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Baked Rabbit
Fry the pieces of rabbit, adding three onions, two medium potatoes, half a glass of beer, a little water or stock, pepper and salt. Let it all bake gently in an earthenware pot for two hours, and then thicken the same with flour. It is an improvement to add when it is being cooked two cloves, two bay-leaves, a pinch of nutmeg, and any fresh herbs, such as thyme, parsley, mint.
A Flemish beer-braise in miniature: the whole thing hinges on low, slow, covered cooking and a very restrained amount of liquid. The original assumes a jointed rabbit, a hearth-warm oven and a cook who will judge the sauce by eye.
- Quantities and yieldAssume one whole rabbit, jointed into six or eight pieces, roughly 2.5-3 lb; that feeds four. Farmed rabbit is what you will find, and it is milder and more tender than wild rabbit; the recipe does not say which was intended.
- "Half a glass of beer"Read this as about 4-5 fl oz. A Belgian brown ale or dubbel suits it; avoid anything strongly hopped, which turns bitter over two hours of reduction.
- "A little water or stock"Deliberately vague, and it should stay small. The pot is covered, the onions and rabbit give up liquid, and you want the pieces roughly half-submerged, not swimming.
- "Bake gently"The book gives no temperature; in a modern oven read it as low and covered, around 300-325F. Anything hotter and the lean saddle pieces tighten and dry before the legs are done.
- The earthenware potAny lidded casserole or Dutch oven works. If you do use unglazed earthenware, start it in a cold oven rather than a hot one.
- TimingTwo hours is right for wild rabbit. Farmed rabbit is usually tender at 75-90 minutes; test the hind legs and pull the loin pieces earlier if they firm up.
- The potatoesTwo medium potatoes over two hours will largely collapse into the sauce. Cut them into large chunks if you want them to survive as vegetables.
- Thickening at the endDo not scatter dry flour into the pot. Lift out the meat, then whisk in a beurre mani/butter paste or a slurry and simmer a few minutes to cook out the raw taste.
- Cloves and nutmegTwo whole cloves is not a typo but it is close to the ceiling for this quantity of sauce; remove them before serving, along with the bay.
The Belgian Cook Book was assembled in 1915 from recipes gathered from Belgian refugees who had fled to Britain after the German invasion, and it was published partly as a relief effort; the plainness of many entries reflects the domestic cooking of the contributors. Rabbit braised with beer belongs squarely to the Flemish tradition that also gives us carbonnade and konijn met pruimen, in which a dark local ale does the work that wine does further south. Rabbit was the ordinary man's meat across Belgium and northern France, cheap to raise in a hutch on scraps, and beer was likewise the household drink rather than a luxury. The nutmeg and cloves are a long-lived habit in Low Countries cooking, generally traced to the spice trade that ran through Antwerp and the Dutch ports.