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Rabbit
The rabbit when bought should be fresh and the body free from unpleasant odor. If young, the paws and ears will be soft; if old, they will be stiff.
Little grated nutmeg. Salt and pepper. 1 tablespoon chopped parsley. 1/4 cup fine bread crumbs. Rabbit may be cooked in a variety of ways, as fricassee or pie, following the recipe for chicken, or broiled like chicken. Skin the rabbit; singe it; remove the entrails and wipe well inside and out with a damp cloth. Split it down the back, and unless it is to be broiled, divide each half into four pieces. 1 rabbit 2 eggs
This is a preparation entry rather than a finished dish: it tells you how to judge, dress and joint a rabbit, then sends you to the chicken recipes. The stray "2 eggs" at the end belongs to an egg-and-crumb coating for frying, which the page never spells out.
- What you will actually buyFarmed rabbit today comes skinned, gutted and often already jointed, so the singeing and drawing described here are moot. Expect a 2.5-3 lb dressed carcass, which serves three to four.
- Judging ageThe soft-paw, soft-ear test still holds for a whole animal. A young rabbit can be fried or broiled; anything older wants a slow braise or fricassee or it will be dry and stringy.
- Jointing"Split it down the back" means through the backbone with a heavy knife or shears, then each half into four: foreleg, two loin sections, hind leg. Modern butchery more often yields six or seven pieces, so eight is one workable division rather than a fixed standard.
- The orphaned eggsTwo beaten eggs, with crumbs, would suit an egg-and-crumb coating for fried rabbit, which is the likeliest reading, but the page never says so and the chicken recipes it defers to are not given here. If you are stewing or making a pie, ignore them.
- Rabbit is very leanThere is almost no fat on the carcass, so broiling needs basting with butter or oil and close watching. Braises benefit from bacon, salt pork or a barding of fat.
- Cook it throughRabbit is treated like poultry for food-safety purposes: bring it to 160F at the thickest part of the hind leg. Braised pieces are better at the point where the meat pulls from the bone, which is well past that.
- Wild rabbitIf you are dressing a wild animal rather than a farmed one, wear gloves. Tularemia is transmissible through cuts in the skin while handling raw carcasses, and it is the reason hunters avoid rabbits that seemed sluggish or sick.
Rabbit sat in the poultry-and-game chapter of American cookbooks because that is where it sat in the market: dressed rabbits hung alongside chickens and were cooked by the same handful of methods, which is exactly why this entry can dispose of the cooking in one sentence and refer the reader elsewhere. Domestic rabbit-keeping had a genuine boom in the United States around the turn of the twentieth century, the so-called Belgian hare craze of the late 1890s, and rabbit was promoted again during the First World War as a meat that a household could raise in a backyard hutch without competing for feed grain. The instruction to check that the body is "free from unpleasant odor" reflects a period when game was often sold whole, undated and unrefrigerated, and the buyer's nose was the only inspection there was.