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Panned Rabbit
Little grated nutmeg Salt and pepper 1 tablespoon chopped parsley 1/4 cup fine bread crumbs Divide the rabbit at the joints and stew until tender. Butter a pan and lay the pieces over the bottom. Beat the eggs; mix with the other ingredients and spread over the rabbit. Set in a hot oven and bake until brown.
A two-stage dish: the rabbit is stewed until tender, then set under a savoury egg-and-crumb coating and browned. The printed ingredient list is clipped, so a couple of quantities have to be reasoned out.
- The missing eggsThe method says "beat the eggs" but no number survives in the ingredient list. For one rabbit's worth of pieces and 1/4 cup of crumbs, two eggs is the sensible reading — enough to bind the crumbs and parsley into a spreadable coating rather than an omelette.
- "A hot oven"In American books of this period that generally meant somewhere in the 400-450F range. The rabbit is already cooked through; the oven is only setting the egg and colouring the crumbs, so it should not need long.
- Stew it properly firstThis is the hinge. Rabbit that has not been stewed until genuinely tender will not improve in the oven — the browning stage is far too short. Expect 45 minutes to an hour and a half of gentle simmering depending on the animal's age, and keep the liquid at a bare tremble, since a hard boil toughens the lean meat.
- Farmed versus wildSupermarket and butcher rabbit today is farmed, young, and cooks at the shorter end of that range. Wild rabbit is leaner, stronger in flavour and can take twice as long. The book assumes the cook knows which is in hand.
- Save the stewing liquorThe recipe discards it by silence. A few spoonfuls of the strained broth moistened into the crumb mixture keeps the topping from baking dry, and the rest makes a good gravy to serve alongside.
- Butter the pan generouslyWith no liquid in the baking dish and a high oven, the underside of the rabbit will stick to anything less than a well-buttered pan. A shallow dish that holds the pieces in a single layer works best.
- YieldOne rabbit of about 2 1/2 to 3 lb serves three to four with a starch and a vegetable.
Rabbit sat in the poultry and game chapter of American cookbooks well into the twentieth century because it was cheap, widely available, and often home-raised or shot rather than bought. "Panned" here appears to mean finished in a pan in the oven — a way of turning plain stewed meat into something presentable at table, the same logic behind scalloped and au gratin dishes of the era. The egg-and-crumb topping does double duty: it browns attractively and it stretches a small animal across more plates. Mrs. Fryer's book was issued in loose-leaf form so that a household could add and rearrange pages. Entries like this one are terse and occasionally arrive, as here, with part of the ingredient list adrift.