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Rabbit, Stewed Whole
Skin, empty, and wash a rabbit, and soak it in lukewarm water for half an hour. Drain and dry it, and fill it with a forcemeat prepared as follows. Boil the liver for a quarter of an hour. Mince it finely, and mix with it three ounces of finely-shred beef suet, two ounces of grated bread-crumbs, a tea-spoonful of chopped parsley, half a tea-spoonful of mixed sweet herbs, a little pepper and salt, and a little milk. Sew the rabbit up securely, truss firmly for roasting, and lay three or four slices of fat bacon upon it. Bake in a brisk oven for twenty minutes. Cut two ounces of bacon into dice, and fry these in an ounce of butter with a carrot and two onions till they are lightly browned. Dredge a table-spoonful of flour over them, and add a pint of stock or water, a dessert-spoonful of vinegar, half a tea-spoonful of mixed mustard, and a little pepper and salt. Put the rabbit and bacon into this sauce, and let them simmer gently until quite tender. Lay the rabbit on a dish, and keep it hot. Rub the vegetables through a sieve, mix the pulp again with the gravy, let it boil up, pour it over the rabbit, and serve very hot. Time to stew the rabbit, an hour and a half. Probable cost of rabbit, 7d. to 9d. per pound. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A larded, stuffed rabbit given a fast blast in the oven and then finished in a sharpened brown sauce. The method is sound; the timings assume a rabbit tougher than most of what is sold today.
- Farmed or wild changes everythingA farmed rabbit of 2.5-3 lb will be tender in 45-60 minutes of gentle simmering, not the full hour and a half. A wild rabbit, especially an older one, may want the whole time or more. Test the hind leg with a skewer rather than trusting the clock.
- "Brisk oven"Roughly 400-425F (200-220C). The twenty minutes there appears to be to set the forcemeat and colour the bacon rather than to cook the rabbit through, so there is no need to extend it.
- The soakHalf an hour in lukewarm water was standard advice for rabbit, most likely to draw out blood from a freshly killed animal. A butchered rabbit from a shop needs no soaking; pat it dry and go straight to stuffing.
- Liver for the forcemeatRabbit is now sold without offal more often than with it. Two chicken livers, simmered and minced, stand in perfectly well. A quarter of an hour's boiling is long for liver, but here it is being minced into a stuffing rather than served, so the firmness is useful.
- Suet and crumbsThree ounces of beef suet is about 85 g; shredded packet suet works. Two ounces of breadcrumbs is roughly a cup of fresh crumbs, and "a little milk" means just enough to make the mixture cohere, a tablespoon or two.
- Sewing and trussingButcher's twine and a trussing needle, or simply close the belly cavity with skewers laced with string. If the stuffing escapes into the sauce it will thicken it into porridge.
- Odd spoons and measuresA dessert-spoonful is about 2 teaspoons. "Mixed mustard" is prepared mustard, made up from powder with water; English mustard is closest. "Mixed sweet herbs" was a variable dried mixture, usually including thyme and marjoram, sometimes savory, basil or sage.
- Finishing the sauceSieving the carrot and onion gave the sauce extra body alongside the dredged flour; a stick blender does it in seconds. Boil it up briefly to lose any raw flour taste, and check the vinegar and mustard again at the end, as long simmering flattens both.
- YieldFour to five as the book says, with potatoes and a green vegetable. The prices given, 7d. to 9d. a pound, are of period interest only.
Rabbit was the cheap meat of Victorian Britain, sold by the pound from barrows and butchers' hooks in every town, and Cassell's dictionary treats it as a staple rather than game: there are dozens of rabbit entries, from soup and curry to potted and pulled. The technique here has the stuffed animal first roasted hard for colour and then braised in a bacon-and-root-vegetable sauce that is later passed through a sieve to thicken it. Rabbit's fall from British tables is usually traced to the myxomatosis outbreaks of the 1950s, after which a food eaten without comment for centuries came to seem strange, and prices like the sevenpence a pound quoted here belong to a vanished economy of warrens, snares and poaching.