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Curried Rabbit or Hare
Rabbit and hare may be curried by preparing a brown curry and adding the hare, jointed as for stewing. Add one tart apple, a little lemon juice. Serve on platter with boiled rice.
The recipe assumes you already know how to make a "brown curry" — the standard Anglo-Indian base of onion browned in butter or fat, thickened with flour and curry powder, moistened with stock. Everything else here is seasoning.
- Brown curry, decodedSweat a large sliced onion in 2-3 tablespoons butter until genuinely browned, stir in 1 tablespoon flour and 1-2 tablespoons curry powder and cook a minute so the powder loses its raw edge, then whisk in about 2 cups stock. Adding the powder to hot fat rather than to the liquid is the step that separates this from dusty gravy.
- Rabbit or hare is not interchangeableFarmed rabbit is pale, mild and lean; hare is dark, strong and needs longer. A 2-3 lb rabbit will be tender in 45-60 minutes of gentle simmering, a hare closer to 2 hours. Neither should boil — the leg meat tightens and shreds.
- Jointed as for stewingTwo front legs, two hind legs, the saddle cut across into two or three pieces, ribcage split. The forequarters and ribs carry the flavour; the saddle cooks fastest and is worth adding 20 minutes late if you care about texture.
- Brown the joints firstThe original does not say to, but colouring the pieces in the fat before the onion and returning them once the sauce is assembled improves the dish. (The name 'brown curry' refers to the browned onion-and-flour base, not to searing the meat.)
- The appleOne tart cooking apple, peeled and chopped, is standard in period curries — it dissolves into the sauce and supplies both sweetness and acid. A Granny Smith or Bramley works; a modern sweet dessert apple does not.
- Lemon juice at the end"A little" means a teaspoon or two, stirred in off the heat and tasted. Added early it cooks flat, and with the apple already in the pot it is easy to overshoot.
- RiceBoiled rice here is most likely plain rice, drained dry and unbuttered, served on the platter with the curry. Figure 1 cup raw rice for four.
- YieldOne rabbit serves three to four; a hare, four to five. Both benefit from being made a day ahead.
Curry entered English and American cookbooks through the British in India, and by the time this book was compiled "a brown curry" was a fixed domestic formula — commercial curry powder, browned onion, flour, apple, lemon — rather than any attempt at a regional Indian dish. The apple-and-lemon pairing is the signature of that Anglo-Indian house style and turns up in curried veal, chicken and mutton as often as game. That the recipe assumes the cook can joint a hare says something about the period kitchen: wild rabbit and hare were cheap, seasonal and often strong-tasting, and a heavily spiced sauce was the usual way to make an older animal welcome at table.