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Two Shalots (One clove of Garlic)
One clove of Garlic.
One pint Poivrade Sauce.
Cut the rabbit in pieces; fry, or sauté it in the butter: add the shalot, onion, and the brown sauce; put it in the oven for one hour, being careful it does not burn. Twelve small new potatoes, previously cooked, may be added to this, or pieces of cauliflower or croûtons of fried bread.
The heading has swallowed most of the ingredient list — this is one of those book entries where the title carries the first line of the recipe and the quantities for rabbit, butter and onion never appear. Treat it as a method for a rabbit sauté finished in the oven, and supply the amounts yourself.
- What the title is doing"Two Shalots (One clove of Garlic)" is the head of the ingredient list, not a name. Read the dish as: one rabbit, butter for frying, two shallots, an onion, one clove of garlic, one pint of poivrade sauce.
- Missing quantitiesNo weight of rabbit or butter is given. A whole rabbit of about 3 lb jointed into six or seven pieces, browned in 2 oz butter, suits a pint of sauce. The onion is unspecified in size; one medium onion, finely chopped, is in keeping with the two shallots.
- Shalot and clove"Shalot" is the older spelling of shallot. "One clove of Garlic" means a single clove from the bulb, not a whole head.
- Poivrade sauceA peppery brown sauce: a mirepoix of carrot, onion and celery sweated in butter, deglazed with vinegar and often white wine, moistened with brown stock or espagnole, and finished with crushed peppercorns added late so they perfume rather than turn bitter. The recipe then calls the same pint "the brown sauce" a line later. If the pint is an imperial one of 20 fl oz, that is roughly 2½ cups.
- Oven heatNo temperature is stated, and the recipe does not say whether the dish is covered. A modern moderate oven of 325-350F suits an hour of gentle cooking; watch it, as the recipe's own warning about burning suggests.
- The hour is generous for farmed rabbitWild rabbit will take the full hour or a little more. Farmed rabbit, which is what most butchers sell now, is tender at 40–50 minutes; the loin pieces dry out if pushed. Check the hind legs with a skewer and pull the saddle earlier if need be.
- The garnishes go in at the endThe potatoes are "previously cooked" and the cauliflower should be too — both are there to be warmed through in the sauce for the last five minutes, not braised from raw. Croûtons of fried bread are added at the table or they soften.
- YieldOne rabbit with garnish serves four as a main course, or six as part of a longer menu.
Poivrade belongs to the family of peppered brown sauces that French professional kitchens built on espagnole, and it was a standard partner for game — hare, venison, and rabbit standing in for either. Its name is from poivre, pepper, and the crushed peppercorns are characteristically steeped in the sauce only briefly at the end. English cookery books aimed at ambitious households leaned heavily on this French repertoire, which is why a modest rabbit here is dressed with a named sauce, shallots, and croûtons rather than being stewed plainly. Rabbit was cheap and widely eaten in Britain, wild and in season through the cold months, and appears in this sort of book precisely because it let a cook demonstrate expensive technique on inexpensive meat.