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Rabbit Soup, Superior
Skin and empty two rabbits, and let them lie in lukewarm water for an hour. Drain them, and put them into a stewpan with two quarts of white stock made from veal bones. Let them simmer gently until they are quite tender. Lift them out, and pick all the best meat from the bones. Bruise the latter, and put them back into the broth with two carrots, two onions, three or four sticks of celery, a bunch of parsley, a sprig of thyme, a bay-leaf, a blade of mace, a dozen peppercorns, and a little salt. Let all simmer gently for three hours. At the end of that time, strain the liquor, and let it stand to settle, so that it may be poured off free from sediment. Meantime mince the meat, and pound it till it is perfectly smooth, cover it, and put it aside. When the broth is cold, pour off the clear liquor free from sediment, and boil it. Put the pounded meat into a basin, moisten it very gradually with the warm broth, and rub the paste well with the back of a wooden spoon that it may be free from lumps. Add this thickening to the broth, season pleasantly with additional salt and cayenne, and pass it through a sieve. Put it into a clean saucepan, and when it boils stir into it three-quarters of a pint of cream which has been mixed with a table-spoonful of good arrowroot. Let the soup boil up again, and serve very hot. Sippets of toast dipped in cream and fried may be served with the soup. Time, about three-quarters of an hour to an hour and a quarter to boil the rabbits; three hours to boil the liquor. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. per pint. Sufficient for nine or ten persons.
A Victorian purée soup that is really two operations: a rabbit-and-veal broth, and a smooth meat thickening let down with cream. The hinge is the tempering — the pounded meat must be loosened with warm broth a spoonful at a time, or it seizes into lumps no sieve will save.
- RabbitsTwo farmed rabbits give roughly 4–5 lb total. Farmed rabbit is tender in 45 minutes to an hour, which matches the recipe's own three-quarters of an hour to an hour and a quarter; wild rabbit, especially an older animal, may want 1½ hours or more. The hour's soak in lukewarm water was probably intended to draw blood and pale the flesh of freshly killed game, and can reasonably be skipped with a chilled butcher's rabbit.
- Stock and quantitiesTwo imperial quarts is about 9½ US cups. Three-quarters of an imperial pint of cream is 15 imperial fl oz, or about 1¾ US cups. A tablespoon of arrowroot is about 8–9 g.
- Blade of maceA blade is one flat piece of the dried aril from a nutmeg, sold whole in spice shops. About ⅛ teaspoon of ground mace substitutes, added with the peppercorns rather than earlier, since ground spice muddies a soup meant to be pale.
- Pounding the meatWhat took a mortar and a strong arm is a food processor job: mince the picked meat, then process with a ladleful of broth until genuinely smooth. It still needs to go through a sieve afterwards — connective tissue and stray fibres will not break down.
- Settling the brothThe recipe has the strained liquor stand until cold so that sediment drops and any fat sets on top for lifting off; leaving it overnight is a convenient way to manage this, and pouring off only the clear liquor keeps the finished soup cleaner in flavour.
- Cream and arrowrootMix the arrowroot into the cold cream first, then stir it into simmering soup. Arrowroot thickens fast and thins again if held at a hard boil, so bring the soup back up just to the point of boiling and serve. Reheating gently is fine; a second long simmer is not.
- SippetsSmall triangles or cubes of crustless bread, here dipped in cream and fried in butter until gold. Serve them alongside rather than in the bowl so they do not go soft.
- ServingNine or ten portions as a first course, closer to five or six as a main. The soup is bland by design — taste hard for salt at the end, and the cayenne should be felt rather than tasted.
Rabbit was cheap protein in nineteenth-century Britain, both wild-trapped and, increasingly, farmed in hutches. "Superior" here is doing specific work: it marks this as the dressed-up version, built on veal stock and finished with cream, in contrast to plainer preparations of the same meat. The method — long-simmered stock, meat pounded and sieved back in as its own thickening, cream and arrowroot at the last minute — is the classic purée of the period, the same technique applied to hare, partridge or pheasant depending on what came into the kitchen. That structure is generally traced to French practice as absorbed by English professional cooks over the century, and the arrowroot is a period marker of its own: imported from the West Indies, it was prized for thickening delicate soups without the floury taste of a flour-based liaison.