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RABBIT, RAGOUT OF (another way)
Skin, empty, and wash a plump young rabbit, cut it up into ten or twelve pieces, and lay them in a saucepan with a dozen button mushrooms, half a dozen small onions, a bunch of parsley, a sprig of thyme, and a bay-leaf. Pour over these ingredients as much boiling stock or water as will cover them, and let them simmer very gently until the meat is tender. Lift out the rabbit, skim and strain the sauce, and thicken with a table-spoonful of brown thickening. Season with salt, pepper, and grated nutmeg, and let it boil till smooth. Add a glassful of sherry or Madeira if liked. Put in the pieces of meat. Let them get thoroughly hot without allowing the gravy to boil, arrange them neatly in a dish, pour the sauce over them, and serve very hot. Garnish the dish with toasted sippets. Time to simmer the rabbit, from an hour and a half to two hours. Probable cost, 3s. 6d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A straightforward braise that depends on two things the original assumes you already know: how to make brown thickening, and how long a rabbit actually needs.
- Cooking timeAn hour and a half to two hours suits a mature wild rabbit. A farmed rabbit, which is what most butchers sell, is tender in 45-60 minutes of bare simmering; longer and the saddle turns to string. Test the hind leg with a fork and stop when it yields.
- Brown thickeningThis is the book's term for a browned roux — butter and flour in roughly equal measure, cooked together until nut-brown and kept on hand in a jar. A tablespoon suits about a pint of strained liquid; whisk it in off the heat, then return to the boil to cook out the flour, as the recipe's "boil till smooth" intends.
- Buying the rabbit"Skin, empty, and wash" presumes a whole animal in fur. Buy it dressed and ask for it jointed into ten or twelve pieces: two front legs, two hind legs halved, the saddle cut across into three or four, and the ribs.
- A glassful of wineA wineglass in period cookbooks is generally reckoned at about 2 fl oz, not a modern 6 oz pour. Add it while the sauce is still boiling, before the meat goes back in, so the raw edge of the spirit is taken off.
- Don't boil at the endThe instruction to reheat the meat without letting the gravy boil is the hinge. Rabbit is very lean and a rolling boil at this stage tightens the fibres and makes the pieces fall to shreds in the sauce.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of bread, toasted or fried in butter, tucked around the edge of the dish. Cut them just before serving; they soften within minutes of meeting the gravy.
- SeasoningGrated nutmeg with rabbit reads oddly now but is worth keeping — a scant quarter teaspoon over the whole dish. It sits behind the sherry rather than announcing itself.
- Cost and yieldThree shillings and sixpence covered a dish for four or five, sherry and mushrooms included. The quantities still serve four generously with potatoes or plain rice.
Ragout comes from the French ragoûter, to revive the appetite, and by the nineteenth century the word covered any dish of meat cut small, browned or blanched, and finished in its own thickened liquor. Cassell's gives several rabbit ragouts — this one is headed "another way" — rabbit being a cheap meat in the English kitchen, mostly wild-caught and sold by the couple, and respectable enough for company if it was dressed in mushrooms, Madeira and sippets. The recipe's structure is standard practice: cook the meat in stock, take it out, correct and thicken the liquid separately, then reunite the two off the boil. Brown thickening kept in a jar was a standing item in kitchens of this kind, and its assumed presence here says something about how such households cooked. Rabbit's slide off British menus is generally traced to the twentieth century — the spread of cheap chicken, and the myxomatosis outbreaks that reached Britain in the 1950s, which put a great many people off it.