot dish, and pour the sauce over. Probable cost, 2s. to 2s. 6d.
A reheated-roast dish rather than a true fillet: the rabbit is roasted whole, jointed, then finished in a small quantity of sharply seasoned gravy. The success of it rests entirely on the rabbit not drying out during that first hour.
- Which rabbitA farmed rabbit of 2-3 lb roasts in about an hour at 350F and stays tender. A wild rabbit, especially an older one, will be tough and stringy treated this way; joint it and braise it in liquid instead, then use the sauce below.
- Basting is not optionalRabbit has almost no fat, and the recipe assumes you supply it. Lay the animal with bacon or fat pork over the back and legs and baste with butter or dripping every ten to fifteen minutes, or the loin will be dry before the hind legs are done.
- Oven heatThe recipe names no oven temperature; a moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern reading of a one-hour bake for a small rabbit. Test the thickest part of the thigh; 160-165F internal is right, and the meat should come away from the bone readily.
- Spoon measuresA dessert-spoonful is about 2 teaspoons, so the two called for come to roughly four teaspoons, a little over a tablespoon of thickened gravy. This is a glaze for the joints, not a stew liquor.
- Thickened brown gravyA roux-thickened brown stock; in a well-staffed house that might be espagnole, in a plainer one the strained residue of previous roasts. Reduced beef or veal stock thickened with a little beurre manie does the same job; the pan juices from the rabbit carry most of the flavour.
- Mushroom ketchupA thin, dark, salty mushroom-and-spice liquid, not tomato ketchup. Bottled mushroom ketchup is still sold; failing that, use a tablespoon of soy or Worcestershire sauce plus a little mushroom soaking liquor, and hold back on added salt since both are very salty.
- The five minutesTake it literally. The rabbit is already cooked and the simmer is only to warm the joints and marry the sauce; longer and the lean meat tightens and goes fibrous.
- Serving and yieldThe pyramid arrangement wants the leg and shoulder joints as a base with the saddle pieces on top. A 2-3 lb rabbit serves three, or four with a substantial vegetable.
- That cost line2s. to 2s. 6d. is two shillings to two shillings and sixpence in pre-decimal money, the price of the whole dish when the book was compiled, and no guide at all to what a rabbit costs now.
Rabbit was one of the cheapest meats in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, and treated by cookery writers as a workaday substitute for chicken; Cassell's devotes pages to it, from soups and puddings to curries. The title is optimistic, since the animal has no fillet worth the name and what is meant is simply the jointed roast dressed up for the table. The technique of roasting, jointing and then finishing in a strongly flavoured brown sauce belongs to the same household economy that produced hashes and rechauffes, and the mushroom ketchup is the period's standard shortcut to savoury depth, a bottled condiment that predates commercial tomato ketchup in British kitchens by generations. The printed "probable cost" was a fixture of Cassell's, often said to have been addressed to a mistress of the house checking her cook's accounts rather than to the cook herself.