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Rabbit en Casserole
Dress the rabbit and cut into pieces for serving, dredge with flour and fry in butter until delicately browned, then put into the casserole. Melt two tablespoons of butter in the frying pan, add an onion cut in slices, and when well browned add two tablespoons of flour and slowly add two cups of hot water, stir until smooth, then pour over the rabbit, add a bit of bay leaf, enough water to half cover and salt and pepper to taste. Cover and let cook in the oven slowly for an hour or more. When tender add one and one-half tablespoons of lemon juice, three tablespoons of sherry.
Cover and serve at once. If a thicker sauce is desired add another tablespoon of flour.
A straightforward braise that depends on browning and a long, gentle oven. The only real decisions are the pot and the heat.
- "Casserole" hereIn a book of this vintage the casserole is the vessel — a deep, lidded earthenware or enamelled pot that goes from stove to oven. A Dutch oven or heavy covered braiser is the direct equivalent, and browning and baking in the same pot loses nothing.
- A slow ovenRead "cook in the oven slowly" as 300–325F. The liquid should barely tremble; a hard simmer tightens rabbit and leaves it stringy no matter how long it goes.
- Dressing the rabbit"Dress" assumes a whole animal to be skinned and drawn. Buy it jointed, or cut it into eight: two forelegs, two hind legs, the saddle in two or three, and the ribcage for the pot. Sold weights run 2½–3 lb.
- Farmed versus wildFarmed rabbit is pale, mild and tender in about an hour. A wild rabbit is leaner and much tougher, wants closer to two hours, and benefits from the extra water the recipe allows. If you are butchering wild rabbit yourself, wear gloves — tularemia is transmitted by contact with raw tissue, though thorough cooking destroys it.
- The hinge: the lemon and sherry go in lastThe recipe adds them only once the rabbit is tender, then covers and serves at once. Late addition keeps the sherry's aroma, which would cook away over a long braise.
- Liquid levelHalf-covering is deliberate: the sauce reduces to something worth spooning over rather than thinning out. Do not submerge the pieces.
- ThickeningThe two tablespoons of flour cooked with the onion make a loose gravy. If you add the extra tablespoon, work it into softened butter and stir it in at the end rather than dumping dry flour into hot liquid.
- YieldOne rabbit serves three, or four modestly. Egg noodles, boiled potatoes or bread for the sauce.
Rabbit was ordinary meat in American and British kitchens well into the twentieth century -- cheap, widely trapped, and often raised in backyard hutches -- and household books of the period tend to treat it without ceremony rather than as game. The treatment resembles a French braise with the wine bath left out: flour-dredged pieces browned in butter, an onion-and-flour roux, bay, and a long covered oven. Lemon juice and sherry to finish a brown sauce turn up in other recipes of the period for veal and chicken. Rabbit fell out of American home cooking after the mid-century, partly as poultry became cheaper and partly as fewer households hunted or kept animals; it survives on restaurant menus more readily than in domestic ones.