Home › Cooking the Kill › Recipe of the Rabbit to the Wine
Recipe of the Rabbit to the Wine
WHITE OR THE WINE RED Some slices of lard (salt pork), some butter, some onions, a little oil, and put to fry the all in a pot. Cut then the rabbit into small pieces and put with the rest. When that is a-frying add one or two spoonfuls of flour and well rouse (stir) the whole. Next add one quart of the Wine White or the Wine Red, some parsley and a leaf of bay, some salt and pepper. Make it to cook on a fire very slowly. Empty it on a plate hot and then it eats fine. There you have then a Récipé in the true style of Canada Française.
A French-Canadian rabbit stew built as a simple brown fricassee: fry the aromatics and meat in pork fat, dust with flour, wet with a whole bottle of wine, then hold it barely at a simmer. No quantities are given for anything but the wine, so the proportions below are the working ones.
- The hinge: keep it below a simmer"Make it to cook on a fire very slowly" is the whole instruction. Rabbit is very lean, and a rolling boil will dry it out. Hold the pot at a bare tremble, lid on.
- "Lard" here means salt porkThe parenthesis in the original is correct: this is fatty salt pork, not rendered leaf lard. Use 4-6 oz cut into lardons, and let it render slowly before the butter and oil go in. If your pork is heavily salted, blanch it a minute first and go easy on the added salt at the end.
- Working quantitiesFor one rabbit of about 3 lb: 4-6 oz salt pork, 2 tablespoons butter, 1 tablespoon oil, 2 medium onions, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 quart (4 cups) wine, a small bunch of parsley, 1 bay leaf. Serves four.
- Cook the flour before the wineTwo spoonfuls of flour stirred into the hot fat needs two or three minutes of cooking, until it smells toasted, or the sauce will taste pasty. Add the wine in stages and stir each addition smooth before the next.
- Timing by rabbitA farmed rabbit is tender in 45-60 minutes. A wild one, especially an older buck, wants 1 1/2 to 2 hours, and the front legs and saddle will be done well before the hind legs. Pull pieces out as they give to the point of a knife rather than cooking everything to the slowest piece.
- Jointing "into small pieces"Standard butchery gives two front legs, two hind legs, and the saddle cut across into two or three pieces. Include the liver and kidneys if you have them, added in the last ten minutes.
- Which wineRed gives a darker, more assertive sauce and is the more usual choice for a civet; white makes a lighter dish closer to a fricassee. Either way a full quart of thin, sharp wine reduces to something quite acid, so let it cook down uncovered for the last stretch and finish with a knob of butter off the heat.
- Serving"Empty it on a plate hot" means the stew is turned out as one dish, sauce and all. Boiled potatoes or bread suit it, and something of the sort is wanted, since there is a great deal of sauce.