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RABBIT, ROAST (Dr. Kitchener's recipe)
If the fire is clear and sharp, thirty minutes will roast a young and forty a full-grown rabbit. When you lay it down, baste it with butter, and dredge it lightly and carefully with flour that you may have it frothy and of a fine light brown. While the rabbit is roasting, boil its liver with some parsley; when tender, chop them together, and put half the mixture into some melted butter, reserving the other half for garnish, divided into little hillocks. Cut off the head and lay half on each side of the dish. A fine, well-grown (but young) warren rabbit, kept some time after it has been killed, and roasted with a stuffing in its belly, eats very like a hare, to the nature of which it approaches. It is nice nourishing food when young, but hard and unwholesome when old.
A spit-roasting recipe from the early nineteenth century, reprinted by Cassell's without adjustment. Rabbit is very lean, so the hinge here is fat and heat management rather than timing.
- The fire, in oven terms"Clear and sharp" means a bright, well-burnt-down fire radiating strong heat onto a turning spit. In an oven, start at 425F for the first 10 minutes to set the flour crust, then drop to 350F for the remainder. Thirty to forty minutes total is realistic only for a small animal; check the thickest part of the thigh reaches 160F.
- Basting is not optionalA rabbit carries almost no intramuscular fat and will go dry and stringy in an oven's still air. Baste every 8-10 minutes, and consider laying bacon or barding fat over the saddle and hind legs, removing it near the end so the dredged flour can brown.
- Frothing explainedDredging with flour over hot butter produces the "froth" — a thin blistered crust. Use a fine sieve or shaker, add the flour only after the surface is already hot and buttery, and dredge in two or three light passes rather than one heavy one, or it turns pasty.
- Ageing the carcass"Kept some time after it has been killed" refers to hanging game in a cold larder to deepen the flavour toward hare. Rabbit sold today is already dressed and chilled; keep it refrigerated and cook within a day or two rather than attempting to hang it at room temperature.
- The liver sauceSimmer the liver in salted water with parsley until firm all through, about 8-10 minutes, then chop. Liver eaten pink is not advisable; if the liver looks discoloured or spotted, discard it and make the sauce with parsley alone. "Melted butter" in this period means the standard flour-thickened butter sauce, not simply butter warmed in a pan.
- Stuffing a whole rabbitIf you follow the note about stuffing the belly, use a loose forcemeat and allow extra time; a stuffed cavity slows the heat considerably and the 30-40 minute guide no longer applies. Test the meat, not the clock.
- The headModern butchers usually remove it. Splitting a rabbit's head and setting the halves on the dish is sometimes explained as proof that the animal was genuinely rabbit and not cat, though that is a traditional story rather than a documented reason; the recipe itself gives none. Nothing is lost by skipping it.
- YieldA farmed rabbit of 2 1/2 to 3 lb serves two generously or three at a pinch, with the sauce and the reserved parsley-liver "hillocks" as garnish.
- When rabbit is oldKitchiner's warning about old rabbits being "hard and unwholesome" is sound as cookery, if not as medicine. An older or wild animal has tough connective tissue and wants braising or a pie, not dry roasting.
Dr. William Kitchiner (1775-1827) was a wealthy Londoner who held a medical degree but is not known to have practised, and an obsessive amateur cook whose The Cook's Oracle, first published in 1817, went through many editions on both sides of the Atlantic; recipes credited to him circulated in compilations like Cassell's for the rest of the century, long after his death. His distinction between the "warren rabbit" — one living wild in a managed warren, taking exercise and eating rough forage — and the tame hutch rabbit reflects a real difference in eating quality that hunters still describe, and his comparison to hare is a matter of degree: hare is darker, stronger and traditionally hung longer. Rabbit was cheap protein in nineteenth-century Britain, sold in quantity by street hawkers. The parsley-and-liver garnish shaped into "little hillocks" belongs to the same era's habit of dressing plain meat with small decorative mounds of sauce ingredients, a practice that faded as service à la russe replaced the crowded table.