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Rabbit Sausages, Made from Cooked Rabbit
Pick the meat from the remains of boiled or roasted rabbit, and free it from skin and sinew. Mince finely, mix with it a third of its weight of fat bacon coarsely chopped, and add a spoonful or two of onions which have been boiled till tender in strong gravy. Mix the ingredients thoroughly. Season the mixture with pepper, salt, powdered cloves, and grated nutmeg, and bind it together with the yolk of an egg. Fill carefully-prepared skins, and the sausages will be ready for broiling, frying, etc.
A leftovers recipe rather than a butchery one: the meat is already cooked, so the filling only needs heating through and browning. The hinge is fat — cooked rabbit is dry and lean, and without the full third-weight of bacon the sausages will be crumbly and dull.
- ProportionsWeigh the picked meat and add one-third that weight in fat bacon: 12 oz rabbit to 4 oz bacon. Use fatty streaky bacon or, better, unsmoked pork back fat with a little bacon for savour, chopped by hand rather than ground so it stays visible.
- Seasoning quantitiesThe original gives none. For 1 lb of total mixture, start with 1 tsp salt (less if the bacon is heavily cured), 1/2 tsp black pepper, a scant 1/4 tsp ground cloves and 1/4 tsp grated nutmeg. Clove dominates quickly, so fry a teaspoon of the mixture and taste before filling any skins.
- "Strong gravy"This means concentrated meat stock, the reduced pan or bone liquor from the original rabbit. Well-reduced brown chicken or veal stock stands in. Simmer the chopped onion in it until soft and let it cool before mixing, or the yolk will start to set.
- Binding a cooked fillingOne yolk binds about 1 lb; raw sausage relies on the protein in uncooked meat, which this mixture has already lost. If it will not hold together, work in a tablespoon or two of fresh breadcrumbs soaked in the gravy rather than more egg.
- Skins"Carefully-prepared skins" means natural casings, cleaned, soaked and flushed; whether bought salted or prepared at home from the gut, the recipe does not say. Buy hog casings from a butcher, soak 30 minutes in warm water and flush them through. Failing that, roll the mixture into flat cakes or shape it in cling film and chill firm — the recipe works perfectly well skinless.
- CookingFry or grill over moderate heat until well browned and hot right through, about 8-10 minutes, turning. There is no need for the long slow cooking a raw sausage wants, and prolonged heat only dries the rabbit further.
- KeepingThis is cooked meat handled a second time, so treat it as highly perishable: refrigerate at once, cook within 24 hours, or freeze the same day. Do not leave the filled sausages at room temperature to "settle".
- YieldDepending on how much was left, the picked meat from a rabbit already served might come to something like 12 oz, which with the bacon makes about 1 lb of filling — six to eight small sausages, enough for three or four. Scale the bacon and seasoning to whatever weight of meat you actually have.
Cassell's separates this from its raw-rabbit sausage recipes for a practical reason: the two behave quite differently, and a Victorian kitchen would have arrived at this one only after a boiled or roast rabbit had already been to table. Rabbit was among the cheapest meats in nineteenth-century Britain — sold by street hawkers as well as butchers — which is why household dictionaries of the period carry many ways to cook it and several more for using it up. The wider habit is older than the book: sausage-making is often said to have begun as a means of stretching and preserving scraps, and the seasoning here, with its cloves and nutmeg alongside pepper, keeps close to the spice pattern of English forcemeats and puddings going back well before Cassell's. That the recipe assumes the cook has casings on hand, and can prepare them, is a reminder of how much butchery work still happened in the domestic kitchen.