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RABBIT, POTTED (another way)
Take off the legs and shoulders of the rabbits, and also the fleshy parts of the back. Cut off the leg-bones at the first joint, and the shoulder-bones at the blades, but without cutting off the meat. Take also the livers; season these and the limbs, put plenty of butter over them, and bake gently. Keep them three or four days in the pan after they are done, then stow them lightly into pots, covering them with clarified butter. The remainder of the rabbits may be used in many ways.
This is a Victorian preserving method, not simply a way of cooking rabbit, and the preserving step is where it fails by current standards. The notes below explain the specific problems rather than offering a revised procedure.
- The four-day rest is the fatal instructionCooked rabbit and liver held three or four days in their own fat and juices, at whatever temperature a Victorian larder happened to be, is an open invitation to bacterial growth. Nothing in the method brings the meat back to a safe temperature afterwards; it goes straight into pots.
- Sealed under butter is an anaerobic environmentA layer of clarified butter excludes air, which is exactly the condition Clostridium botulinum requires. Potted meats stored at room temperature without measured acidity, salt levels or a pressure-processing step are a documented botulism hazard, and the toxin gives no warning by smell or taste.
- Liver compounds the riskOffal carries a heavier bacterial load than muscle meat and spoils faster. Including the livers in a preparation that is deliberately left to stand for days makes an already unsound method worse.
- "Bake gently" gives no temperature and no endpointThere is no target internal temperature, no time, and no indication of oven heat. Even setting the storage aside, the cooking step as written cannot be verified as adequate.
- Rabbit-specific pathogensWild rabbit can carry Francisella tularensis, the tularaemia organism, which is destroyed by thorough cooking; the vague "bake gently" of the original gives no way to confirm that the meat reached an adequate temperature.
- If you want potted rabbitUse a current recipe with stated cooking temperatures and refrigerated storage, treating it as a short-life fridge preparation rather than a preserve.
- On the archaic language"Stow them lightly into pots" means pack without compressing; "clarified butter" is butter with the milk solids and water removed, which is what allowed the seal to hold in the first place. Neither term is the problem here.
Potting was the English larder's answer to a glut before refrigeration: meat, game or fish cooked in butter, packed into earthenware pots and sealed under a fat cap that kept air out. The technique runs from the seventeenth century through the Victorian household books, and Cassell's gives more than one version of it because rabbit was cheap, plentiful and often arrived at the kitchen door several at a time. The instruction to leave the meat standing in its pan for three or four days is not carelessness in period terms — the reasoning is not spelled out, but it may well have been thought to let the flesh mellow and take up the seasoned butter, with a cool larder relied on to do the rest. What the book could not know is that a fat seal on under-processed meat creates precisely the oxygen-free conditions that the most dangerous foodborne organisms prefer; botulism was described as a distinct clinical illness by Justinus Kerner in the 1820s, and the organism itself was identified by van Ermengem in 1895, with the link to home-preserved foods worked out well after recipes like this one were in print. The closing line — \"the remainder of the rabbits may be used in many ways\" — is the authentic voice of the period, assuming a cook who would not dream of wasting the ribs, kidneys or head.