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Rabbits, Giblottes Of
Take two young rabbits to make a giblotte; but, observe, they must be both alike as to age; if you put a young one with an old one, the young one will be done to rags, while the other one will be scarcely done at all. Skin them, and cut them into pieces. Have ready some pieces of breast of bacon cut into the shape of small corks; these are to be blanched so that they may not be briny. Fry them in the stewpan with a little butter to give them a light brown colour. Take the bacon out of the stewpan, and put the pieces of rabbit into it: when cooked firm, take them out also; throw a good handful of flour into the butter in the stewpan, let it get a little brown; next moisten with some veal gravy. Let the sauce boil a little, to see whether it is not too thick; if so, you will never be able to skim off the fat, and accordingly it will never be of a good colour. When sufficiently stewed, put in the rabbits, bacon, a bunch of parsley and green onions, thyme, bay-leaf, clove, etc. etc.; and when the sauce has boiled for an hour, skim it well, and put the meat into another clean stewpan, and drain the sauce through a tamis; then take some button mushrooms and some small onions, and fry them white in butter; let them boil for a quarter of an hour in the sauce. When you are going to send up to table, first dish the pieces of rabbit, next the small white onions, and then put the bacon and the mushrooms over. Take off the fat and scum, otherwise there can be no good cookery; and cover the whole with the sauce when reduced.
A classic French rabbit fricassée written for a kitchen with stock always at hand and a cook who expected to skim a sauce three times. The method holds up; the vocabulary and one or two timings need translating.
- The hinge: skim, and keep the sauce looseThe instruction to check the sauce is not too thick before it simmers is the whole point. Fat and scum only rise and gather where the liquid is thin enough to let them; a sauce tightened too early traps the fat and turns grey and greasy. Keep it at pouring consistency throughout and reduce only at the end, after the final skim.
- Two rabbits of the same ageThis is genuine advice, not fussiness. Farmed rabbit sold today is uniformly young (about 2.5–3 lb dressed) and will suit; wild rabbit is leaner, tougher and variable, and an old wild buck wants a good deal longer than the hour given here. Do not mix the two in one pan.
- Breast of bacon cut like small corksThis is streaky bacon or unsmoked pork belly. The recipe's "small corks" means short thick chunks rather than fine lardons. Blanching means a couple of minutes in boiling water to draw out the salt — worth doing with heavily cured supermarket bacon, unnecessary with mild fresh pork belly.
- Veal gravyA light unthickened veal stock. A good chicken stock is the practical substitute; avoid anything dark, heavily reduced or heavily seasoned. The bacon and the flour are both lightly browned here, so expect a light brown sauce rather than a white one.
- TamisA drum sieve of stretched cloth or fine mesh. A fine chinois or a conical strainer lined with muslin does the same job of removing the herb bundle, the aromatics and any lumps from the roux.
- "Fry them white"The mushrooms and small onions are cooked in butter over gentle heat until soft and glossy but without colour, so they do not muddy the sauce. Their quarter-hour in the sauce at the end is enough; button mushrooms held longer will shed water and go slack.
- Cooking timesAn hour of simmering suits farmed or young wild rabbit; check the saddle pieces at 40 minutes, as they cook faster than the legs and shoulders and will fall to shreds if forgotten. Older wild rabbit may need 90 minutes or more.
- Clove and the herb bunch"A clove" here means one or two whole cloves, not a head of garlic. Tie the parsley, spring onion tops, thyme and bay into a bundle so the whole lot lifts out cleanly before the sauce goes through the sieve.
- YieldTwo rabbits, with the bacon and garnish, serve six generously as a main course with plain boiled potatoes or rice to take the sauce.
Gibelotte is the French name for a rabbit stew, and Cassell's spelling "giblotte" is one of several anglicisations that circulated in Victorian cookery writing. The word is generally traced to the Old French gibelet, a dish of small game birds, which also lies behind the English giblets; by the nineteenth century it had settled firmly on rabbit. The version here is built on a roux, veal gravy, lardons, button onions and mushrooms rather than the red-wine gibelotte more familiar today, and its voice is that of a French kitchen addressing an English one, complete with the aside that without skimming "there can be no good cookery". Rabbit was cheap, plentiful and unremarkable in Britain when this dictionary was compiled, sold by poulterers alongside fowl; treating it to a full French frica s e with a strained sauce was a way of dressing an everyday meat for a dinner table.