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Rabbit, Stewed
Cut a plump young rabbit into pieces the size of an egg. Divide half a pound of streaky bacon into square pieces, and fry these with an ounce of butter till they turn yellow. Take them up, and put in their place the pieces of rabbit and two onions sliced, and fry these till they are lightly browned. Take them up, mix an ounce of flour with the fat and stir it over the fire with the back of a wooden spoon for two minutes. Moisten the paste gradually with three-quarters of a pint of stock or water, and add a bunch of savoury herbs, a little pepper and salt, the rabbit, the bacon, and the onions, and simmer all gently together in a closely-covered saucepan for twenty minutes. Take out the herbs, pile the pieces of rabbit on a dish, pour the sauce over them, and serve very hot. If liked, a glassful of claret may be added to the sauce. It will be much improved, also, if a dozen mushrooms are boiled in the sauce for the last six or seven minutes. Failing these, a table-spoonful of mushroom ketchup may be stirred into it. Time, from an hour and a half to two hours. Probable cost of rabbit, 7d. to 9d. per pound. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A straightforward brown stew built on a bacon-fat roux. The one thing to settle before you start is the cooking time, because the recipe contradicts itself.
- The timing contradictionThe method says simmer twenty minutes; the footer says one and a half to two hours. Twenty minutes suits only a very young rabbit in small pieces. A farmed rabbit of 2 1/2 to 3 lb needs 45 to 60 minutes at a bare simmer, and a wild adult closer to 90 minutes. Judge by the meat pulling from the bone, not the clock.
- Jointing"Pieces the size of an egg" calls for fairly small joints: front legs, hind legs (split if large), the saddle cut across into two or three pieces, plus the ribs. Eight or more pieces from a farmed rabbit. Bone-in throughout.
- Streaky baconThis is British side bacon, the cut American shops sell as regular sliced bacon; buy it thick-cut or in a slab so it can be cut into squares. Half a pound is a generous amount of salt and cure going into the pan, so hold back on added salt until the sauce has reduced and you have tasted it.
- Liquid quantityThree-quarters of an Imperial pint is 15 fl oz, roughly 1 3/4 US cups. Chicken or veal stock works; water gives a thinner result that the bacon partly rescues.
- The rouxOne ounce of flour is about 3 1/2 tablespoons. Two minutes over the heat cooks out the raw taste but keeps the colour pale-blond; add the stock in stages, stirring smooth each time, or the sauce will stay lumpy no matter how long it cooks.
- Bunch of savoury herbsA bouquet garni: parsley stalks, thyme, a bay leaf, tied with string so it lifts out whole. "Savoury herbs" in Victorian usage covers mixed pot herbs generally; winter savory or marjoram is one plausible reading.
- Claret and mushroomsA "glassful" here is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz of dry Bordeaux-style red. Add it with the stock rather than at the end so it has time to cook down into the sauce. Mushroom ketchup is still sold; a tablespoon of it or of a dark soy-and-anchovy substitute adds the same savoury depth.
- YieldFour to five servings as written, which assumes potatoes or bread alongside. A 3 lb rabbit realistically feeds three to four modern appetites.
Rabbit was an everyday meat for good reason: at seven to ninepence a pound it undercut butcher's meat throughout the late nineteenth century, when huge numbers of wild and warren-raised rabbits moved through markets such as Leadenhall, and cheap imported carcasses later arrived from Ostend and, by the 1900s, Australia. The treatment here is straight French provincial practice " lardons rendered first, the meat browned in their fat, a flour liaison, a bouquet garni and a glass of red " which is essentially the method behind gibelotte de lapin. Mushroom ketchup, offered as the fallback for fresh mushrooms, was a standard English store-cupboard bottle of the period: salted mushrooms pressed and spiced, used much as cooks now use Worcestershire sauce or soy for background savour.