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RABBIT, FRICASSEED, WHITE (another and a superior way)
Prepare a rabbit as in the last recipe. Dissolve two ounces of butter in a stewpan, sprinkle a little salt and pepper over the pieces of rabbit, put them into the saucepan, and with them a dozen button onions and half a pint of blanched mushrooms. Let all simmer gently in the butter for three or four minutes, shaking the saucepan frequently, in order to keep the pieces of rabbit from acquiring any colour. Dredge two ounces of flour over them, pour on them half a pint of stock or water, and add a glassful of sherry or Madeira, if liked. Let the fricassee boil, then draw it to the side of the fire, and let it simmer gently for half an hour, or longer if the rabbit is large. Carefully remove the scum and the fat as they rise to the surface. Season the gravy with a little salt and pepper, if required, and add a little grated nutmeg, a pinch of cayenne, and a lump of sugar the size of a marble. Beat the yolks of two eggs with a quarter of a pint of cream, take the fricassee from the fire for one minute, then stir a small portion of the gravy into the cream, and afterwards mix this with the rest of the sauce. Stir over the fire till it is quite hot, but on no account allow it to boil after the eggs are added. At the last moment stir in a table-spoonful of lemon-juice. Arrange the pieces of rabbit on a hot dish, place the mushrooms and onions round them, and pour the sauce over all. Garnish with cut lemon. Serve very hot. Time, one hour or more. Probable cost, 4s. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A white fricassee stands or falls on the egg-and-cream liaison at the end. Everything before that is gentle stewing without colour.
- The hinge: never boil after the eggsOnce the yolks and cream go in, the sauce must be held below a simmer — around 180F is plenty. A boil scrambles the yolks and the sauce breaks into curds that will not come back.
- Temper properlyTake the pan off the heat for a full minute, then whisk a ladle of the hot gravy into the egg-and-cream mixture before returning it to the pan. Pouring the cream straight into the hot pan is the usual way this dish fails.
- Imperial pintsThis is a British book, so a pint is 20 fl oz. Half a pint of stock is 10 fl oz (about 1¼ cups) and a quarter pint of cream is 5 fl oz (about ⅔ cup). The half pint of mushrooms is a volume measure, not a weight.
- Button onionsThese are pearl or small pickling onions, peeled and left whole. Frozen peeled pearl onions work and save considerable time.
- "Blanched" mushroomsHere the sense is treating the buttons to keep them pale (period practice used salt, lemon, or a brief plunge into acidulated water), not the modern sense of shocking in ice. The point throughout is whiteness; nothing in the pan should take on colour.
- Keeping it whiteButter over low heat, shaking constantly — if the flour or the rabbit browns even slightly, the finished sauce goes beige. A heavy pan and a low flame matter more than the timing here.
- Rabbit and timingFarmed rabbit, which is what most butchers sell, is tender and will be done in the half hour specified. A wild rabbit, especially an older one, wants 45 minutes to an hour and should be checked for tenderness at the leg rather than by the clock.
- The lump of sugarA marble-sized lump is about a teaspoon. It is there to round off the acidity of the wine and lemon, not to sweeten — leave it out and the sauce reads sharp.
- Lemon at the last momentAcid added to a hot egg-thickened sauce can encourage curdling, so it goes in at the very last moment before serving, as the recipe directs (the recipe does not say to take the pan off the heat for it).
- YieldFour to five servings, as stated. The original's "probable cost, 4s" is a period price for the whole dish.
Fricassee — from the French fricasser, a word usually explained as a compound of frire and casser, though the derivation is not settled — reached English cookery well before the eighteenth century and split into two branches: brown, where the meat is coloured first, and white, where it is deliberately not. The white version is finished with a liaison of egg yolk and cream, as here, and Cassell's presents this one as "superior" to the preceding version. Rabbit was ordinary food in Victorian Britain, mild and pale enough to suit a white sauce, and it appears regularly in fricassee in books of this period. The optional glass of sherry or Madeira, the nutmeg and the pinch of cayenne are all long-standing English habits of seasoning applied to a French method — a fair picture of how the two cuisines met in a nineteenth-century household kitchen.