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Rabbit, Fricasseed
Cut a young rabbit into neat joints, lay these in a stewpan, and cover with good stock. Let the liquid boil, then put with it three onions, three carrots, three turnips, and three sticks of celery, all sliced; add a bunch of parsley, a sprig of thyme, a blade of mace, a salt-spoonful of grated nutmeg, and a small piece of sugar, and stew all gently together until the vegetables are quite soft. Lift the vegetables out, and rub them through a sieve with the back of a wooden spoon. Stir the puree over the fire with a table-spoonful of the gravy for two or three minutes to make it quite hot. Put the pieces of rabbit on a dish, cover with the puree, and pour the sauce over all. Serve very hot. Time, one hour. Probable cost, 3s. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A vegetable-thickened stew rather than the cream-and-egg fricassee most cooks expect. The purée of the aromatics is the sauce, so the quality of the dish rests entirely on how those vegetables are cooked and sieved.
- The hinge: cook the vegetables to collapseThe sauce has no flour, cream or egg liaison — its body comes wholly from the sieved carrot, turnip, onion and celery. Stew until they crush against the pan with no resistance, or the purée will be thin and gritty rather than smooth.
- The rabbitA young farmed rabbit runs about 2.5-3 lb and jointing gives two forelegs, two hind legs and the saddle cut into two or three. Wild rabbit is leaner and tougher and may want closer to 90 minutes. A joint is done when the meat pulls easily from the bone, which for a stewed joint is well past the 165F safe-cooked mark.
- TimingOne hour is right for young farmed rabbit at a bare shiver, not a rolling boil. Hard boiling squeezes the lean meat dry and stringy; keep the surface barely trembling and lift the joints out as soon as they are tender, even if the vegetables need longer.
- A blade of maceOne flake of the dried aril of nutmeg. If you have none, about 1/4 teaspoon ground mace, or a pinch more nutmeg on top of the salt-spoonful already called for.
- A salt-spoonfulRoughly 1/4 teaspoon. The "small piece of sugar" is a lump — about a level teaspoon — meant to round the turnip, not to sweeten.
- SievingA drum sieve and wooden spoon was the Victorian method; a food mill on its finest plate or a short blitz in a blender does the same work faster. Push through a sieve afterwards if you want the texture the book intends.
- "Pour the sauce over all"The sauce is the stewing liquid left after the vegetables come out. It will be thin, so reduce it, and check the seasoning at that point.
- Yield and costFour to five servings as written. The 3s. is a price in shillings, useful only as a period marker.
Cassell's places this among the dishes that treat rabbit as everyday meat rather than game, which it largely was through the nineteenth century — cheap and widely sold in British markets. The name is loose: fricassée properly denotes white meat cooked in a pale sauce, often finished with cream and egg yolks, and the term comes from French cookery, where it is recorded from the fifteenth century onwards for a range of white stews. What appears here instead is a purée of root vegetables doing the thickening, an approach closer to the "cullis" (an anglicisation of the French coulis) of sieved vegetables and meat used in earlier English cookery to give body to sauces. The result is paler and lighter than a brown stew.