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Rabbit, Marinaded and Fried
Cut the rabbit into neat pieces the size of an egg. Lay these in a deep pan with a table-spoonful of oil, a table-spoonful of ravigote or tarragon vinegar, a bunch of parsley, a sprig of thyme, a bay-leaf, and a little pepper and salt. Let the pieces of meat remain for three hours, turning them about at intervals that they may be equally flavoured. Drain them, roll them in flour, and fry till they are lightly browned. Serve very hot, garnish with fried parsley, and send tomato sauce, piquant sauce, or maitre d'hotel sauce to table with them. Time to fry, ten to fifteen minutes. Probable cost, 2s. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A straightforward marinate-and-fry treatment for rabbit that depends almost entirely on the age of the animal you start with. Get that right and the rest is easy.
- Young rabbit onlyFrying suits a young rabbit of roughly 2.5-3 lb. An older wild rabbit has tough, sinewy hind legs that will stay tough in a frying pan; those want braising instead.
- The marinade is thinA tablespoon each of oil and vinegar will not coat a jointed rabbit. Scale up to roughly 4 tablespoons oil and 2 of vinegar so every piece is actually wetted, and turn the pieces at intervals as the recipe directs.
- Ravigote vinegarA herb-steeped vinegar, traditionally with tarragon, chervil, chives and shallot. The recipe already offers tarragon vinegar as the substitute; plain white wine vinegar with a bruised tarragon sprig added to the pan does the same job.
- Marinate coldThree hours in a cool Victorian larder becomes three hours in the refrigerator. Bring the pieces back toward room temperature for twenty minutes before flouring so the coating browns rather than steams.
- "The size of an egg"In practice: split the saddle crosswise into two or three pieces, separate the forelegs, and cut each hind leg through the joint into thigh and drumstick. Uniform pieces matter more than the exact size, since they have to finish together.
- Frying timeTen to fifteen minutes in shallow fat at moderate heat will cook the thin forelegs and saddle, but thick hind-leg pieces often need longer. Rabbit is very lean and dries out fast, so pull each piece as it reaches about 160-165F at the bone rather than timing the whole panful together.
- Fried parsleyWhole dry sprigs dropped into the hot fat for a few seconds, until they stop sputtering and turn brilliant green. Wet parsley will spit violently; dry it thoroughly first.
- Cost and yieldThe "2s." is a period price and tells you nothing useful now. Four to five servings is realistic for a 3 lb rabbit only if there is a substantial vegetable or potato alongside.
Marinading meat in oil, vinegar and herbs before frying was a common enough nineteenth-century recourse for anything lean or of uncertain age, and rabbit was both. Cassell's was written for households in which rabbit was cheap everyday meat rather than a specialty: it appeared in butchers' and poulterers' shops in quantity, and the dictionary carries a number of rabbit entries covering boiling, potting, currying and pies. The three sauces suggested here are all standard kitchen preparations of the period and reflect the book's reference-work habit of pointing the cook to entries elsewhere rather than repeating them. Ravigote vinegar, named from the French ravigoter, to revive or perk up, was one of a family of flavoured vinegars that a well-run Victorian kitchen kept bottled on the shelf, and which largely disappeared from domestic use thereafter.