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Fried Rabbit
Skin, singe and wipe rabbit, joint it and soak it in cold salted water for 1/2 hour. Wipe pieces of rabbit, dip them in flour and fry in hot fat until tender and brown on each side. Remove rabbit from pan and add heaping tablespoon of flour and about 3 cups water. Bring to boil and when thickened add salt, pepper, teaspoon chopped parsley, little grated lemon rind and 2 tablespoons currant jelly. Serve sauce in sauce bowl. Garnish rabbit with green parsley. Serves four.
A straightforward pan-fried rabbit with a quick pan gravy, written for cooks who expected to butcher their own game. The only real difficulty is that frying alone will not tenderize an older animal.
- Skinning and singeingThese steps assume a whole freshly killed rabbit; singeing burns off residual fine hairs. A rabbit bought dressed from a butcher or supermarket needs only rinsing and patting dry before jointing.
- Young versus old animals"Fry until tender" only works on a young rabbit or farmed fryer, roughly 2 to 2 1/2 lb. An older wild animal will still be tough after browning; joints from one need to finish gently in the liquid, covered, until they give at the bone.
- Internal temperatureRabbit is lean and cooks fast, but it is still a whole muscle from a wild or farmed mammal. Take the thickest part of the hind leg to at least 160F; the meat should show no pink at the joint.
- The salted soakHalf an hour in cold salted water was partly to draw out blood and partly a mild seasoning. It is optional today; there is no need to extend it.
- JointingTwo forelegs, two hind legs, and the saddle cut into two or three pieces gives six or seven pieces from one rabbit. The forelegs and saddle cook faster than the hind legs, so pull them from the fat sooner.
- The gravyOne heaping tablespoon of flour to three cups of water is a thin sauce by modern taste. Use stock rather than water, or cut the liquid to two cups, if you want it to coat rather than pour.
- Currant jellyRed currant jelly is the traditional sweet-sour note for game and still sold as such. Sharp redcurrant is better here than a jam with seeds; a tart apple or cranberry jelly stands in acceptably.
- Fat and quantityThe recipe specifies only 'hot fat'; enough to shallow-fry in a heavy skillet is the sense. Lard or bacon fat suits rabbit better than butter, which will brown too fast at frying heat.
Rabbit belonged to the everyday meat supply in North America and Britain well into the twentieth century, in a household that expected the cook to be handed the animal whole rather than in a tray. The red currant jelly finish is the older European convention for game: the sweet-acid jelly cuts the muskiness of wild meat, and the same pairing turns up with venison, hare and mutton across nineteenth-century cookbooks. Rabbit's decline on the American table is usually traced to the postwar rise of cheap commercial chicken rather than to any change in taste, and grated lemon rind with parsley here does much the same job of freshening as it would in a fricassee of fowl.