Important: Safety Warning
This recipe calls for animal brains or related nervous-system tissue. Cattle brain and spinal tissue can transmit bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the cause of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, which is fatal and has no treatment.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
Home › The Principles of Cookery › RABBIT PUDDING (another way)
RABBIT PUDDING (another way)
Skin, empty, and wash a rabbit, and cut it into ten or twelve pieces. Put these into a stewpan with a little pepper and salt and half a blade of mace. Pour over them as much boiling water as will cover them, and let them simmer very gently for half an hour. Take them up, and put in their place the head and liver of the rabbit, with a little bacon rind if it is at hand, and simmer for an hour, till the gravy is strong and pleasantly flavoured. Strain and skim it, and put it aside to cool. Line the edges of a pie-dish with suet crust. Put in the pieces of rabbit, together with four ounces of fat bacon cut into narrow strips, pour in a cupful of the cooled gravy, lay on the cover, press the edges closely together, tie the pudding in a floured cloth, plunge it into boiling water, and let it boil quickly until sufficiently done. Some cooks parboil and mince the liver, mix it with the brains, season the mixture rather highly with salt and cayenne, and sprinkle it over the meat in the pudding. Time to boil, two hours. Probable cost, 3s. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A boiled suet pudding of jointed rabbit, in the pattern of steak-and-kidney pudding. The method is sound; only the units, the vessel and one optional garnish need attention.
- Skip the brains variantThe final sentence offers a mixture of minced liver and brains sprinkled over the meat. Omit the brains and use the liver alone, which is seasoned the same way. Rabbit is not a species associated with transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, but nervous-system tissue is unnecessary here and adds nothing the liver does not.
- The vessel"Line the edges of a pie-dish with suet crust" sits oddly with a pudding tied in a cloth and plunged into boiling water; the sense appears to be a lined pudding basin. Roll the crust, line a basin of about 2 pints (1.2 L) leaving an overhang, fill, then lay on a rolled lid and pinch the two together. In place of the floured cloth, pleated baking parchment and foil tied under the rim will serve, over simmering water, allowing longer than the boiling time given.
- The hinge: keep the water boiling and topped upA cloth-tied pudding must go into water already at a rolling boil and stay there for the full two hours, with boiling water added as it evaporates. If the pan drops off the boil the suet crust turns grey and sodden rather than light.
- Suet crust proportionsNone are given. A workable ratio is 8 oz self-raising flour (or plain flour with 2 tsp baking powder) to 4 oz shredded suet, a pinch of salt, and about 5 fl oz cold water. Vegetable suet behaves the same way.
- The rabbitA whole rabbit skinned and drawn, cut into ten or twelve pieces: legs, shoulders, saddle in two or three, ribs. Wild rabbit runs 2-3 lb dressed and is lean and firm; farmed rabbit is larger and more tender and will need the shorter end of any cooking time. Ask a butcher to joint it.
- Mace and bacon rindHalf a blade of mace amounts to only a pinch of ground mace, an eighth of a teaspoon or so, though the whole blade is worth seeking out for the clean stock it gives. Bacon rind was a common larder scrap; a piece of pancetta rind or the trimmings from the 4 oz of fat bacon does the same job of adding body to the gravy.
- The two stocksThe half-hour simmer of the joints is a par-cook, not the finish; the hour-long simmer of head and liver afterwards is what makes the gravy. Strain, chill, and lift off the fat before measuring out the cupful — reckon on somewhere between a half and a full modern cup — that goes into the pudding. Keep the rest to serve hot alongside, as the cupful inside will not stretch.
- Yield and costFive or six servings, as printed. The probable cost of 3s. matches the printed page; it is the book's own estimate and has no useful modern equivalent.
Boiled suet puddings filled with meat were among the cheapest hot dinners a British kitchen could produce: the crust needed no oven, only a pot of water, and it stretched a small amount of meat into a meal for six. Cassell's, compiled for middle-class households in the later nineteenth century, gives rabbit puddings and pies in several versions because rabbit was then genuinely inexpensive and widely sold in markets, wild rather than farmed. The details here belong to a period of strict thrift — the head simmered for stock, the liver minced into the filling, the bacon rind kept back in case it was wanted — and the pudding cloth, floured so the dough would not stick and knotted loosely to allow swelling, was standard equipment long before basin, parchment and foil replaced it.}