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Rabbit Soup, White
A small quantity of good rabbit soup may be made with the inferior parts of the rabbit, that is the head, neck, and shoulders, leaving the best parts, that is the legs and the back, to be stewed, and served as an entree. Divide the rabbit, and soak the part which is to be used for soup in lukewarm water for half an hour. Cut it into small pieces, and put these into a stewpan with as much stock made from bones and water as will barely cover them. Let them simmer gently until the meat is done enough. Take it up, pick it from the bones, and put these back into the liquor with a carrot, a turnip, an onion, a bunch of parsley, a sprig of thyme, a little pepper, salt, and pounded mace. Add a pint and a half of additional stock, and simmer all gently together for two hours. Strain the soup, and leave it to cool. Mince the meat, and pound it quite smooth. Add to it a slice of stale crumb of bread which has been soaked in milk till soft and afterwards squeezed dry. Moisten this paste gradually with the strained stock, and let it boil for a quarter of an hour. Add a small cupful of cream which has been mixed with a tea-spoonful of ground rice or arrowroot, let it boil up once more, and serve. Some cooks add the yolk of an egg boiled hard to the pounded mince, and stir this into the soup to enrich it. When this is done the soup must not boil after the egg is added. Time, three to four hours. Probable cost, 1s. per pint. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A Victorian white game soup built on the thrifty half of the animal, thickened with a bread panade rather than flour. Nothing here is difficult, but two or three of the instructions reflect kitchens that no longer exist.
- The hinge: the finishOnce the cream and ground rice go in, the soup gets one brief boil and no more. If you also use the hard egg yolk, it must not boil at all after that — hold it just below a simmer, or the yolk will granulate and the soup loses its smoothness.
- The soakingSoaking in lukewarm water for half an hour was meant to draw out blood and lighten the colour of the meat, which matters in a soup that wants to stay white. Do it in cold water in the refrigerator instead; half an hour at room temperature with raw rabbit is not worth the risk.
- Which rabbitA farmed rabbit of about 2 1/2 to 3 lb gives pale, mild meat and cooks in 45 minutes to an hour. Wild rabbit is leaner, darker and much stronger in flavour, and may need 1 1/2 to 2 hours before the meat leaves the bone easily.
- Stewpan and stockA stewpan is simply a heavy saucepan with a lid. "Stock made from bones and water" most likely means an unseasoned, unbrowned stock — veal or chicken bones; a light chicken stock is the modern equivalent. The recipe fixes only the pint and a half added later; the first quantity is however much barely covers the meat.
- PoundingThe mortar work is a food processor now. Pulse the picked meat with the squeezed bread until it is a smooth paste, then let it down with the strained stock a ladleful at a time; adding all the liquid at once leaves you with lumps that will not break up.
- That quarter-hour boilFifteen minutes of boiling was there to amalgamate the bread paste with the stock. Ten minutes at a bare simmer, stirred, does the same job with less risk of the pur"e catching on the bottom of the pan.
- Pounded maceMace is the lacy covering of the nutmeg — warmer and less sweet than nutmeg itself, and a common seasoning in white soups. A pinch of ground mace, or a blade simmered with the vegetables and removed, is right for this quantity.
- Ground rice or arrowrootGround rice is rice milled to a slightly coarser grain than rice flour; either works, as does arrowroot. Slake the teaspoonful into the cold cream before it meets the hot soup.
- Yield and costThree to four servings as a first course. "1s. per pint" is a later-nineteenth-century shilling and tells you only that this was a middling-priced soup for a household that already had the rabbit.
White soups — pale, thickened with almonds, bread, cream or a hard egg yolk rather than browned flour — were a fixture of English cookery from the eighteenth century onward, and by the time Cassell's was compiled they had become the polite way to serve almost any mild meat. What makes this version characteristic of the book is its economy: the recipe opens not with the soup but with an argument for splitting the carcass, sending the legs and saddle to table as an entree and giving the head, neck and shoulders to the pot. Rabbit was cheap and widely available in Victorian Britain, wild and increasingly farmed, and household manuals of the period return to it constantly as a way of putting meat on a middle-class table without the price of butcher's joints. The bread panade is older still — softening stale crumb in milk and pounding it with meat to bind a soup is a technique generally thought to have been in use in English kitchens well before roux became common.