Home › The Principles of Cookery › RABBIT, FRIED (another way)
RABBIT, FRIED (another way)
Prepare the rabbit as before, and cut it up into pieces not larger than a hen's egg. Dip these into beaten egg, and afterwards into nicely-seasoned bread-crumbs, and fry in hot fat till they are brightly browned. Pile them on a hot dish, pour the gravy round them, and serve very hot. The gravy may be prepared as follows. Wash the liver of the rabbit, and boil it for five minutes, let it get cold, and mince it finely. Simmer an inch or two of lemon-rind in a quarter of a pint of gravy till it is pleasantly flavoured. Strain it, and thicken with half a tea-spoonful of thickening, or, failing this, with a small lump of butter rolled in flour. When the sauce is of the proper consistency, stir in the liver and two table-spoonfuls of cream. Let it boil for one minute, and it will be ready for use. If liked, a tea-spoonful of lemon-juice may be added just before it is poured round the rabbit, or the cream may be omitted, and a table-spoonful of mushroom ketchup used instead of it. Time, a quarter of an hour to fry the rabbit. Probable cost, 2s. 3d. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A straightforward egg-and-crumb fry, with a small liver-and-lemon sauce alongside. The only genuinely dated part is the frying time.
- "Prepare the rabbit as before"The earlier entries mean skinned, drawn and jointed. A farmed rabbit of 2.5-3 lb gives the three or four servings claimed here; cut the legs into two pieces each and the saddle across into thick rounds so nothing exceeds egg size.
- Frying timeA quarter of an hour in the pan will dry out saddle pieces badly. Fry in fat at 340-360F, giving loin pieces 5-6 minutes and the hind legs 10-12; better still, brown everything and finish the legs in a 350F oven while the sauce is made. Rabbit is lean and turns woolly the moment it overcooks.
- "A quarter of a pint of gravy"Five Imperial fluid ounces, a scant two-thirds of a US cup. "Gravy" here is most likely real brown stock or the strained juices of a previous roast rather than a thickened commercial gravy.
- "Thickening"In this book, a stored butter-and-flour paste cooked together in advance. The stated fallback is essentially the same thing made fresh: a small lump of butter kneaded with flour and whisked in off the boil.
- The liverFive minutes' boiling firms it enough to mince cleanly. Add it at the very end and hold the sauce at a bare boil for the minute given; longer and the minced liver goes grainy and the cream may separate.
- Lemon-rindPare it thin, with no white pith, and pull it out as soon as the flavour reads. Two inches of rind in a quarter-pint of stock can turn bitter if left to simmer while you attend to the frying.
- Mushroom ketchupThe cream-free version depends on it. The Victorian product is a thin, dark, salty mushroom liquor, not the sweet tomato sauce; a mushroom ketchup or a spoonful of good soy plus a little stock reduction stands in for it.
- CostRabbit was one of the cheaper meats on the Victorian table. Farmed rabbit today is a specialty purchase and usually needs ordering from a butcher.
Cassell's gives rabbit an unusually long run of entries because in late nineteenth-century Britain it was cheap, plentiful and sold everywhere by street hawkers and game dealers, wild rabbits arriving in London by rail in enormous numbers from estates and warrens. Frying jointed rabbit in egg and crumbs treats it much as a cook would treat chicken or veal cutlets, and the accompanying sauce follows a very Victorian logic: nothing edible is wasted, so the liver is boiled, minced and stirred into the thickened sauce for flavour. The choice offered at the end between cream and mushroom ketchup is a small snapshot of the period's two directions in sauce-making, the French-influenced enriched sauce on one side and the older English bottled condiment on the other; mushroom ketchup had been a store-cupboard staple in Britain since the eighteenth century, well before tomato ketchup displaced it.