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RABBIT (Venetian way)
Take three or more young rabbits; skin and empty them nicely, then cut them into pieces in the following way. Take off the shoulders, then the head from the neck, divide the back in four parts; take off the legs on each side of the saddle, and cut them into two pieces. Have ready half a pottle of mushrooms chopped very fine, with parsley and shallots also chopped fine. Put a small lump of butter into a stewpan with a little rasped bacon; put in the sweet herbs with a little salt, pepper, and allspice, and let them stew for a short time on a slow fire. When sufficiently fried put in the rabbits, make them get firm with these sweet herbs till they are sufficiently done. Take the limbs out from the seasoning, lean the stewpan sideways to skim the fat that comes uppermost, put a table-spoonful of sauce tournee, or, if you have none, add to it a small tea-spoonful of flour, moistened with a spoonful or two of consomm, let it boil a few minutes, and make a thickening of the yolks of four eggs; add the juice of a lemon and a little cayenne pepper; stir the sauce well; if it happens to be too thick, make it thinner with a spoonful of broth; keep it quite hot, throw the pieces into the sauce again, and send up quite hot. This sauce must be rather highly seasoned.
A white rabbit stew built on a mushroom-and-shallot base and finished with an egg-yolk liaison. Everything hinges on the last step: once the yolks go in, the sauce must not boil.
- The liaisonBeat the four yolks with a ladle of the hot sauce before adding them back, and hold the pan below a simmer — roughly 160-175F — while it thickens. Boiling will scramble the yolks and split the sauce. The recipe adds the lemon juice at the very end, along with the yolks.
- Half a pottleA pottle is two quarts, so half a pottle of mushrooms is about a quart chopped fine — roughly 1 lb of button or cremini. Chopped that small they will release a great deal of liquid, which is intended; it becomes the body of the sauce.
- Rasped baconBacon scraped or grated to a paste from a solid piece, used as a seasoning fat rather than as meat. Finely diced unsmoked bacon or pancetta, or a spoonful of lardo, does the same work; heavily smoked supermarket bacon will overwhelm a deliberately pale sauce.
- Sauce tournéeA pale, lightly thickened veal or chicken velouté kept on hand in a nineteenth-century kitchen. The recipe already gives the substitute: a teaspoon of flour slaked with a spoonful or two of stock. Use unsalted chicken or veal stock in place of the consommé.
- "Make them get firm"The rabbit is stiffened in the herb base without colouring — a sweat, not a sear, which is what keeps the finished dish white. Keep the heat low; the back pieces will be done well before the legs and shoulders, so test them separately and lift them out as they are ready.
- The rabbitsThree young rabbits of roughly 2-2.5 lb each dressed will serve six to eight. Farmed rabbit is what is generally sold now, and it is tenderer and milder than the wild animal this recipe assumes; if you use wild rabbit, allow longer and expect a firmer texture. A butcher may joint it for you, and in any case the cuts described here — shoulders, neck, back in four, legs halved — are straightforward with a heavy knife.
- SeasoningAllspice and cayenne are both meant to be noticeable; the instruction to season highly is doing real work against a rich, bland egg-thickened sauce. Season the base lightly at the start and correct after the liaison, since the sauce reduces and concentrates along the way.
- ServingOnce the yolks are in, the sauce will not stand a hard reheat, so serve it straight away. Rice, plain boiled potatoes or bread suit a sauce of this kind.
The "Venetian way" here is less a claim about Venice than a French kitchen's shorthand: i in nineteenth-century cookery is usually described as a pale sauce sharpened with lemon and green herbs, and the label travelled loosely between dishes. What the method really shows is the older European preference for rabbit cooked white rather than browned — a fricassee, thickened at the last moment with egg yolks and acid, a technique often traced well back through French cooking and surviving today in dishes like blanquette de veau. The instruction to use sauce tournée "or, if you have none" a spoonful of flour and stock is a good marker of the book's audience: households that might or might not keep a professional stockpot going. Rabbit itself was cheap, abundant and unremarkable food in Britain when this dictionary was compiled, sold by poulterers and treated much as chicken is now. The recipe's vocabulary — pottle, sauce tournée, consommé — is professional French-trained English cookery, and may well be borrowed matter.