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Rabbit, Smothered with Onions
Skin and empty a rabbit, and remove the eyes. Dry it well, and truss it firmly. Put ten or twelve large onions into a saucepan with three quarts of water. When this boils, put in the rabbit, and let all simmer gently together until both rabbit and onions are sufficiently done. Take out the onions, mince them, and put them into a clean saucepan with a slice of fresh butter, a table-spoonful of flour, a spoonful of milk, and a tea-spoonful of white pepper. Mix these ingredients thoroughly over a gentle fire to form a puree. Put the rabbit on a hot dish, and remove the skewers; pour the onion puree over it, and serve very hot. Rabbit smothered with onions is sometimes stuffed with veal forcemeat, but this is not common. This dish should always be accompanied with boiled bacon, or boiled pickled pork. Excellent pea soup may be made of the rabbit broth, or if this is not required the rabbit broth will prove a valuable addition to stock. Time to boil the rabbit, three-quarters of an hour to an hour and a quarter, according to the size. Probable cost of rabbits, 7d. to 9d. per pound. Sufficient, one medium-sized rabbit for three or four persons.
A plain boiled rabbit dressed in an onion sauce, of the sort that turned a cheap carcass into a full supper. Two things decide whether it succeeds: keeping the water at a bare simmer, and cutting the pepper back.
- Sourcing the rabbitFarmed rabbit is what butchers and online game dealers sell, usually 2.5-3 lb dressed and already skinned, gutted and headless, so the first sentence looks after itself. Wild rabbit is leaner, tougher and darker, and will want the longer end of the cooking time.
- "Remove the eyes"The rabbit was cooked and served with the head on, and trussed to hold its shape in the pot. A modern rabbit arrives headless; simply tie the legs close to the body with string so the animal holds its shape.
- Simmer, do not boilThis is the hinge. Rabbit is very lean and a rolling boil shreds the loin into dry fibres. Keep the water at a lazy tremble, barely breaking the surface, for the whole time.
- TimingThree-quarters of an hour suits a small farmed rabbit; an hour and a quarter suits a large or wild one. The leg meat should come away from the bone with slight resistance, not fall off it.
- The pepperA teaspoon of white pepper in a sauce made from a dozen onions is aggressive by current taste. Start with a quarter-teaspoon and add more.
- The sauce proportionsA tablespoon of flour with only a slice of butter and a spoonful of milk will not bind on its own; the body comes from the onions themselves. Cook the butter and flour together for a minute before the minced onion goes in, then loosen with a ladle of the cooking broth until it drops from the spoon. Salt is not mentioned and is needed.
- Three quarts of waterRoughly 3.4 litres, which should just cover rabbit and onions in a deep pot. Use less if your pan is narrow; the point is to poach, not to make broth for its own sake.
- The brothThe suggestion to save it is sound. Strained and chilled, rabbit broth makes a clean, faintly sweet base for pea soup and keeps three days in the fridge or three months frozen.
- Yield and accompanimentThree to four servings. The boiled bacon or pickled pork is not optional decoration: rabbit has almost no fat of its own, and the salt pork supplies both seasoning and richness.
Rabbit was the cheapest meat in the Victorian larder that still counted as a joint rather than an offcut, and Cassell's gives its price as 7d. to 9d. a pound. Warrens supplied town markets in enormous numbers, so rabbit appears throughout nineteenth-century cookery books in every register from the servants' hall to the dinner-party entree. "Smothered" is old English kitchen usage for a dish buried under a thick sauce or a mass of vegetables, and the pairing with onions and salt pork is very old indeed: the lean white meat needs the fat and the sweetness, and cooks knew it long before anyone wrote down why. The note that stuffing with veal forcemeat is possible "but not common" records the fancier variant while steering the reader to the plain one.