Rabbits
Rabbits, which are in the best condition in midwinter, may be fricasseed like chicken in white or brown sauce. To make a pie, first stew till tender, and make like chicken-pie. To roast, stuff with a dressing made of bread-crumbs, chopped salt pork, thyme, onion, and pepper and salt, sew up, rub over with a little butter, or pin on it a few slices of salt pork, add a little water in the pan, and baste often. Serve with mashed potatoes and currant jelly.
Three methods compressed into one paragraph, all of them assuming a cook who already knows how to handle a chicken. The roasting instructions are the fullest and the most useful.
- What kind of rabbitThe book most likely means a wild rabbit, dressed and possibly hung. A farmed rabbit from a butcher or good supermarket runs 2.5-3 lb, is milder, more tender and a little less lean than a wild one. If you use wild rabbit, expect longer stewing and a stronger flavour, and joint it rather than roasting it whole unless it is a young one.
- Oven and temperatureNo temperature is given because the range had none. Roast at 325-350F, and cook to 160F at the thickest part of the thigh. Rabbit is very lean and goes dry within minutes of that point, which is exactly why the recipe insists on butter, salt pork and frequent basting.
- Bard it, do not skip that stepThe salt pork pinned over the back is the hinge of the roasting method. Without a fat covering the saddle dries out well before the legs are done. Streaky bacon works the same way if salt pork is not to hand.
- The water in the panA little water keeps the drippings from scorching during a long roast and gives you the base for gravy. Half a cup, topped up as it evaporates; do not flood the pan or the bird steams.
- Stuffing and safetyBread stuffing packed in a body cavity heats slowly. Either cook the dressing separately in a dish, or check that its centre reaches 165F before serving.
- Stewing timeFor the pie, "stew till tender" means about 45 minutes to an hour for farmed rabbit and up to two hours for an old wild one. The meat should come off the bone easily; pick it before it goes into the pastry.
- Handling wild gameWild rabbits can carry tularemia, which is transmitted through cuts during skinning and dressing rather than by eating properly cooked meat. Wear gloves when butchering, and cook through.
- YieldOne rabbit serves two, three at a stretch. The pie stretches further, especially with potato or root vegetables added.
Rabbit appears among the game recipes in The Dixie Cook Book, at a period when some American meat still arrived from a gun rather than a butcher, though commercial meatpacking and butchers by then supplied most urban households. The instruction that rabbits are best in midwinter is a real piece of field knowledge: cold-weather animals carry more fat and better condition, and hunting is often said to have been concentrated in the frost months, when there was less risk of spoilage on the way home. The habit of treating rabbit exactly like chicken -- fricassee it, pie it, roast it -- runs through nineteenth-century English and American cookery and reflects a kitchen that thought in methods rather than in named dishes. Currant jelly with game is an older English convention still going strong on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1880s; its sharpness cuts through dark, lean meat much as cranberry does with turkey.