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Rabbit Creole Potage
I YOUNG RABBIT, CUT UP I QUART WATER 1/2 ONION, CHOPPED 1/2 BAY LEAF 1/2 BLADE MACE I TABLESPOON BUTTER 1/2 CUP RICE CAYENNE SALT CROUTONS 2 TABLESPOONS PORT WINE Wash rabbit well before cutting up in small pieces. Brown onion, bay leaf and mace in butter and put in water with rabbit meat. Simmer gently until meat is tender-say, 2 hours. Add rice, salt and pepper and simmer 1 hour more. Stir in wine, pour soup over puffed rice in tureen and go to it.
A camp soup built on one rabbit and a quart of water, thickened by rice and finished with port. The timings belong to an era of tough wild game and are the main thing to adjust.
- The rabbitA young farmed rabbit runs 2-3 lb dressed and is tender in 45-60 minutes of gentle simmering, not two hours. Wild rabbit, particularly an older one, genuinely does want the longer time.
- Rice timingAn hour of simmering will dissolve white rice into paste. Long-grain rice needs about 20 minutes in the broth; if you want it to break down and thicken the soup, 30 is plenty.
- BonesThe recipe leaves the cut-up rabbit in the pot. Lift the pieces out once tender, pull the meat from the bones and return it before the rice goes in, or diners will be picking fine bones out of a spoonful of soup.
- Blade maceMace is the lacy aril around the nutmeg seed, sold whole as "blades" or ground. Half a blade is a small fragment; about an eighth of a teaspoon of ground mace substitutes, added with the onion.
- LiquidA quart of water for a whole rabbit plus half a cup of rice gives a thin yield. Expect to top up as it simmers, or start with a quart and a half if you want more than four small servings.
- CayenneThe ingredient list calls for cayenne and the method says pepper. The cayenne is presumably what the "creole" in the title is pointing at -- a scant quarter teaspoon, added with the salt, then adjusted at the end.
- PortStir it in off the heat so the alcohol edge stays. Two tablespoons in a quart of soup reads as sweetness and depth rather than as wine.
- YieldFour bowls as a first course, two as a meal.
Rabbit was a cheap and widely eaten meat in North America and Europe well into the twentieth century, and here it stands in for whatever small game was to hand. Potage is simply the French for soup, and the "creole" appears to signal cayenne pushed into an otherwise classical broth -- mace, bay and butter would sit comfortably in any nineteenth-century English game soup. The port at the finish is an older convention still: fortified wine stirred into game and turtle soups was a familiar Victorian practice, valued for the sweetness and colour it gave a long-simmered stock.