Rabbit Soup
INGREDIENTS for soup for 10 or 12 persons.-2 large rabbits, or 3 small ones; a faggot of savoury herbs, head of celery, 2 carrots, 1 onion, 1 blade of mace, salt and white pepper to taste, a little pounded mace, 1/3 pint of cream, the yolks of 2 eggs, boiled hard, the crumb of a French roll, 3 quarts of water. AVERAGE COST, 4s.
Make the soup with the legs and shoulders of the rabbits, and keep the nice pieces for a dish or entrée. Put them into warm water to draw the blood; when quite clean, put them into a stewpan, with a faggot of herbs, and a teacupful, or rather more, of veal stock or water.
Simmer slowly till done through, add the three quarts of water, and boil for an hour.
Take out the rabbits, pick the meat from the bones, covering it up to keep it white; put the bones back in the liquor, add the vegetables, and simmer for two hours; skim and strain, and let it cool. Now pound the meat in a mortar, with the yolks of the eggs, and the crumb of the roll previously soaked; rub it through a tammy and gradually add it to the strained liquor, and simmer for 15 minutes. Mix arrowroot or rice-flour with the cream (say 2 dessertspoonfuls), and stir in the soup; bring it to a boil, and serve. This soup must be very white, and instead of thickening it with arrowroot or rice-flour, vermicelli or pearl barley can be boiled in a little stock, and put in five minutes before serving.
TIME.-Nearly 4 hours.
SEASONABLE from September to March.
RABBIT, TRUSSING OF.
Rabbit, for dish for 4 or 5 persons.-1 rabbit, 2 large onions, 6 cloves, 1 small teaspoonful of chopped lemon-peel, a few forcemeat balls, thickening of butter and flour, 1 large tablespoonful of mushroom ketchup. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 9d.
Cut the rabbit into small joints; put them into a stewpan, add the onions, sliced, the cloves and minced lemon-peel.
Pour in sufficient water to cover the meat, and, when the rabbit is nearly done, drop in a few forcemeat balls, to which has been added the liver, finely chopped.
Thicken the gravy with flour and butter, put in the ketchup, give one boil, and serve.
TIME. Rather more than hour.
SEASONABLE from September to February. -- Rabbit, Stewed, Larded.
INGREDIENTS for dish for 4 or 5 persons.- 1 rabbit, a few strips of bacon, rather more than 1 pint of good broth or stock, a bunch of savoury herbs, salt and pepper to taste, thickening of butter and flour, 1 glass of sherry. AVERAGE COST, 2s.
Well wash the rabbit, cut it into quarters, lard them with slips of bacon, and fry them; then put them into a stewpan with the broth, herbs and a seasoning of pepper and salt; simmer gently until the rabbit is tender, then strain the gravy, thicken it with butter and flour, add the sherry, let it boil, pour it over the rabbit, and serve.
Garnish with slices of cut lemon.
TIME. Rather more than hour.
SEASONABLE from September to February.
A Victorian white soup: rabbit simmered to a stock, the meat pounded to a paste with hard-boiled yolk and bread, then returned to the liquor. The whole point is pallor, so nothing may brown at any stage.
- Keep it whiteNo browning, no coloured stock, no scorched pan. Sweat the joints gently in the small amount of veal stock rather than frying them, and cover the picked meat with damp greaseproof so it does not darken while the bones go back to the pot.
- Rabbit sizeTwo large wild rabbits give roughly 3-4 lb of joints. A single farmed rabbit of about 3 lb will serve, though the flavour is milder.
- A faggot of herbsA tied bundle: parsley stalks, thyme, a bay leaf. Tie it with string so it lifts out whole before straining.
- QuantitiesA third of a pint of cream is a scant 7 fl oz (about 190 ml). Three imperial quarts is about 3.4 litres. Two dessertspoonfuls of arrowroot is about 4 teaspoons.
- The crumb of a French rollThe soft interior of a small white roll, about 1 to 1 1/2 oz, soaked in a little of the stock and squeezed. It is a thickener, not a flavour; stale white bread does the same job.
- Mortar and tammyA food processor replaces the pounding entirely. Pass the resulting paste through a fine sieve, pressing with a ladle, to catch sinew that the blades leave behind.
- After the liaison goes inOnce the meat paste and later the cream are added, hold the soup below a simmer. A hard boil curdles the cream and makes the puree grainy; the recipe's instruction to bring it to a boil is best read as bringing it just to steaming.
- Yield and seasoningAs written it fills 10 to 12 soup plates. Salt is easy to underjudge in a white soup with cream in it, so season at the very end, and use white pepper so no dark specks show.
White soups of this kind were a fixture of the English dinner table from the eighteenth century onward, when the first course was expected to offer a pale soup alongside a brown one. The technique here comes straight out of that tradition: meat pounded to a paste with hard yolk and soaked bread, sieved, and let down with stock and cream, a method the older cookery writers applied to veal and to fowl as readily as to rabbit. The seasonable note, September to March, reflects a period when rabbit was game rather than grocery, cheap and abundant in the countryside and priced accordingly at four shillings for a pot serving a dozen. Note too the household economy behind the first instruction: the legs and shoulders go into the soup while the loin and best pieces are saved for a separate dish, one animal doing the work of two courses.