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Saddle of Rabbit
Pack saddles close together in pan, sprinkle with seasonings and minced herbs (or poultry seasoning), dot with butter, and put in oven. When rabbits begin to brown, begin spooning hot evaporated milk over them, just enough to keep them moist-say 3-4 tablespoons undiluted evaporated milk to each saddle. When done and taken up, thin the pan remains with water, and thicken with flour to make the gravy. Buttermilk or sour cream are an improvement over evaporated milk.
Or, make shallow punctures all over meat with a narrow sharp pointed knife, tuck a tiny triangle of bacon in each hole, season with salt, pepper and herbs, wrap in buttered paper or good tasting leaves, and bake in oven, in ashes, or in Dutch oven.
A camp-style roast that assumes you know your rabbit and your fire. The method is sound; what it withholds is any temperature or time, so both need supplying.
- What a saddle isThe saddle is the loin section between the ribs and the hind legs, taken as a single double-sided piece on the bone. A domestic rabbit saddle is roughly a single serving and a wild cottontail saddle smaller still, which may be why several are packed close together in the pan.
- Oven temperatureNo number is given. Roast at 350F for a covered, moist result, or start at 425F for fifteen minutes to get the browning the recipe waits for, then drop to 350F. Domestic rabbit saddles take roughly 25-35 minutes at 350F; wild rabbit runs leaner and cooks faster.
- DonenessRabbit is a white meat that should reach 160F at the thickest part of the loin. Past that it dries out badly, and the loin is the first cut to go stringy. Older wild rabbits are better braised covered than roasted.
- Undiluted evaporated milkThe instruction is explicit and worth honoring: straight from the can, not reconstituted. Canned evaporated milk was a common shelf-stable stand-in for cream in this period, and its milk sugars help the surface brown.
- Buttermilk and sour creamThe author is right that these are an improvement, but both curdle under direct oven heat. Spoon them over near the end, or stir them into the finished gravy off the heat rather than basting with them throughout.
- Larding with baconThe second method is larding, and it exists because rabbit carries almost no intramuscular fat. Cut the bacon into slivers about the size of a matchstick tip and push them in with the knife tip still in the cut, so the hole stays open. The recipe wants punctures all over the meat.
- Buttered paper and leavesUse parchment, not waxed paper, for oven work. For the leaf wrapping, grape, fig, banana or corn husks all work; avoid anything you have not positively identified, and avoid ornamental shrubs entirely.
- The gravyPan drippings from lean rabbit are scant. Deglaze with a splash of stock rather than plain water for body, and whisk the flour into a little cold liquid first rather than adding it dry to the hot pan.
Rabbit was among the most commonly eaten wild meats in American home kitchens well into the mid-twentieth century, cheap enough during the Depression that it was sold dressed in butcher shops alongside chicken, and abundant enough on farms that it cost little more than a shell. The two methods here mark the split in how it was handled: the pan-roast with a milk baste is a kitchen-stove technique, while larding with bacon and wrapping in buttered paper or leaves for ashes or a Dutch oven is field cookery, a way of roasting without a pan. Larding lean game with pork fat is old European practice, generally traced through French kitchen technique and carried into American hunting cookery. The undiluted evaporated milk is the clearest date stamp on the page — canned milk was a common cream substitute in households without daily refrigeration, and outdoor cookbooks reached for it because it traveled.