Roast Rabbit
Stew the rabbit. After boiling the haslet and liver, stew them with parsley, thyme, celery-seed, butter, salt, and pepper, for gravy. Soak a piece of loaf bread, a short time, in water. Mix with it the yolk of an egg and some butter, for stuffing; then soak it in milk and cream. Sprinkle the inside of the rabbit with salt and pepper, fill it with the above dressing, sew it up, and roast or bake quickly.--Mrs. B.
A two-stage method typical of nineteenth-century rabbit cookery: the animal is stewed to tenderness first, then stuffed and finished in a hot oven. Skipping the first stage is the usual way this dish fails.
- "Stew the rabbit" is the hingeThe instruction is easy to read past, but the rabbit is meant to be gently simmered until nearly tender before it is stuffed and roasted. Wild and older farmed rabbit is very lean and sinewy; sent straight into a quick oven it dries into strings. Simmer in salted water, covered, until the leg meat gives to a fork, then drain and cool enough to handle.
- HasletAn old term for the pluck — heart, lungs and liver, sometimes the kidneys. Modern rabbit is rarely sold with any of it. If you have only the liver and heart, use those; otherwise build the gravy on the stewing liquid, which is the more valuable part anyway.
- "Quickly" means a hot oven"Quickly" means a hot oven. The book gives no temperature -- somewhere around 425 to 450F suits the intent. The rabbit has already been stewed, so the fast heat is there to brown the skin and set the stuffing rather than to cook the meat; twenty to thirty minutes should be enough.
- Loaf breadA plain white yeast loaf, not a sweetened sandwich bread. Stale crumb works better than fresh. The recipe soaks it in water, then in milk and cream, which reads oddly; the practical reading is to moisten the bread, squeeze it out, and enrich it with the egg yolk, butter, milk and cream to a soft but not sloppy dressing.
- Celery-seedStill sold, still potent. A quarter teaspoon is plenty for a gravy of this size; it turns bitter and medicinal in quantity.
- Sewing it upCotton kitchen twine and a trussing needle. Rabbit skin is thin and tears, so take wide stitches through the flap of the belly wall rather than close to the edge, and tie the hind legs together to hold the cavity shut.
- Keeping it moistNothing in the recipe protects the loin, which is the leanest part and the first to dry. Bacon or fat pork laid over the back, or repeated basting with the stewing broth and butter, is consistent with period practice and worth doing.
- YieldA rabbit of 2 1/2 to 3 lb with stuffing serves three, generously four. The gravy is thin by modern habit; thicken it with a little flour cooked in butter if you want it to coat.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (first published 1878, with printings dated 1879) was assembled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named and initialled Virginia housekeepers -- hence "Mrs. B." -- and its rabbit recipes reflect a household economy in which small game arrived from the fields and woods rather than a market. Rabbit was cheap and abundant, and cookbooks of the period generally treat it as a lean meat needing help, either long moist cooking or a rich stuffing and plenty of fat. The stuffing here is a straightforward bread panada, and the practice of stewing the offal separately for gravy is standard Anglo-American technique carried over from eighteenth-century English cookery. The terse, ingredient-list style -- no quantities, no times -- assumes a reader already familiar with the dish.