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Rabbit Salad, Simple
Take two or three thin slices of stale crumb of bread. Toast them on both sides till brightly browned, let them cool, and divide them into neat squares. Lay on each one of these a slice of cold roast rabbit. Arrange them on a dish alternately, with small salad or a spoonful of washed and dried lettuce finely shredded. Sprinkle over all two table-spoonful of boiled onion finely minced, two anchovies cut small, and half a tea-spoonful of shredded parsley. Garnish the dish with parsley and sliced beet-root, and pour mayonnaise sauce over it at the moment of serving.
A cold-meat salad built on toast, in the Victorian manner of using up yesterday's roast. Everything can be prepared ahead except the dressing.
- The hinge: dress at the tableThe hinge: sauce it last -- The instruction to pour on the mayonnaise "at the moment of serving" matters because toast squares soften quickly under a wet dressing, so assemble and garnish the dish first and add the sauce only as it goes out.
- "Crumb of bread"The crumb is the soft interior, crusts cut away. Stale bread is specified because it toasts dry and stays crisp rather than steaming; day-old white sandwich bread cut thin, no more than about 1 cm, works, trimmed into squares after toasting as the recipe directs so the edges stay neat.
- "Small salad"In Victorian usage this means the seedling greens sold as mustard-and-cress, harvested at an inch or two. Any fine microgreen or pea shoot stands in; the shredded lettuce given as the alternative is the easier route.
- RabbitFarmed rabbit is sold whole or jointed at good butchers and roasts in about 40-50 minutes; the meat is lean and dries out, so it wants larding or a covered roast. Cold roast chicken thigh is a close substitute in texture if rabbit is not available.
- AnchoviesAnchovies of this date would most often have been salt-packed, needing rinsing and boning. Two oil-packed fillets from a tin will do, patted dry; with the mayonnaise they are the main seasoning in the dish, so taste before adding more salt.
- Boiled onionA small onion simmered until tender, then cooled and minced. Boiling removes the raw bite, and skipping the step for raw onion will overpower the rabbit.
- BeetrootCooked beetroot, not raw. Keep the slices at the rim of the dish rather than under the toast, since the juice bleeds into both bread and mayonnaise.
- YieldTwo or three slices of bread give roughly eight to twelve squares, which is a first course for three or four, or a light lunch for two.
Cassell's belongs to a long English tradition of turning cold roast meat into a composed salad rather than a hash: the salmagundi of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries arranged sliced meat, anchovy, onion and greens in patterns on a dish, and the late Victorian "salad" of cold game or poultry with mayonnaise is its descendant. Rabbit belongs here because it was cheap and common — wild rabbit was a staple of both the country cottage and the city market well into the twentieth century, and a dictionary of cookery of this date carries dozens of rabbit entries where a modern book might have none. The anchovy is doing the work salt and vinegar do in later dressings, a habit inherited from the eighteenth-century English kitchen, where anchovy in one form or another seasoned everything from sauces to devilled bones.