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RABBIT PIE (another way)
Put into the bottom of a baking-dish a few slices of ham or beef; cut the rabbit into as many bits as you like; season each bit with salt, pepper, pounded spices, etc.; put them in a dish as close as possible, add a glassful of broth if you have any; if not, a wine-glassful of water and a drop of white wine; cover this dish quite close with a good crust, beat an egg, in a gallipot, and with a paste-brush rub it twice over the paste, and bake in a hot oven for an hour and a half, when the pie will be ready for serving. Whether hot or cold, this dish is excellent. Remember that if the rabbit pie is to be eaten cold it must be much more highly seasoned than when made to be eaten hot.
A plain raised-crust game pie of the kind Cassell's expected any cook to assemble from what was in the larder. Two things need translating: the oven and the liquid.
- The ovenCassell's gives no temperatures; a "hot oven" is conventionally taken as somewhere around 425-450F. Ninety minutes at that heat will blacken the pastry long before the rabbit is done, so give it 20 minutes hot to set and colour the crust, then drop to 350F for the remainder. Cover the top loosely with foil if it darkens early.
- Wine-glassful, gallipotA wine-glass is about 2 fl oz (60 ml) - a modest splash, not a soaking, since the meat and ham release their own juices under a sealed crust. A gallipot is simply a small glazed earthenware jar; any bowl will do for beating the egg wash.
- The rabbitFarmed rabbit is what you will find today, usually 2.5-3 lb and much more tender than the wild animal Cassell's assumed. Joint it into eight or so pieces; the fore legs and saddle cook faster than the hind legs, so pack the hind legs toward the outside of the dish.
- Ham or beef at the bottomThis is not garnish. Rabbit is extremely lean and the layer of fatty ham or salt beef bastes it from below. Use streaky bacon, pancetta or a thick slice of gammon if you have no ham off the bone.
- "Pounded spices"For a Victorian game pie that means mace, allspice, a little clove and black pepper, ground together in a mortar. A teaspoon of the mixture total is ample for one rabbit.
- Packing the dish"As close as possible" matters - gaps fill with steam, the crust sags into them and the pie is soggy underneath. Fill the dish level or slightly domed, and use a pie funnel or an inverted eggcup to support the centre.
- Seasoning for cold eatingThe closing note is sound and often forgotten: chilling mutes salt and aromatics considerably. If the pie is for the cold table, season noticeably harder than tastes right when you mix it.
- Cooling and yieldOne rabbit with a crust feeds four. If serving cold, let it cool completely in the dish so the juices set to jelly, then refrigerate; cut it cold rather than warm or the filling will slide out.
Rabbit was cheap meat in nineteenth-century Britain - poached, snared, trapped on farms and sold by the couple in every market town - because a household could count on it in a way it could not count on beef. This version is the plainest kind of pie: no forcemeat, no stock jelly poured in afterwards, just meat, fat, spice and a crust that acts as both cooking vessel and container. The instruction that it eats as well cold is the practical heart of it. A sealed, egg-glazed pie was portable food for shooting parties, harvest fields and travellers, and the advice to over-season for cold service is often said to be a piece of professional knowledge running through English pie-making of long standing. The egg wash is brushed on twice, rather than once.