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Curried Rabbit
1/2 teaspoon onion juice 1 teaspoon curry powder cup chopped cold rabbit j 1 cup brown sauce Add the rabbit meat to the brown sauce; cook until thoroughiy heated; season and serve in a border of rice. • •
A short made-over dish for leftover roast or stewed rabbit, built on a cup of brown sauce and finished in a ring of rice. The whole thing takes about as long as the rice does.
- Brown sauceIn a book of this vintage this generally means a plain brown roux sauce: butter and flour cooked to a nut colour, then whisked with brown stock and simmered until it coats a spoon (the classic espagnole is the elaborate version of the same idea). A cup of good reduced beef or game stock thickened with a beurre manie will do the same work.
- Quantity of rabbitThe meat measure has lost its fraction in the original line, so the amount is not recoverable; it may have been half a cup, a cup, or a cup and a half. Against one cup of sauce, roughly a cup of chopped cooked rabbit gives a loose hash; use closer to a cup and a half of meat if you want it substantial enough to hold a mound of rice.
- Onion juiceGrate half a small onion and press the pulp through a fine sieve, or grate it on a microplane and use the liquid that collects. It gives onion flavour without any texture, which is the point in a smooth sauce.
- Curry powderA teaspoon of a standard commercial blend. Bloom it for thirty seconds in a little butter in the pan before the sauce goes in; modern blends can taste raw and dusty if simply stirred into hot liquid.
- Heating throughThe instruction to cook until thoroughly heated means an actual reheat, not a warming. Bring the sauce to a gentle simmer and hold it there a couple of minutes so the meat reaches 165F right through; do not boil it hard or the rabbit shreds and toughens.
- The rice borderPack hot cooked long-grain rice into a buttered ring mould or shape it with a spoon into a ring on the platter, then pour the curry into the centre. Any plain rice works; season it, since the sauce carries most of the salt.
- SubstitutionRabbit is sold at good butchers but not everywhere. Cooked dark-meat chicken or turkey behaves the same way in this sauce, though it is sweeter and less gamey.
- YieldTwo modest servings as written, or four as part of a larger meal. It scales up cleanly as long as you keep the sauce and meat in balance.
Curried leftovers were a fixture of English and American household cookery from the middle of the nineteenth century onward, and a loose-leaf teaching book of the kind is full of them: the cook is being shown how one mother sauce, brown sauce, plus a flavouring turns yesterday's roast into a dish worth putting on a platter. Rabbit was cheap, widely trapped and raised, and appeared far more often on American tables in the 1900s and 1910s than it does now, so a made-over rabbit dish needed no explanation. The ring of rice is the standard presentation of the era for any wet, chopped filling, the same frame used for creamed chicken or curried eggs.