Home › The Principles of Cookery › Rabbit, Sauces For
Rabbit, Sauces For
Onion sauce, white sauce, white celery sauce, white mushroom sauce, parsley and butter made with milk instead of water, and liver sauce are all suitable sauces for boiled rabbit. For roasted rabbit, brown sauce served with currant jelly, brown mushroom sauce, poivrade sauce, and liver sauce are most usually served. Liver sauce for boiled rabbits is made as follows. Mix a table-spoonful of flour and a little cold milk to a smooth paste. Stir this into a quarter of a pint of boiling milk, and add a quarter of a pint of boiling water. Let this sauce boil gently for five or six minutes, stir it all the time, and add a slice of fresh butter. Mince finely the liver of the rabbit which has been boiled for twenty minutes. Rub it through a wire sieve, and stir it into the sauce. Add pepper and salt and a spoonful or two of cream if liked, pour the sauce into the tureen, stir a small piece of butter into it, and when this is dissolved, serve immediately. To make liver sauce for roast rabbit:--Wash the liver, throw it into boiling water, and let it boil for twenty minutes, mince finely, and rub it smooth with the back of a wooden spoon. Put it into a quarter of a pint of gravy, and add a tea-spoonful of chopped parsley, half a tea-spoonful of Bovril, a little pepper, salt, and grated nutmeg, a pinch of grated lemon-peel, a small pinch of powdered thyme, and a piece of butter the size of a walnut rolled in flour. Stir the sauce over the fire till it boils, and serve very hot.
Two workable sauces sit inside this reference entry: a milk-based liver sauce for boiled rabbit and a gravy-based one for roast. The rest is a list of suggestions rather than instructions.
- The hinge: sieve the liver, do not chop itThe whole character of these sauces depends on the liver becoming a smooth purée that thickens the liquid, not visible specks. Mince it, then press it through a fine sieve with the back of a spoon, or blitz it with a little of the hot liquid in a small food processor.
- A quarter of a pintIn an Imperial pint of 20 fl oz, a quarter pint is 5 fl oz, a generous half cup. The boiled-rabbit version therefore makes about 10 fl oz of sauce plus the liver; the recipe gives no number of servings.
- Butter the size of a walnutAn inexact old measure, roughly 1 to 2 tablespoons, 15 to 30 g. This belongs to the roast version, where it is rolled in flour to thicken. In the boiled version the 'small piece of butter' stirred in once the sauce is in the tureen is a further addition on top of the earlier 'slice of fresh butter', and need be no more than a teaspoon or two; it is there for gloss.
- BovrilA concentrated beef extract, still sold in Britain and easily replaced by any thick beef bouillon paste or concentrate. Half a teaspoon in 5 fl oz of gravy is a seasoning, not a base, so add it before the salt and taste again afterwards.
- Twenty minutes for the liverRabbit liver simmered that long is firm and dry, which is exactly what the recipe wants because it is going through a sieve. Do not treat this as a guide to cooking liver you intend to eat as liver, where two or three minutes is the limit.
- Parsley and butterThe sauce named in the first line is the plain English one: melted butter thickened with a little flour and, here, milk rather than water, with chopped parsley stirred in at the end.
- PoivradeA brown sauce sharpened with vinegar and finished with a good deal of coarsely crushed black pepper, usually strained. Worth making separately rather than approximating with pepper stirred into gravy.
- GravyFor the roast version this means the pan juices, deglazed and skimmed, or a well-reduced brown stock. Modern granule gravy is already salted and thickened and will fight the flour-rolled butter.
Rabbit was among the cheapest meats in late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain, sold in enormous numbers by poulterers and butchers, which is why a general dictionary of cookery could assume the reader had one on the board and needed only to be told what to pour over it. The two treatments reflect the usual division of the period: boiled rabbit was a nursery and invalid dish, served with pale milk-thickened sauces, while roast rabbit was given the darker, sharper accompaniments used for game. Using the animal's own liver to thicken and flavour its sauce is an old economy shared with hare, poultry and giblet gravies. The half-teaspoon of Bovril dates the entry: the beef extract was launched under that name in the 1880s and was quickly absorbed into British domestic cookery as a shortcut to the depth that a long-simmered stock would otherwise provide.