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Roasted Rabbit with Olives
Clean a rabbit well, lard its fleshy parts with strips of salted pork, wrap it up in a sheet of buttered paper, fastening it with skewers or binding twine round it, and roast it in a hot even, basting it frequently. About ten minutes before removing the rabbit from the oven, the paper should be removed to allow it to brown. When the rabbit is cooked, pour the gravy out of the drippingpan into a small saucepan, add some clear beef gravy if there is not sufficient, season it to taste with salt and pepper, and put in three dozen stoned olives. Stir the sauce over the fire and boil it for five minutes. Untruss the rabbit, and place it on a hot dish, garnish round with the olives, pour the sauce over it, and serve.
A straightforward larded roast whose success turns almost entirely on fat: rabbit has almost none of its own, and the salt pork and buttered paper are there to keep it from drying to string.
- The hinge: don't overcook itRabbit is leaner than most poultry and goes from tender to cottony in a few minutes. A 2 1/2 to 3 lb farmed rabbit needs roughly 45 to 55 minutes total, pulled when the thickest part of the thigh reads 160F.
- "A hot even"A typesetter's slip for "hot oven." The book gives no temperatures; a hot oven of this period is usually read as somewhere in the 400 to 450F range. The paper shields the meat at that heat, and removing it for the last ten minutes, as directed, is what gives the browning.
- Buttered paperParchment, generously buttered on the side touching the meat, tied on with kitchen twine. Foil works but steams rather than roasts; if you use it, leave it loose and take it off for the final fifteen minutes.
- LardingThreading strips of salt pork through the loin and thighs with a larding needle. Without the needle, lay thin sheets of salt pork or unsmoked bacon over the back and legs under the paper — the effect is close enough.
- Wild versus farmedOscar's kitchen may well have seen both. A young farmed rabbit roasts well; an older wild one is sinewy and is better braised, since no amount of basting will make a roast of it.
- "Clear beef gravy"Not a thickened pan gravy but a clarified brown beef stock. A good unsalted beef stock reduced by half, or a spoonful of demi-glace loosened with water, gives the same body.
- Three dozen olivesGenerous even for a platter garnish. A cup of pitted green olives is plenty; rinse them, and hold back the salt in the sauce until the olives are in and it has boiled.
- YieldOne rabbit of this size serves three, four if the platter is part of a larger meal.
Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893, and his 1896 Cook Book reads as a working transcription of the French-trained hotel repertoire of the day — larding, buttered paper, a garnish of stoned olives set round the dish. Rabbit was ordinary market meat in nineteenth-century America, sold alongside poultry and game, so its appearance on a Waldorf menu says more about French cooking's fondness for lapin than about luxury. The pairing of a lean roast with olives and a clear brown stock is the same logic behind the Provençal treatments of rabbit, though Oscar gives this dish no regional label.