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Rabbit, with Cucumber
Cut the meat from the remains of a cold roast rabbit into neat strips, and lay it aside. Slice a fine cucumber very thinly. Sprinkle a little salt over it, and lay it between two dishes for an hour. Drain the water from it, pour over it a spoonful or two of vinegar, and let it remain for another hour. Pour off the vinegar, and put the slices of cucumber into a saucepan with two ounces of fresh butter, a bunch of parsley, a sprig of thyme, a bay-leaf, and either an onion or a small bunch of chives. Shake the saucepan over the fire till the cucumber is slightly browned. Dredge a little flour over it, pour upon it a quarter of a pint of good gravy or stock made from bones, and let it simmer gently for half an hour. Take out the herbs, season the sauce with pepper and salt, put in the pieces of rabbit, and let them get quite hot. The sauce must not boil after the rabbit is put in. Pile the rabbit on a dish, and pour the sauce over it. Serve very hot. Time, half an hour to simmer the sauce; a few minutes to heat the pieces of rabbit.
A made dish for leftovers: cold roast rabbit reheated in a braised cucumber sauce. The work is all in the cucumber, and the one rule that matters is not to let the sauce boil once the meat goes in.
- The hingeCooked rabbit is lean and dry, and boiling it a second time turns the fibres stringy. Bring the sauce to a bare shiver, slide in the strips, and hold them at that heat for three or four minutes until hot through.
- A quarter of a pintIn an English book of this period that is 5 fl oz, about 150 ml. Two ounces of butter is 55 g, half a standard American stick.
- Salting and souring the cucumberThe hour under salt draws out water so the slices brown rather than steam; the hour in vinegar is for flavour and firmness. Both stages can be shortened to about 30 minutes each with a large modern cucumber, but do drain and pat dry before the butter, or it will never colour.
- "A fine cucumber"Victorian frame-grown cucumbers were typically long and thin-skinned. One large English cucumber, or two field cucumbers peeled and seeded, gives roughly the right volume.
- The herbsParsley, thyme and bay tied with kitchen string make removal easy, since the recipe calls for the herbs to be taken out. The onion can go in whole or halved so that it too can be lifted out, though the recipe does not say what becomes of it.
- Gravy or stock made from bonesThe rabbit carcass simmered with an onion and a carrot for an hour gives something close to what is meant. Failing that, use a light chicken stock; a dark beef stock will bury the cucumber.
- Rabbit todayFarmed rabbit is sold whole or jointed at butchers and online, and roasts well wrapped in bacon. Cooked chicken thigh meat, cut in strips, substitutes directly if rabbit is not to hand.
- YieldThe meat from one rabbit with this quantity of sauce serves two generously, three at a stretch. Rice, plain boiled potatoes or toast take up the sauce.
Cucumber cooked rather than raw is one of the clearest markers of nineteenth-century kitchen practice: French cookery treated the cucumber as a vegetable to be stewed, glazed or stuffed, and English books followed, often pairing it with lamb, veal or rabbit. The salt-and-vinegar pre-treatment here is one common method of the period for keeping a watery vegetable from flooding a sauce, and it survives in modern cucumber salads for the same reason. The dish belongs to the large class of Victorian rechauffe recipes, built to use up the remains of a joint at a time when a roast rabbit was cheap meat and throwing food away was not done. Cassell's is thick with such entries, and they are usually the most practical cooking in the book.