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Stuffing for Rabbits
Peel two fair-sized onions and boil; when they are tender, drain and mince them. Chop one-half pound of pickled pork and a few fine herbs, stir them in with the onions, then stir in the yolks of two eggs and add a sufficient quantity of breadcrumbs to make it fairly consistent. Season to taste with pepper and salt, using a very little of the latter on account of the salt in the pork. The stuffing is then ready for use.
A plain forcemeat of onion, salt pork, herbs and crumbs, meant to be packed into a whole rabbit before roasting. Almost all of the seasoning comes from the pork, so the choice of pork decides the dish.
- Pickled porkThis is pork belly or shoulder cured in brine, not vinegar-pickled. Salt pork is the closest supermarket equivalent; a thick slab of unsmoked streaky bacon also works, though it brings a cured-smoke flavour the original would not have had. If your pork is very salty, blanch the dice in water for a few minutes and drain before chopping it in.
- "A few fine herbs"Most likely just herbs chopped fine; parsley, thyme, sage and savory were the usual kitchen choices. It can also be read as fines herbes: parsley with some combination of chervil, tarragon and chives. About two tablespoons total suits this quantity. Thyme and sage suit rabbit, but use them with a lighter hand since they do not wilt away like parsley.
- Boil the onions, do not brown themBoiling and mincing gives a soft, sweet, almost wet onion that binds the crumbs. Frying instead changes the character of the stuffing and makes it drier. Drain the onions thoroughly and press out the water, or the mixture will never come to a workable consistency.
- BreadcrumbsDry crumbs from stale bread, not the fine sandy commercial sort, which absorbs badly. Start with about a cup and add more until the mixture holds together when squeezed but is not stiff; overloading with crumbs is the usual way this kind of stuffing turns to sawdust.
- SaltOscar's warning is worth taking literally. Season with pepper first and go very lightly on the salt. If you want to check the seasoning, fry a teaspoon of the mixture through in a pan and taste that; do not taste the raw mix, which contains raw pork and raw egg yolk. Salt pork can carry the whole thing on its own.
- YieldPerhaps two to three cups, depending on how much crumb goes in; roughly enough to fill one rabbit. It can also be rolled into small balls and roasted alongside the meat, given long enough for them to cook through.
- Cooking throughStuffing packed into a cavity heats more slowly than the meat around it, and this one contains raw egg yolk and raw pork. Fill loosely and take the temperature at the centre of the stuffing, not just the thigh; 165F there is the number that matters.
Rabbit was cheap, plentiful and unremarkable in American and British kitchens well into the twentieth century, which is why a book from the Waldorf treats stuffing for it as a matter-of-fact kitchen note rather than a specialty. The stuffing itself is an old English pattern - boiled onion, cured pork fat, crumbs, egg to bind, and herbs - close to the mixtures used for other roasts and for baked fish, adjusted in its seasoning. Pickled pork, kept in a brine barrel, was the standing fat and salt of the larder before refrigeration made fresh pork ordinary, and its presence here explains both the richness of the mixture (lean rabbit needs added fat) and Oscar's caution about the salt cellar. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's maitre d'hotel whose name carries the 1896 book, gathered a great many such workaday preparations alongside the hotel's showpieces, and they are often the more useful half of the volume.