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Laeken Rabbit
Take a medium-sized rabbit, and have it prepared and cut into joints. Put the pieces to soak for forty-eight hours in vinegar, enough to cover them, with a sprinkle of fresh thyme in it and a small onion sliced finely. After forty-eight hours, put one-quarter pound of fat bacon, sliced, in a pan to melt, and when it has melted, take out any bits that remain, and add to the melted bacon a bit of butter as big as an egg, which let melt till it froths; secondly, sprinkle in a dessert-spoonful of flour. Stir it over the fire, mixing well till the sauce becomes brown, and then put in your marinaded pieces of rabbit. Add pepper and salt and cook till each piece is well colored on each side. When they are well colored, add then the bunch of thyme, the sliced onion and half the vinegar that you used for soaking; three bay-leaves, one dozen dried and dry prunes, five lumps of sugar, half a pint of water. Cover closely and let it simmer for two hours and a half.
A Flemish sweet-sour rabbit stew, written for a cook who knew what a browned roux should look like and had a cold larder to hold meat for two days. Two things need attention: where the marinade sits, and how long the meat actually needs.
- The forty-eight-hour soakMarinate in the refrigerator in a non-reactive bowl (glass, ceramic or stainless), never aluminium or bare cast iron, which the vinegar will pit and discolour. Two days at room temperature is not acceptable practice now.
- Vinegar strengthHousehold vinegar of the period was unstandardised and varied a good deal from the 5 per cent product on shelves today. A straight two-day soak in undiluted modern vinegar will bleach and toughen the meat; a mild wine or cider vinegar, or vinegar cut with an equal part of water, gives a gentler marinade.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. A dessert-spoonful of flour is roughly 2 teaspoons, which makes a very light thickening; the sauce is meant to be a gravy, not a stew thickened to paste.
- Fat baconUnsmoked fat salt pork or a slab of fatty streaky bacon cut into lardons. The point is to render clean fat, not to add smoke; heavily smoked supermarket bacon will dominate the vinegar and prunes.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, a US one 8 fl oz. Either works. Add more hot water during the simmer if the pan runs dry.
- Five lumps of sugarLump sugar cut from a loaf varied in size, so treat the figure as approximate; 2 to 3 teaspoons is a reasonable starting point. Taste at the end and adjust, since the prunes contribute sweetness of their own and the balance against the vinegar is the whole character of the dish.
- Prunes"Dried and dry" means hard, unsoaked prunes, which rehydrate in the pan and thicken the sauce as they collapse. Check whether yours are stoned before they go in.
- Cooking timeTwo and a half hours suits an older wild rabbit. Farmed rabbit, which is what most butchers sell, is tender at 1 to 1 1/2 hours at a bare simmer; pushed to two and a half it shreds off the bone and dries out. Test the saddle pieces first, as they cook faster than the legs.
- YieldA medium rabbit serves four. Boiled or steamed potatoes are the usual accompaniment, to take up the sauce.
Laeken is the northern district of Brussels that holds the royal palace and its glasshouses, and the name attaches here to a version of what Flemish kitchens call konijn met pruimen — rabbit with prunes, the sweet-sour braise that is one of the most recognisable dishes of the Low Countries. The sweet-and-acid pairing of dried fruit with dark meat is old in the region and generally traced back to medieval cookery, which used verjuice, vinegar and dried fruit where later cooks would reach for wine; many Belgian versions substitute a sour lambic or gueuze beer for the vinegar entirely. The book itself belongs to the First World War: it was compiled in Britain from recipes gathered from Belgian refugees, which is why the dishes are household ones rather than restaurant cooking — the food people could describe from memory.