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Rabbit Pudding
Skin, empty, and wash a rabbit, and cut it into ten or twelve pieces. Make a little gravy by stewing the head, the liver, and a little bacon rind in stock or water, and season this with salt, pepper, and grated nutmeg. Line a buttered basin with good sued crust. Lay in the pieces of rabbit (first seasoning each one separately with a little pepper, salt, and cayenne), and put with them three or four ounces of bacon cut into strips. Pour over them a tea-cupful of the stock, and be careful to let it cool before using it. Put the cover on the top, press the edges closely together, and tie the pudding in a floured cloth which has been wrung out of boiling water. Put it into fast-boiling water, and let it boil quickly until done enough. Time to boil, three hours. Probable cost, 3s. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A boiled suet pudding of the plainest English kind: raw meat sealed in a crust and cooked for three hours in a cloth. Nothing here is difficult, but two or three details decide whether the crust holds.
- Let the stock cool — this is the hingeLet the stock cool — this is the hinge. The recipe is explicit about it for good reason. Warm stock poured into a raw suet lining melts the fat, the crust slumps and the pudding leaks in the water. The gravy should be cold, even lightly jellied, before it goes in.
- "Sued crust" is suet crustA typesetter's slip. Reckon on 12 oz self-raising flour (or plain flour with 3 teaspoons baking powder) to 6 oz shredded beef or vegetable suet, a good pinch of salt, and cold water to a soft dough — enough to line and lid a basin of about 2–3 pints, which is what a jointed rabbit and its bacon will need. Roll the lid from the reserved quarter.
- A tea-cupfulVictorian teacups ran small: allow 5–6 fl oz. That is deliberately little. The rabbit and bacon give up their own juices, and an over-filled pudding pushes its lid off.
- The cloth, and the modern substituteA floured cloth wrung out in boiling water is the authentic seal; the flour swells and waterproofs the weave. Pleated baking parchment under a sheet of foil, tied under the rim with string and given a handle loop, does the same job with less anxiety.
- Keep the water fast and topped upThe basin should sit in water reaching two-thirds up its side, at a genuine rolling boil, with a plate or trivet underneath. Top up from a boiling kettle as it falls; cold water added mid-cook stops the crust rising. Steaming in a covered pan works equally well and is far less prone to swamping.
- Wild versus farmed rabbitThree hours suits a wild rabbit, which is lean and sinewy. Farmed rabbit is much more tender and will be cooked and pulling from the bone in about two hours; longer will not spoil it but the flesh goes stringy. A whole rabbit runs 2.5–3 lb and jointing it into ten or twelve pieces means legs, shoulders and the saddle cut across.
- Head, liver and bacon rindThe head-and-liver stock is the flavour of the dish and takes 30–40 minutes; strain it and discard the solids, or mash the liver back in if you want body. Butchers no longer supply rabbit heads as a matter of course. A pint of chicken or veal stock reduced with a couple of bacon rinds and a bay leaf is an honest stand-in.
- BaconThree or four ounces of unsmoked streaky, cut into strips, suits the dish; the fat is there to baste the dry rabbit from inside. Modern smoked bacon may dominate the nutmeg.
- Yield and costFive or six as written, and it needs no more than boiled potatoes and a green vegetable. "Probable cost, 3s." is three shillings, a real sum in a Victorian household and a reminder that rabbit was cheap meat, not game-shop meat.
Boiled suet puddings, sweet and savoury, were the backbone of English cooking from the eighteenth century until well into the twentieth: a basin, a cloth and a pot of water asked nothing of an oven, which mattered in kitchens where the range was lit only for baking day. Rabbit belonged squarely in that economy. Wild rabbits were abundant and cheap, reaching the table by way of the warrener, the poulterer and sometimes the poacher, and cookery writers of the period treat them as everyday meat in a way modern British cooks no longer do. The same crust, cloth and three hours would take beefsteak and kidney, pigeon or mutton. The scalded, floured cloth is the older technique; purpose-made pudding basins with a tied cover largely replaced it once cheap earthenware became common, and the phrase "boil until done enough" is a fair indication of how much was assumed of a cook who had made the thing a hundred times.