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Rabbit Curry (Cut up two rabbits into small)
603. Cut up two rabbits into small pieces, roll each bit in flour, and fry in dripping a nice brown; fry four or five middle-sized onions cut in shreds, then put all together into a stewpan, with enough gravy to cover it; mix four dessert-spoonfuls of curry-powder, a little salt, and half a tea-spoonful of chutnee in four table-spoonfuls of mushroom ketchup, and the same quantity of vinegar, add it to the rabbit, then let it stew slowly three or four hours, and just before dishing add the juice of one and a half lemon. If the gravy is thin, mix a little flour with cold gravy, and add to it.
A Victorian curry in the English manner: browned meat, a great many onions, commercial curry powder, and a long slow stew. It works, but the timing and the seasoning both want adjusting for modern rabbit and modern spice.
- Cooking timeThree to four hours will reduce farmed rabbit to threads. Farmed rabbit is tender in 45-60 minutes of gentle simmering; a wild rabbit, especially an older one, may want 1.5-2 hours. Test the shoulder and hind leg meat for tenderness rather than watching the clock.
- Two rabbitsA dressed farmed rabbit runs about 2.5-3 lb, so this is 5-6 lb of meat on the bone, serving six to eight. Jointing means: two front legs, two hind legs, saddle cut into two or three pieces, ribcage reserved for stock.
- Curry powderFour dessertspoonfuls is about eight teaspoons, or a little under three tablespoons. Commercial curry powders of the period are generally reckoned to have been heavy on turmeric and less fierce than many modern blends; start with about half the quantity of a modern blend, fry it briefly in the dripping with the onions to take off the raw edge, and add more to taste near the end.
- Mushroom ketchupA thin, dark, salty mushroom-and-spice liquid, not the tomato sauce. It is still made commercially in Britain; Worcestershire sauce diluted with a little mushroom stock or dark soy stands in reasonably. Four tablespoons of it plus four of vinegar is assertive, so hold back on additional salt until you taste.
- ChutneeHalf a teaspoonful of a sweet fruit chutney of the period, most likely a mango one. It is there for sweetness and fruit acid rather than bulk; a teaspoon of mango chutney is closer to what a modern palate expects.
- Dripping and gravyBeef dripping gives the right flavour, but any neutral fat or lard browns just as well. "Enough gravy to cover" means meat stock; rabbit or chicken stock is right, and the reserved ribcage will make it.
- The lemonAdding the juice of one and a half lemons only at the end is the instruction that matters. Fresh acid dulls over long cooking; at the finish it lifts a stew that has been simmering a long time.
- ThickeningSlaking flour into cold liquid before it goes into the pot is correct and prevents lumps. Simmer two or three minutes after adding so the flour loses its raw taste.
Curry entered British domestic cookery through the East India Company, and by the middle of the nineteenth century "curry" in an English kitchen meant a specific formula: meat floured and browned, a large quantity of onions, bought curry powder, a sharp-sweet accent from chutney and vinegar, and lemon at the end. Rabbit was the obvious candidate because it was cheap, plentiful and everywhere in Victorian Britain, both wild and warren-raised, and because its mild pale meat took strong seasoning well. Curry powder itself was a British commercial convenience, blended and bottled at home rather than in India, and recipes such as this one treat it as a single ingredient much as one would treat pepper. The mushroom ketchup marks the dish firmly as of its time: before bottled tomato sauces took hold, ketchup meant a thin fermented mushroom or walnut liquor used as a savoury seasoning in stews and gravies.