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Rabbit, Potted
Empty, skin, and wash two or three young fully-grown rabbits. Take off the legs, and pick all the flesh from the back. Season with salt cayenne, and mace, all finely powdered, and pack the meat closely into a potting-jar. Lay upon it six ounces of fresh butter, and bake gently until done enough. Let it stand in a cool place for twenty-four hours, turn it into small jars, and cover with clarified butter. The livers can be put in also, if liked. The meat can be served in jars, or small portions can be cut out, laid on a napkin, and garnished with parsley. This is an excellent way of preserving rabbits which are not wanted for immediate use. Time to bake, one hour and a half. Probable cost of rabbits, 7d. to 9d. per pound.
A straightforward English potted meat: rabbit baked slowly under butter, then packed and sealed. Two things need translating — the oven, and the storage claim.
- The storage is the part to ignoreA butter seal over cooked meat creates a low-oxygen, low-acid environment held at room temperature, which is exactly the condition Clostridium botulinum favours. Treat this as a refrigerated dish to be eaten within three or four days, not as a method of preserving rabbits "not wanted for immediate use."
- "Bake gently"The book gives no oven description, but a slow oven, covered, is the sense; in modern terms somewhere around 300-325F is a reasonable reading. The point is to render the meat soft enough to shred and to melt the butter through it, not to brown anything. An hour and a half at that heat suits the young rabbits specified; older or wild animals want longer.
- Potting-jarA deep straight-sided stoneware jar. Any deep ovenproof dish or small loaf tin works, as long as the meat is packed tight enough that the butter can cover it rather than run down the sides.
- Two or three rabbitsA farmed rabbit dresses out at roughly 2.5-3 lb and may give something like 1 to 1.25 lb of picked meat, though the yield here depends on whether the leg meat goes into the jar or only the flesh picked from the back. On that basis two rabbits give around 2 lb of meat, which with the 6 oz of butter would roughly fill a litre jar and serve eight to ten as a first course or on toast.
- MaceThe dried outer covering of nutmeg, warmer and less sweet than the seed itself, and a characteristic flavour of English potted meats. Ground mace loses its aroma quickly; buy it fresh or grate blade mace yourself. Nutmeg can stand in for it, adjusted to taste.
- Seasoning blindNo quantities are given, and potted meat is eaten cold, which mutes salt and spice. Reckon on about 1.5 teaspoons of fine salt per pound of meat, a scant quarter-teaspoon of mace, and cayenne to taste — then taste the mixture warm and correct it before it goes into the jars.
- The clarified butter coverIt must be clarified, not merely melted: milk solids and water left in the butter spoil quickly and break the seal. Pour it on when the meat is cold and the butter barely warm, and let it set to a good quarter-inch.
- The liversOptional in the original and worth including — they enrich the mixture considerably. Cook them with the meat rather than adding them raw.
- The price7d. to 9d. per pound is pre-decimal, seven to nine pence when there were 240 pence to the pound sterling.
Potting was a principal English way of keeping cooked meat before reliable ice, and through the nineteenth century rabbit was a cheap and widely eaten meat on the British table, supplied by managed warrens and by rail carriage from the countryside; imported Australian rabbit came later, from about the 1890s. The technique -- season, bake slowly in a covered jar, seal under clarified butter -- is the same one applied to beef, tongue, ham, shrimps and game birds elsewhere in the same book, and it survives today mainly in potted shrimps. The distinguishing flavour is mace, which English cooks had used in potted and forcemeat preparations since at least the seventeenth century. Note that the recipe itself frames the dish as preservation rather than luxury; the modern habit of serving potted meat as a delicacy is a reversal of that purpose.