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Rabbit Pie
Cut into eighteen even pieces a fine, fresh, skinned, well-cleaned rabbit of about three and a half pounds. Heat in a black frying pan two tablespoons leaf lard and add the rabbit. Season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper and let gently brown for ten minutes, occasionally turning the pieces with a fork. Lift up with a fork and place in a saucepan with a tablespoon butter and briskly cook on the range for five minutes, lightly mixing. Add six finely chopped shallots, half bean finely crushed garlic and mix for one minute; sprinkle a heavy tablespoon flour over the meat and thoroughly stir. Moisten with a gill white wine, half pint water and two gills demi-glace. Season with half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons white pepper, half teaspoon chopped parsley and half teaspoon chopped chives; add one bay leaf and one clove; lightly mix; cover the pan and let slowly boil for ten minutes. Place twelve very small white onions in a frying pan with a tablespoon lard and briskly fry for ten minutes or until a nice brown colour, frequently tossing, and add to the rabbit; add also two scooped-out raw potatoes and one ounce salt pork cut into small dice pieces. Lightly mix the whole well together and cover the pan. Set in the oven to bake for forty minutes. Remove, uncover, transfer to a baking dish, egg the edges of the dish and cover with a pie paste. Press the paste with the thumb around the edges, neatly trim, make a few small incisions on top, lightly egg the surface and set in the oven to bake for twenty minutes. Remove and serve.
A French-style rabbit fricassee finished under a pastry lid. The whole thing is essentially a braise that gets a crust at the end, and the two stages want very different oven heats.
- The hinge: two ovens, not oneThe recipe gives no temperatures. Bake the covered braise at 325-350F for the forty minutes, then raise the heat to 400-425F for the pastry so it colours and puffs in twenty minutes rather than drying out the meat.
- Liquid measuresA gill is half a cup, so the moistening comes to 1/2 cup white wine, 1 cup water and 1 cup demi-glace. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon, making "two saltspoons white pepper" 1/2 teaspoon.
- Demi-glaceTwo gills of it is what carries this dish. Classically demi-glace is espagnole sauce reduced together with brown stock, rather than plain reduced veal stock; a good commercial demi-glace concentrate or a well-reduced brown stock will both stand in. Plain broth will leave the sauce thin and pale, so reduce it hard first if that is all you have.
- "Half bean" of garlicAn older way of saying half a clove. With six shallots alongside it, the garlic is a background note and should not be increased much.
- Eighteen piecesA rabbit normally breaks into eight or nine serving pieces; eighteen means the saddle and legs chopped through the bone into small portions, which suits a pie where everything is eaten with a spoon. A butcher will do it, or use a heavy cleaver.
- "Scooped-out raw potatoes"Potato balls cut with a melon or parisienne scoop, not hollowed-out whole potatoes. Cut them from a waxy variety so they hold their shape through the braise and the second baking.
- Leaf lard and the black panLeaf lard is the mild fat from around the kidneys; ordinary lard, or a neutral oil, browns the meat just as well. The "black frying pan" is simply cast iron.
- Rabbit choice and donenessFarmed rabbit at 3 1/2 lb is what this expects. A wild rabbit is leaner and tougher and will want closer to an hour of braising before the crust goes on; check that the leg meat is coming away from the bone before you cover the dish.
- YieldServes four generously as a main course, with the onions, potato balls and salt pork counted as the vegetable.
Rabbit pie sat on both sides of the Channel: an English cottage and farmhouse standby made with little more than rabbit, bacon and a suet or short crust, and in French cooking a *civet* or fricassee of *lapin* built on brown sauce, shallots, glazed button onions and lardons. This version is plainly the French one, dressed in an English pie crust for an American table. The style is that of a professional American kitchen of the period -- Alexander Filippini's Delmonico's books read very much like this, though the attribution here is an inference from style rather than an established fact -- and the giveaway is the two gills of demi-glace: a restaurant kitchen with brown sauce always on hand could reach for it as casually as a home cook reaches for stock. Rabbit was cheap, widely sold in markets and considered unremarkable meat around 1900; its retreat from English-language cookbooks over the twentieth century is often credited to the rise of cheap chicken, though that is not the only factor.