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Fried Rabbit
Clean, wash and put into boiling water; boil ten minutes and drain; when cold cut into joints, dip into beaten egg, then in bread crumbs and season with salt and pepper. Fry brown in butter and lard over a moderate fire. Thicken the gravy with one tablespoon of flour and pour in one cup of milk or cream; boil up once and pour over the rabbit. Garnish with sliced lemon, and serve with any tasty sauce.
A straightforward egg-and-crumb fry, but the ten-minute parboil is doing real work and the recipe never says why. Read the first line as tenderizing, not cooking.
- The hinge: parboil then coolThe ten-minute boil firms the flesh so the joints hold together and shortens the pan time; the recipe's instruction to wait until the meat is cold before jointing also means the crumb coating meets dry, cool meat rather than wet, warm meat, which helps it adhere. The recipe itself gives no reason for either step.
- Rabbit size and ageA young farmed rabbit of 2 1/2 to 3 lb is what this suits. An older wild animal will still be tough after ten minutes of boiling and is better braised; if you have one, expect to simmer 30 to 40 minutes before jointing.
- JointingTwo front legs, two hind legs, and the saddle cut across into two or three pieces. The rib section is thin and mostly bone; keep it for the pan or add it to stock.
- "Moderate fire"Medium heat on a modern burner; with butter in the fat the pan should stay below the point where the milk solids blacken, so keep it around 300 to 325F. Rabbit is lean and the crumbs scorch before the meat is through if the pan runs hot; allow roughly 12 to 15 minutes, turning, and take the loin pieces out first.
- Butter and lardThe lard raises the smoke point and the butter browns the crumbs. The recipe gives no proportions; roughly equal parts is a reasonable reading, and equal parts clarified butter and a neutral oil behaves the same way. Cook to 160F at the thickest part of the hind leg.
- The gravy"Thicken the gravy" means the browned fat and fond left in the pan. Pour off all but about a tablespoon of fat, stir in the tablespoon of flour, cook it a minute, then add the cup of milk or cream. One tablespoon to a cup gives a thin pouring sauce, which is what the recipe wants.
- "Any tasty sauce"Currant jelly, a mustard sauce, or a sharp tomato sauce would all be at home with game of this period. The lemon garnish may also do more than decorate: the acid cuts the rich cream gravy.
- YieldOne rabbit serves two generously or three modestly. Two rabbits fry more easily in a large pan than one crowded skillet's worth of joints.
Rabbit sat in the poultry-and-game chapter of American cookbooks well into the twentieth century because it was a cheap, reliably available meat: hunted in the fall, raised in hutches in town yards, and sold by butchers alongside chickens. The treatment here is simply fried chicken's method transferred to another small animal, egg, crumbs, a mixed butter-and-lard fat, and a milk gravy built in the pan, which tells you how standardized that technique had become by the time Butterick issued its cook book in 1911. The parboil is an older habit, generally traced to the need to tame game that might be lean, strong-flavored, or of uncertain age, and it faded from recipes as farmed rabbit and reliable refrigeration became the norm. Rabbit consumption in the United States dropped sharply after the mid-century, which is why a dish once considered ordinary now reads as unfamiliar.