Home › The Principles of Cookery › Rabbit, Hashed
Rabbit, Hashed
Take the remains of a boiled rabbit, and about a fourth of their weight in cooked bacon or pickled pork, together with any sauce that may have been served with the rabbit. Slice both of the meats, and heat them in the sauce. Serve on a hot dish with a border of mashed potatoes. Hard-boiled eggs may be used as a garnish, or fried forcemeat balls.
A leftovers dish rather than a formal recipe: cold boiled rabbit, its sauce, and a salty cured meat reheated together. The whole thing hinges on not cooking the rabbit a second time.
- The hinge: reheat, don't simmerThe rabbit is already cooked through from boiling. Bring the sauce to a bare shiver, slide in the sliced meat, and leave it four or five minutes until hot. Anything approaching a boil turns lean rabbit dry and stringy.
- The sauce you probably don't haveBoiled rabbit was commonly sent up with onion sauce or a white sauce enriched with the cooking liquor, so the recipe assumes a jug of it in the larder. Failing that, make a plain béchamel loosened with rabbit or chicken stock, or a soft onion sauce, and season it well — the dish has no other liquid.
- Pickled porkThis is uncooked pork, usually belly or shoulder, cured in brine rather than smoked. Unsmoked bacon, thick-cut and gently boiled or fried, is the nearest supermarket equivalent; pancetta will do but is more assertive.
- ProportionsA fourth of the meat's weight in bacon means roughly 4 oz of bacon to a pound of picked rabbit. It is there for salt and fat, not bulk, so resist increasing it, and taste before adding any salt to the sauce.
- Getting the rabbit off the boneRabbit carcasses hold a surprising amount of meat in the saddle and hind legs. Pull it while still slightly warm if you can; "slice" is optimistic on a small animal, and neat bite-sized pieces work better than shreds.
- Farmed rabbit todayMost rabbit sold now is farmed, mild and tender, and takes about 45 minutes to an hour to boil. Wild rabbit is leaner and stronger and benefits from longer, gentler cooking; it also dries out faster on reheating.
- Forcemeat ballsPeriod forcemeat is breadcrumbs, suet or butter, chopped bacon or ham, parsley, lemon zest and mace, bound with egg and rolled small. Fry them separately and add at the last moment so they stay crisp against the sauce.
- The potato borderPipe or spoon stiff mashed potato around the rim of a heatproof dish and brown it briefly under the grill before filling the centre. The mash needs to be drier than usual or it will slump into the sauce.
- YieldThe remains of one rabbit with its bacon serves two generously, three with the potato border doing real work.
Rabbit was cheap, widely available and, in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, a staple of both country and working-town kitchens; boiling it whole with onion sauce was the plainest treatment, and what came back to the kitchen was expected to reappear the next day rather than be discarded. The pairing with bacon or pickled pork is practical rather than decorative: boiled rabbit is very lean and mildly flavoured, and the cured pork supplies the fat and salt it lacks, a logic repeated across European cooking wherever rabbit is roasted or braised under bards of bacon. The hard-boiled egg garnish and fried forcemeat balls are the period's standard way of making a reheated dish look like an intended one.