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Herb (II)
RABBIT SOUP 8 WHOLE PEPPERS SALT 2 TABLESPOONS BUTTER 2 TABLESPOONS FLOUR 1/2 CUP CLARET Cover rabbit and bacon with cold water, about 3 pints. Tie cloves and whole peppers in a bit of cloth and add with parsley or some freshly picked tasty wild herb. Bring slowly to boiling point, and simmer 3 hours, adding salt while cooking. Remove rabbit, cut up a few of the best pieces and set aside. Brown flour and butter together, and drop in soup here and there, stirring constantly until slightly thickened. Add cut-up rabbit meat and claret, and heat before you eat.
A camp soup built on a long, slow simmer rather than a stock pot. The ingredient list as printed is short of several items the method calls for, so read the instructions first and shop from those.
- What you actually needThe method uses rabbit, bacon, cloves, whole peppers, parsley or a wild herb, salt, butter, flour and claret. The printed list omits the rabbit, bacon and cloves entirely, and gives no quantities for them. Figure one whole rabbit, 2.5-3 lb, cut into pieces, and 3 or 4 thick rashers of bacon.
- Wild versus farmed rabbitA wild rabbit is lean, sinewy and genuinely wants three hours. Farmed rabbit from a butcher is far more tender and will fall apart in half that time; check at 90 minutes and pull the meat when it leaves the bone easily.
- ClaretIn American cookbooks of this period the word was used loosely for dry red table wine, nominally in the Bordeaux style. Any dry red works. It goes in at the end and is only warmed through, so use something you would drink.
- The spice bagTying cloves and peppercorns in cloth is the point of the step, not a flourish. Whole cloves left loose in a three-hour simmer will dominate everything. A tea ball or a square of muslin does the same job.
- Browning the flour and butterEffectively a browned roux made separately and stirred into the hot soup. The book gives no colour cue; cook it over moderate heat until it smells nutty and darkens, then add it a little at a time, stirring constantly as the recipe directs, or it will lump.
- Handling wild gameIf you are working with a wild-shot rabbit, handle it with gloves, wash hands and boards afterwards, and cook it thoroughly. Tularemia is a real risk with wild lagomorphs and is the reason the long simmer here is no hardship.
- YieldThree pints of water reduces over the three-hour simmer, so expect about four bowls with the meat. It thickens on standing and takes well to a second day.
Rabbit soup belongs to the older tradition of cooking whatever the day's shooting produced, and the recipe reads that way in small ways: bacon supplying the fat that a wild rabbit lacks, a spice bundle rather than a spice rack, and the instruction to use "parsley or some freshly picked tasty wild herb" if parsley is not to hand. The finishing splash of claret and the separately browned flour-and-butter thickening were both long-established in English as well as French game cookery, and nothing in the recipe tells us which route it came by. Wild rabbit was through much of this period an everyday meat rather than a delicacy, and cookbooks treated it accordingly, with long simmers to make good on tough muscle.