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January 11
Menu: Tomato Bisque; Pickled Peaches; Celery; Roast Rabbit, Currant Jelly Sauce; Hominy Squares; Riced Potatoes Boiled Onions; Cranberry Salad; Apricot Tapioca; Coffee Roast Rabbit-6 tablespoons breadcrumbs, 3 tablespoons chopped cooked ham, 3 tablespoons Crisco, 1 tablespoon chopped parsley, 1 teaspoon grated lemon rind, 1/2 teaspoon powdered herbs, 3 chopped mushrooms, three beaten eggs, 1 rabbit, salt, pepper, and red pepper to taste. Beat up eggs, add mushrooms, Crisco, ham, breadcrumbs, parsley, and seasonings, and mix well. Wipe rabbit, and season inside with pepper, salt, and powdered cloves. Lay forcemeat inside rabbit and sew top; skewer head back and legs on each side; roast 1 hour, basting well with melted Crisco. Serve hot with currant jelly sauce.
A stuffed roast rabbit from the day-by-day menu section of a 1910s shortening promotional cookbook. The method is sound; what it omits is an oven temperature, a rabbit size, and any doneness check.
- CriscoCrisco is a hydrogenated all-vegetable shortening, still sold and essentially unchanged in function. Butter or lard works in both the forcemeat and the basting, and either gives more flavour to a lean animal.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, and the recipe does not name an oven type either. A moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern reading, with the first fifteen minutes hotter if you want colour on the back and legs.
- The rabbit itselfA farmed rabbit runs 2.5 to 3 lb dressed and is what this quantity of forcemeat suits. Wild rabbit is smaller, leaner and tougher, and a jointed braise serves it better than a whole roast.
- Doneness, not the clockOne hour is a starting point for a small stuffed rabbit. Rabbit is very lean and goes dry fast, so check the thickest part of the thigh at 160F and the centre of the egg-bound forcemeat at 165F, then stop.
- Basting and bardingThere is almost no fat on a rabbit's back, which is why the recipe insists on basting well. Laying strips of bacon or fatback over the saddle and removing them for the last ten minutes does more than basting alone.
- Head and skewers"Skewer head back" assumes a butcher's rabbit sold whole with the head on. Modern rabbit comes headless; simply truss the legs against the body with string so the stuffed cavity holds its shape.
- Seasonings"Red pepper" is cayenne. "Powdered herbs" means a dried mixture of the thyme, marjoram, savory and sage sort, about half a teaspoon in total. The powdered cloves rubbed inside are a separate step and easy to overdo.
- Currant jelly sauceThe usual version is redcurrant jelly melted into the pan drippings with a splash of port or stock, seasoned and strained. It is not sweet enough to be a dessert glaze; it is there to cut the richness of a ham forcemeat.
- YieldRabbit and stuffing together serve four modestly, three generously.
The Story of Crisco was Procter & Gamble's cookbook for the shortening it launched in 1911, written by Marion Harris Neil, and its calendar of dinners assigns menus to the days of the year — this one falls on January 12, in the depth of the game season. Rabbit was ordinary meat in 1913 rather than a specialty: cheap, widely available from butchers with the head still on, and cooked much as a small bird would be, trussed, stuffed with a bread-and-ham forcemeat and served with the currant jelly that English and American cooks had paired with game for well over a century. The interesting thing about the page is what it is selling. Recipes throughout the book route traditional fats — butter, lard, suet, drippings — through the new vegetable shortening instead, and a lean animal that must be basted constantly made an unusually good showcase for a product whose whole argument was that it could do anything animal fat could do.