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Rabbit Patties
Take the white meat from a cold cooked rabbit. Free it from skin and sinew, mince it finely with a small portion of good suet, and put it aside. Bruise the bones, put them into a stewpan with a little salt, pepper, grated nutmeg, and grated lemon-rind, and let them simmer until the gravy is pleasantly flavoured. Thicken it with a little flour and butter, and stew the mince in this till it is quite hot. Bake the patties in patty-pans, take them out of the oven, and half fill them with the hot mince. Put on the covers, and pile them on a napkin. Time, about an hour to simmer the gravy. Probable cost of patties, 2d. each. Sufficient, a dozen for a dish.
This is a use-up dish for the remains of a roast or boiled rabbit, and the recipe assumes you already know how to line patty-pans with puff paste. Two things carry it: a properly reduced stock from the bruised bones, and pastry cases baked separately so they stay crisp.
- Patties and patty-pansA "patty" here is a small pastry case with a lid, not a meat cake. Patty-pans are shallow tartlet tins, commonly around 2-2.5 inches across; a standard muffin tin or set of small tartlet tins works, or use bought vol-au-vent cases. The recipe does not name the pastry, but the "covers" it calls for imply a lidded case, and puff paste would be the usual choice.
- The pastry is not in the recipeNo paste is given here, so the cases must come from a separate pastry recipe. Bake the empty cases blind in a hot oven, around 425F, until well risen and dry through, roughly 15-20 minutes, and keep them warm while the filling heats.
- Bruising the bonesCracking the bones open with the back of a heavy knife or a rolling pin exposes the marrow and gelatine, which is the whole point of the hour's simmer. Cover them barely with water; if the bones swim, the gravy will be thin and the flour will have to do work the bones should have done.
- Suet"A small portion" is not quantified; something on the order of one part suet to six or eight of meat is a reasonable working ratio, there only to keep lean rabbit from going dry. Beef suet is sold shredded in the UK; elsewhere, finely chopped cold beef fat or a knob of butter worked into the mince does the same job.
- Thickening"A little flour and butter" would usually mean butter and flour worked together cold and whisked into the simmering stock in small pieces, in the manner of a beurre manie. For about a cup of gravy, a couple of teaspoons of each is enough; the filling should coat the mince, not flood it.
- Reheat, do not re-cookThe rabbit is already cooked. Stir the mince into the hot gravy just until heated through, a couple of minutes. Held at a simmer, cold cooked rabbit turns stringy and dry, which is the usual failure of this dish.
- Fill at the last momentHalf-filling is deliberate, but the real instruction is to fill the cases after they leave the oven and serve at once. Filled pastry sitting on a warm plate goes soft within minutes.
- Yield and servingA dozen small patties for a dish, which is a first course or supper dish for four to six. The napkin was a folded linen cloth on the serving dish, used to steady the patties and absorb steam; a warm plate lined with a folded cloth still works.
Cassell's belongs to a tradition of British household cookery in which the second appearance of a joint mattered as much as the first, and rabbit was among the cheaper meats a town household could buy - the note that each patty costs twopence is there because readers were expected to cost a dish before they cooked it. Rabbit remained ordinary English food into the mid-twentieth century, sold by the brace at butchers and poulterers, and declined only after myxomatosis reached Britain in 1953 and put many people off it for a generation. The method here is standard for the period: the meat is minced and bound in a sauce, and the flavouring is the old English trio of nutmeg, lemon rind and pepper rather than anything herbal. Small filled pastry cases of this sort, served piled on a folded napkin, were a staple of the lighter courses at Victorian dinners.