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Stewed Rabbit
Draw, skin and wash a rabbit, and cut it into pieces about two inches in length. Cut one-half pound of streaky bacon into pieces about one and one-half inches long by one inch in width, blanch and dry them, put them into a fryingpan with one ounce of butter and fry to a light brown color. Take them out, put in fifteen button mushrooms and fry them also, then put them on a plate and keep them hot. Put the pieces of rabbit into the fryingpan and fry them gently for ten minutes, then dust in one ounce of flour, stir well for a couple of minutes, and add three teacupfuls each of broth and red wine, a bunch of herbs, salt and pepper to taste, and the mushrooms and pieces of bacon. Place the pan at the edge of the fire and simmer gently for about twenty minutes, then add two more pints of mushrooms and cook for five minutes longer. Remove the herbs, turn the remainder out onto a hot dish, and serve it immediately.
A straightforward wine-and-bacon rabbit stew, written for a cook who bought the animal whole and had a coal range with hot and cool zones. Two details need attention: the mushroom quantities and the cooking time.
- Buy it dressed"Draw, skin and wash" assumes a whole rabbit, fur on. A farmed rabbit from a butcher or online supplier arrives skinned and gutted at about 2½–3 lb; joint it into 8–10 pieces (fore legs, hind legs, saddle in two or three, ribs).
- TeacupfulRoughly 6 fl oz, or three-quarters of a cup. Three teacupfuls each of broth and red wine is therefore about 2¼ cups of each — a generous braising liquid that wants reducing at the end.
- The mushroom problemFifteen button mushrooms are fried at the start and returned to the pan; then "two more pints of mushrooms" appear near the end. Two pints of sliced mushrooms is around 10–12 oz and will flood the pan with water in five minutes. Treat the second addition as optional, or brown 8 oz separately and fold them in.
- Blanching the baconBacon of the period was often more heavily salted and smoked than today's, and blanching drew some of the excess out. Much modern supermarket bacon is mild and wet-cured; you can skip the blanching and simply render the lardons slowly, or use unsmoked pancetta.
- Edge of the fireThis is the cool part of a range top — a bare simmer with the surface barely trembling, not a boil. On a gas or induction burner, the lowest setting with the lid ajar, or a low oven in a covered pot.
- Twenty minutes is not enoughThat timing suits a young farmed rabbit and even then the legs will be tight. Give the hind legs 45–60 minutes at a simmer and add the loin pieces for the last 15, or they will dry out. Wild rabbit or an older animal can need 1½ hours.
- Bunch of herbsA bouquet garni: parsley stems, thyme, a bay leaf, tied with string so it lifts out whole. Rabbit takes well to a little rosemary or a strip of orange peel in the bundle.
- Finishing and yieldLift the meat out, boil the sauce hard to nap consistency, then check the salt — the bacon and the reduced broth do most of the seasoning. One rabbit serves three, four if there is a starch alongside; buttered noodles or boiled potatoes take the sauce.
Rabbit was ordinary food in American and European kitchens well into the twentieth century, cheap and widely available. The treatment here follows the framework of a French civet or gibelotte: browned lardons, button mushrooms, flour to bind, red wine and broth to braise — much the same framework a French cook would apply to a chicken for coq au vin. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel, compiled his 1896 Cook Book from the hotel's repertoire alongside a great mass of domestic American recipes, which would explain a recipe that still assumes the reader might be skinning the animal herself. Rabbit lost ground in American kitchens after the Second World War as poultry became industrially cheap, and it has never become a common butcher's-case item again.