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Rabbit Pie
Take two fine wild rabbits, cut them into joints, and lay them in a little lukewarm salted water, so as to cleanse them from all unnecessary blood. Dry them in a clean cloth, flour them nicely, and season with cayenne and salt; then arrange these joints neatly in a suitable-sized pie-dish; parboil the livers, and beat them in a mortar with their weight of fat bacon, a few bearded oysters, sweet herbs, and parsley chopped fine, a dust of flour, and a few bread-crumbs; with an egg make this up into small balls, and distribute these in the dish with some artichoke bottoms cut into dice. With your rabbit place also one pound of fat pork that has been at least a week in pickle; cut the pork into small pieces, and judiciously place these with the balls and rabbit. Grate over all half a good-sized nutmeg, and then add half a pint of port wine and the same quantity of water. Cover with a tolerably thick good crust, and bake an hour and a half or more in a moderate oven; when nearly done, place over the crust, to prevent its becoming too brown, a buttered paper. If time will permit, the rabbits will be much better relished if the nutmeg and wine are placed over them the night before they are wanted, so as to allow the meat to absorb the flavour. A small piece of tender rump steak placed at the bottom of the dish is also an improvement to the gravy, though a good cook should never be without a stock-pot, so as to have gravy at command when needed, either to add to a pie when the baking is finished or for serving with poultry or game.
A Victorian game pie built in a deep dish with a top crust only. The chief difficulty is that wild rabbit is lean and sinewy, and the baking time given assumes small young animals.
- Oven temperature"Moderate oven" is usually taken as somewhere around 350F. As a modern adjustment, you can start hotter, around 425F, for the first 15 minutes to set the pastry, then drop to 350F for the remainder; the book itself gives no such instruction.
- Wild rabbit needs longerNinety minutes will cook young rabbit through but leaves older animals tough and stringy. Either use rabbit under three months, or braise the joints in stock until tender before assembling the pie and cut the bake to about 45 minutes.
- Half a pintIn an Imperial pint of 20 fl oz, half a pint is 1¼ cups. Half port and half water gives about 2½ cups of liquid, which is generous for a pie dish; hold some back unless the dish is deep.
- Fat pork "a week in pickle"This is salt pork from a wet cure. Supermarket salt pork or unsmoked streaky bacon substitutes directly, but blanch it for a few minutes first, as modern cures vary in salt and the pie already carries seasoned flour.
- Bearded oystersThe beard is the dark frill along the mantle edge; trim it off, as it stays chewy. Use small oysters, and note that they are here only to season the forcemeat balls, not to be eaten as oysters.
- Artichoke bottomsThe fleshy base of the globe artichoke, sold jarred or canned; drain and dice. Canned artichoke hearts are the practical stand-in.
- The forcemeat ballsPounding in a mortar is straightforward work for a food processor: pulse the parboiled livers with an equal weight of fat bacon, the oysters, herbs, crumbs and egg until it comes together, then roll into balls the size of a walnut.
- NutmegHalf a whole nutmeg is roughly a rounded teaspoon grated, which is assertive by current taste. A half teaspoon suits most palates, and the overnight steeping in port and nutmeg is worth doing.
- Buttered paperParchment or loosely tented foil over the crust for the last 20 minutes does the same job of stopping the pastry colouring further.
- YieldTwo rabbits, a pound of pork and the forcemeat fill a large pie dish and serve six to eight. Serve hot; the book suggests keeping a stock-pot so gravy can be added to the pie once the baking is finished.
Cassell's appeared in the 1870s into a market where wild rabbit was often said to be among the cheapest meat available, sold by the brace in market towns, and rabbit pie was as much a labourer's dinner as a gentleman's. What marks this version as a book for the aspiring middle-class household is everything piled on top of the rabbit: port wine, nutmeg, oysters in the forcemeat, artichoke bottoms, salt pork for fat, a piece of rump steak to enrich the gravy. Lean wild game genuinely needs added fat and moisture, so the pork and the liquid are practical rather than merely showy, but the oysters and port belong to an older English tradition, going back to the eighteenth century, of using both as background savour in meat pies rather than as flavours to be recognised. The closing remark that "a good cook should never be without a stock-pot" is the real signature of the period: the perpetual stock-pot was the foundation of Victorian kitchen economy, a habit the book plainly took for granted.