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Rabbit, Minced
Take a fat young rabbit, skin, empty, and wash it, and boil it till tender. Lift the flesh from the bones, mince it, and season with pepper, salt, grated nutmeg, grated lemon-peel, and a little of the juice. Put it into a saucepan, and stir in with it six ounces of fresh butter and four well-beaten eggs, and continue to stir for a quarter of an hour. Turn it on a hot dish, squeeze the juice of half a lemon over it, garnish with toasted sippets, and serve very hot. Time to boil the rabbit, three-quarters of an hour to one hour. Probable cost, rabbits, 7d. to 9d. per pound. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A Victorian way of stretching a single rabbit into a soft, buttery, lemon-scented mince. Everything hinges on how gently the eggs are treated once they go in.
- The hinge: low heat once the eggs go inFour beaten eggs and six ounces of butter stirred into hot minced meat is a custard, not a sauce. Keep the pan over the lowest possible heat, or set it over barely simmering water, and stir without stopping; the quarter of an hour is a description of how slowly it should thicken, not a target. Take it off while it still looks slightly loose, as it firms on the hot dish.
- "Boil" means simmerA rolling boil toughens rabbit and shreds the flesh off the bone in rags. Bring the water to the boil, then hold it at a bare tremble for the stated three-quarters of an hour to an hour. A farmed rabbit of 2½-3 lb will be tender at the shorter end; wild rabbit is leaner and often older, and may want longer.
- Farmed versus wild rabbit"Fat young rabbit" meant a tame or very young wild one. Most rabbit sold today is farmed and mild; wild rabbit is darker, drier and more strongly flavoured, and will give a firmer mince with less fat to carry the butter.
- Six ounces of butterThat is 170 g, about a stick and a half, to the meat of one rabbit. It is period-correct richness. Cutting it to 3-4 oz still binds the mince and makes a dish that a modern table will finish.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of bread, toasted or fried in butter until crisp, stood around the edge of the dish. They are structural as much as decorative, since the mince is soft and needs something to eat it with.
- Lemon-peel and nutmegGrate only the yellow zest, not the white pith. Nutmeg grated fresh from the whole seed is the flavour intended; the pre-ground tin is flatter and needs a slightly heavier hand.
- The cooking liquidThe recipe says nothing about it, but the pot of rabbit broth is worth keeping. A few spoonfuls stirred into the mince before the eggs loosen it usefully; the rest freezes as stock.
- Yield and costFour to five as the book says is generous by modern standards for one rabbit; treat it as four servings, or six as a light supper with the sippets and a green salad. The quoted 7d. to 9d. per pound puts rabbit at a modest price for meat at the time, which is part of why it appears so often.
Rabbit was the everyday meat of the British nineteenth-century table, cheap enough to be sold by street hawkers and common enough that Cassell's returns to it repeatedly. Mincing was the standard treatment for meat already cooked, whether from a joint boiled that morning or the remains of yesterday's dinner, and the binding of butter and beaten egg over gentle heat is an old English method that runs back through the eighteenth-century "fricassee" and "hash" tradition. The seasoning tells you the same story: nutmeg, lemon-peel and lemon juice recur often enough to look like a common pattern for lifting a pale meat, a habit inherited from earlier centuries when spice and acid did the work that stock reductions and wine would later do in French-influenced cooking. Sippets, the toasted bread points around the rim, are older still, a flourish that sat well beside soft dishes needing something crisp.