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Rabbit, Pupton Of
Take enough rich forcemeat, roll it out, and lay it in a buttered tin dish. Cut slices of bacon exceedingly thin, and place them over the forcemeat. Then take a rabbit, cut it up, season highly, and lay it in the dish, strewing upon it asparagus tops, mushrooms, oysters, and the yolks of hard-boiled eggs; over these lay some more slices of bacon, and on the top place a layer of forcemeat. Bake for an hour in a rather slow oven. When ready, turn the pupton of rabbit into another dish, and pour sauce over it if it is to be sent hot to table. It is quite as good eaten cold.
A moulded raised dish of the older French kind: forcemeat lines a tin, jointed rabbit and garnishes fill it, and the whole is turned out and sauced. The hinge is the meat — an hour in a slow oven will not reliably cook bone-in rabbit, so judge by temperature, not the clock.
- Rather slow ovenConventionally glossed as about 300-325F. At that heat a jointed rabbit sealed under forcemeat and bacon may well want longer than the hour given, perhaps 1½-2 hours; wild rabbit longer still. Cook until the thigh meat reaches 160-165F and pulls easily from the bone.
- ForcemeatA period forcemeat here means a pounded, seasoned meat paste — veal or pork with breadcrumbs soaked in stock, suet or bacon fat, egg to bind, mace and lemon peel. Sausage meat loosened with an egg and a handful of crumbs stands in perfectly well. Allow about 1½ lb in total for a base, sides and lid.
- Tin dishA plain deep tin, not the modern lidded casserole. A 2 lb loaf tin or a 7-inch round cake tin works; butter it heavily and line the base with parchment or the turning-out will tear the crust.
- OystersFifteen minutes of heat makes an oyster rubbery, and here they sit through the whole bake. Use them small, keep them whole, and accept that they contribute flavour rather than texture — or leave them out and add their liquor to the sauce instead.
- Asparagus topsTips only, about an inch, and no blanching needed since they will steam inside the mould. Frozen tips are acceptable; thaw and pat dry so they do not water the filling.
- Bacon"Exceedingly thin" means shaved as fine as the cook could cut it. Unsmoked streaky or pancetta, stretched with the back of a knife, gives the barding layer without a smoky overlay.
- Turning outLet it stand 15 minutes off the heat before inverting, and pour off the accumulated fat and juices first — keep them for the sauce. Turning out hot and wet is how these puptons collapse.
- Sauce and servingThe recipe specifies only "sauce"; a brown gravy or an espagnole thinned with the reserved juices would suit. A rabbit of 2½-3 lb built into a loaf tin serves four to five; cold, cut in slabs, it serves the same number as a lunch dish.
"Pupton" is generally traced to the French poupeton, a moulded dish in which forcemeat forms the case for a richer filling — the same idea as a raised pie, with meat paste standing in for pastry. It belongs to the eighteenth-century repertoire that English cookery took wholesale from French kitchens; Hannah Glasse gives a pupton of pigeons in much these words, and Cassell's is passing the formula on largely unchanged some 130 years later. The garnish list — asparagus tops, mushrooms, oysters, hard-boiled egg yolks — is the standard eighteenth-century set for enriching a plain meat, and the note that it is "quite as good eaten cold" reflects a period when a moulded, bacon-barded dish was expected to reappear on the sideboard the next day. Rabbit itself was the cheap end of this cookery: plentiful, farmed or trapped, and a common domestic substitute wherever a recipe called for young poultry or veal.