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Flemish Rabbit
Cut the rabbit into neat pieces. Put them into a deep frying-pan and toss them in butter, so that each piece is well browned without burning the butter. Take them out of the pan and in the same butter cook six shallots (finely minced) till they are brown. Then return the rabbit to the pan, seasoning all with salt and pepper, adding as well three bay-leaves, two cloves, and two white peppers. If you have any gravy, add a pint of it, but in default of gravy add the same quantity of Bovril and water. Place on the fire till it boils, when draw it to the side and let it cook there gently for three-quarters of an hour. Just when it is nearly done, add a little vinegar, more or less according to your taste. This is served with boiled and well-drained potatoes. If the sauce is not thick enough, add to it a little flour which has been first mixed with some cold water.
A straightforward braise: brown, build a shallot base, simmer in stock, and sharpen at the end with vinegar. Two details in the original need translating before you start.
- "Two white peppers"Most likely two whole white peppercorns, added with the cloves and bay as an aromatic rather than as seasoning, since the salt and pepper have already been accounted for.
- Bovril and waterBovril is a concentrated beef extract, still sold. If you are using it in place of gravy, a pint of water with about 2 teaspoons of extract gives roughly the right strength; taste before adding salt, since the extract is already very salty. Any good beef or chicken stock does the same job.
- "Gravy" means stockIn the usage of the period this generally meant the meat-based cooking liquor kept from a previous roast or braise, rather than the thickened sauce served at table; note that the recipe adds flour separately at the end.
- Rabbit and yieldA farmed rabbit of 2 1/2 to 3 lb, jointed into two forelegs, two hind legs and the saddle cut across in two or three pieces, feeds three or four. Wild rabbit is leaner and tougher.
- Cooking time depends on the animalThree-quarters of an hour is right for farmed rabbit; the meat should be tender but still on the bone. Wild or older rabbit wants 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 hours at a bare simmer, and the loin pieces are worth lifting out early so they do not dry.
- Keep the butter from burningThis is the hinge. Browning the rabbit and then the shallots in the same butter builds the whole colour of the dish, but butter alone scorches at that heat — use clarified butter, or add a spoon of neutral oil, and take the pan off the heat if the fond starts to darken past deep brown.
- The vinegarStart with a tablespoon of a mild wine or cider vinegar off the boil, taste, and add more. It is meant to cut the richness and read as a faint sweet-sour edge, which is characteristic of Flemish braises; boiled hard it turns harsh.
- Three bay leavesThat is a lot for a single rabbit by modern standards, when bay is sold dried and potent. Two is plenty, and fish them out along with the cloves and peppercorns before serving.
- ThickeningA tablespoon of flour slaked in a little cold water, stirred in and simmered two or three minutes, is enough to bind a pint of sauce. It needs that couple of minutes of cooking or it will taste of raw flour.
The Belgian Cook Book was compiled during the First World War from recipes given by Belgian refugees in Britain, and its proceeds went to relief work — which explains the plain, thrifty character of pages like this one, and the appearance of Bovril, a British pantry staple, in a Flemish dish. Rabbit was the everyday meat of the Low Countries, kept in hutches in town yards as much as hunted, and the pairing of browned onion or shallot with vinegar and a little sugar or fruit runs through Flemish cooking from carbonnades to hare in beer. Recipes of this shape are sometimes linked to the medieval civet, a stew named for its onions (cive) and traditionally thickened with blood, though the line of descent is far from certain. What the book preserves is not a restaurant dish but the way it was actually cooked at home: one pan, whatever stock was left from the last roast, and boiled potatoes alongside.