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Jugged Rabbit or Squirrel
2 COTTONTAILS, OR 3 SQUIRRELS 2 ONIONS 6 CLOVES FLOUR 3 TABLESPOONS BUTTER BACON SLICES I TEASPOON GRATED LEMON PEEL MEAT BROTH SALT AND PEPPER I TEASPOON MINCED PARSLEY 1/4 TEASPOON MINCED THYME 1/2 TEASPOON MINCED SAVORY OR MARJORAM FRUIT JUICE OR WINE Cut skinned and cleaned animals into convenient pieces, saving the livers and blood to put into the gravy. Peel onions and stick 3 cloves in each. Dredge pieces of rabbit with flour and brown in butter. Line bottom of a bean pot, or similar container, with bacon slices, and pack browned pieces of rabbit close together on top placing 1 onion at bottom and the other near the top, and scattering seasonings, lemon peel, and herbs evenly all the way through. Mix 1 cup tinned fruit juice, or wine, or ale, or beer, with 1 bouillon cube dissolved in 1 cup hot water, add mixture to the pot, cover closely and seal cover with flour and water paste. Cook 3-4 hours in preheated hole, and just before unsealing, fry livers in butter and mash them. Open pot, add mashed livers, and blood stirred smooth with vinegar. Shake pot gently to mix, and let stand over low heat a few minutes to blend.
DOING A DEER'S HEAD IN THE BEAN HOLE See under Barbecues
This is a bean-hole adaptation of the old English jugged hare, and it carries that dish's defining feature: a liaison of raw blood stirred in at the very end. That step, combined with wild rabbit, is why the recipe cannot be recommended as printed.
- The blood liaison is the problemThe blood is reserved raw, slaked with vinegar, and stirred into the opened pot with only "a few minutes" over low heat to blend. Blood proteins coagulate somewhere around 160-170F and then break, so a gravy finished this gently is unlikely to bring the raw blood of a wild animal to a safe temperature. Anyone wanting a blood-thickened game stew should work from a current recipe.
- Wild rabbit and tularemiaCottontails are the classic reservoir of Francisella tularensis, and the risk in this recipe is not only in eating. Skinning, gutting, and deliberately catching and handling the blood and liver of an animal that may be infected is the recognised route of transmission, through cuts and through the eyes. The long cook in the pot would handle the meat; the collection step is where the recipe fails.
- What a bean hole actually isA pit lined with rocks, heated for hours with a hardwood fire, raked clear of most coals, then packed with the sealed pot and buried under embers and earth. It holds something like slow-oven heat, though the recipe specifies no temperature and pit heat varies a great deal. The 3-4 hour time assumes that residual heat, not a live fire.
- Sealing the lidThe flour-and-water paste is a luting seal, not a decoration. It bakes hard, keeps grit and ash out of the pot, and traps the steam that does most of the cooking. It has to be cracked off before the pot can be opened.
- The quantities that are missingNo amount is given for the bacon, the flour for dredging, or the salt and pepper. "Tinned fruit juice" is left unspecified; the recipe offers wine, ale, or beer as alternatives to it.
- YieldTwo dressed cottontails run roughly 2 to 3 lb of bone-in meat, three squirrels a broadly similar amount. The recipe specifies neither pot size nor number of servings.
Jugged hare takes its name from the tall earthenware jug or jar the meat was packed into, sealed, and set in a pan of simmering water so that it stewed in its own juices with no added liquid to speak of; Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery gives a version in the mid-eighteenth century, and thickening the gravy with the animal's own blood was standard practice in English game cookery for centuries. What is happening here is a transplant: the sealed vessel and the blood liaison are English, but the bean hole is North American, a pit oven long associated with Maine and New Brunswick logging camps and often traced further back to indigenous earth-cooking. Outdoor and camp cookbooks of the mid-twentieth century collected both traditions freely, on the reasonable grounds that a bean pot buried in coals does the same thing a jug in a water bath does, only slower and with more smoke.