Rabbit Salad
Two roast rabbits, French dressing, three beads of lettuce, one teaspoonful of French mustard, one pint of mayonnaise dressing.
Cut up the meat; place in a bowl and cover with a French dressing; let it stand for four hours. Place the lettuce in a salad bowl; drain the meat and add to the lettuce. Put into a plate one teaspoonful of French mustard; thin with one tablespoonful of the dressing taken from the meat, and add slowly to this one pint of mayonnaise dressing, and pour over the salad.
A cold composed salad from the era when rabbit was ordinary butcher's meat. The marinade does the real work here, so it is worth respecting the four hours.
- The hinge: marinate coldThe meat sits in dressing for four hours, which in a modern kitchen means in the refrigerator, covered, not on the counter. Bring it out about twenty minutes before serving so the fat in the dressing is not congealed.
- Two roast rabbitsA whole dressed rabbit runs about 2 1/2 to 3 lb and yields roughly 1 to 1 1/4 lb of picked meat, so two rabbits give a generous 2 lb of meat. Farmed rabbit is sold frozen at many butchers; boneless chicken thigh meat substitutes directly if rabbit is unavailable.
- Cut up the meatRabbit carries a great many fine bones, especially in the ribs and saddle. Pick the meat off by hand rather than chopping through the carcass, and tear it into bite-sized pieces along the grain.
- French dressingIn this period the phrase means a plain vinaigrette of oil, vinegar, salt and pepper, shaken but not emulsified and containing no sugar or tomato. Allow about a cup for marinating 2 lb of meat.
- French mustardA smooth Dijon-style mustard, not the bright yellow prepared kind. The teaspoonful is loosened with a spoonful of the marinade before the mayonnaise goes in, which helps it blend evenly through the dressing.
- A pint of mayonnaiseTwo cups is a heavy dressing by current taste; one cup will coat the salad adequately. If you make mayonnaise from scratch it is not cooked at any point, so use pasteurized eggs and keep the finished salad refrigerated until it goes to the table.
- LettuceThree heads, probably small ones; a soft butterhead or Boston type suits. The recipe has the lettuce placed in the bowl and the dressed meat added to it, with the dressing poured over, rather than everything tossed together.
- YieldRoughly six to eight as a lunch course. Dress it at the last moment, since the mayonnaise slackens quickly against wet lettuce.
Rabbit appears in nineteenth-century English cookery as everyday meat rather than game, cheap enough to be a staple in country districts and common on city stalls, and it turns up in American books as well, though how uniformly cheap and widely sold it was on that side of the Atlantic is less clear. Salads of this construction "a bed of lettuce, cold cooked meat first steeped in vinaigrette, then bound with a mustard-sharpened mayonnaise" were the standard formula of the period for using up a roast, and the same method appears in the same books applied to chicken, veal, sweetbreads and lobster. A collection devoted entirely to salads, of which many were published around the turn of the twentieth century, reflects the new fashion for cold luncheon dishes and the arrival of reliable commercial oil and vinegar in home kitchens. Rabbit's disappearance from the American table came later, largely a twentieth-century shift in taste rather than any change in availability.