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Rabbit, Spanish Way of Cooking
A stewpan or earthenware pipkin is taken, having a tightly-fitting cover, and of sufficient size to hold a couple of rabbits when cut up into small pieces; also four moderate-sized Spanish onions in thin slices. A layer of sliced onion is placed on the bottom of the pan; on it a layer of the pieces of rabbit previously seasoned with salt, pepper, and whatever other seasoning may be desired. This is covered with a second layer of onion, then rabbit, and so on alternately, until the whole of the rabbit is used up. A few thin slices of raw bacon or ham are put over the last layer of rabbit, and all the remaining pieces of onion are placed on the top. The cover is then put on, and the whole stewed at a moderate heat for two hours. A slack oven, a hot plate, or hot hearth, answers admirably. It is needless to say that, as no water may be added, if the pan is placed over the fire the meat is burned and spoiled. At the end of two hours let it be turned out into a dish, and served up immediately, when it will be found to be a tender, succulent, gravy-teeming dish, far different from the insipid, dry, stringy, boiled rabbit and onion sauce of the ordinary style. English onions answer very well; and should the gravy (of which a considerable quantity is produced), require to be slightly thickened, a tea-spoonful of flour should be added to the seasoning which is rubbed over the pieces of rabbit.
A dry-stewed rabbit that relies entirely on the water in four large onions. The instruction that matters most is the one the book repeats: add no liquid, and keep the pan off direct heat.
- The vesselA pipkin is a squat earthenware pot with a lid; a heavy cast-iron or enamelled Dutch oven does the same job. What matters is a lid that fits closely enough to hold the steam in, since the onions supply all the moisture. A sheet of foil crimped under the lid is worth adding if yours is loose.
- "A slack oven"Conventionally a low oven, somewhere around 300F, though "slack" was never a fixed temperature and the book gives none. What the book actually rules out is setting the pan over the fire, where the meat "is burned and spoiled"; it allows a hot plate or hot hearth as well as the oven. Whichever you use, keep the heat low and resist the urge to raise it.
- Buying rabbitTwo rabbits means roughly 4-5 lb of meat on the bone, jointed small. Farmed rabbit is what most butchers sell and it will be tender in the two hours given; a wild rabbit, especially an older one, may want closer to three.
- The onionsFour "moderate-sized Spanish onions" is about 2 lb. Spanish onions are the large sweet yellow kind, and they matter here for their water content as much as their flavour. The recipe concedes ordinary onions work; slice everything thin so it collapses rather than steams in chunks.
- Bacon or hamUse dry-cured streaky bacon or a thick slice of raw gammon, not the wet-cured supermarket kind, which leaches water and salt. Two or three slices are enough, and season the rabbit lightly given the salt they contribute.
- ThickeningThe teaspoon of flour rubbed on with the seasoning is the whole method; there is no roux and no reduction at the end. If the finished gravy is still thin, lift the meat out and boil the liquid down in a wide pan rather than adding more flour.
- Turning it outAfter two hours the layers are fragile. Slide a wide spoon down the side of the pot and lift out in sections rather than inverting it, or serve straight from the pot with the top layer of onions spooned over.
- YieldServes four to six with boiled potatoes or bread to take up the gravy, of which there will be a good deal.
Cassell's fondness for this method is really an argument against the English habit of boiling rabbit and drowning it in onion sauce, which the entry dismisses in as many words. The technique itself — meat layered with sliced onion in a sealed earthenware pot and cooked slowly with no added liquid — belongs to a wide family of slow-cooked pot dishes; the "Spanish" in the title probably points as much to the Spanish onions as to any particular regional dish. Rabbit was cheap, plentiful and unglamorous in late Victorian Britain, which is why a book of this kind devotes so much space to making it palatable: the readers being addressed were more likely to be economising than indulging. The reference to "a hot plate, or hot hearth" is a reminder that the recipe predates reliable oven thermostats, and that a cook judged a slack oven by hand and habit.