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Roman Pie
Clean and cut up a rabbit into joints, boil it until tender in 2 quarts of water with onion, celery, carrot, and herbs. This can be used as soup, when set aside. Cut all the meat off the rabbit into very thin slices, and discard the bones. Have ready 2 ounces of boiled macaroni, 2 ounces of grated cheese, salt, pepper, and 1/2 pint rich milk, also an onion, chopped fine. Mix the milk with the cheese, seasoning, and the yolk of an egg, and line a dish with the macaroni, fill with the slices of rabbit, and pour the sauce over all, covering with a thin layer of puff paste. Bake it 1 hour, turn it out, if possible, and serve with a brown or tomato sauce.
A pasta-lined mould in the Italian timballo manner, written for a cook who already knew what puff paste and a lined dish looked like. Two things decide whether it works: the pasta lining must hold the shape, and the egg-yolk sauce must not be boiled after the yolk goes in.
- The sauce is a custardThe sauce is essentially a thin custard -- half a pint of milk with cheese, seasoning and a raw yolk, which will thicken lightly in the oven rather than set firm, and will not take stove-top boiling. Mix it cold or barely warm; if you heat it first, temper the yolk in off the heat or it may scramble and weep in the finished pie.
- RabbitA whole farmed rabbit runs 2.5-3 lb and gives roughly 1 to 1.25 lb of picked meat. Wild rabbit is leaner and stronger and will want the full simmer. Boneless chicken thigh, poached the same way, is a common modern substitute and behaves similarly.
- Boil until tenderFor farmed rabbit that is about 45 minutes to an hour at a bare simmer, not a rolling boil, which shreds the loin. The saddle meat is done well before the forelegs, so pull pieces as they give.
- Do not throw out the brothThe 2 quarts of cooking liquid with onion, celery, carrot and herbs is the second dish the recipe promises. Strain it, chill it, lift the fat, and treat it as a light stock or clear soup. It will set to a soft jelly, which is normal for rabbit.
- Two ounces of macaroniThe recipe says 'boiled macaroni', so whether the two ounces is weighed dry or after cooking is unclear; read as dry weight it is about half a cup of short tubes, a thin lining rather than a pasta bake. Boil it a minute short of done, since it finishes in the oven, and toss it with a little butter so the pieces sit against the dish instead of sliding.
- Rich milkNineteenth-century "rich milk" means unskimmed milk or milk let down with cream. Whole milk works; whole milk with a couple of tablespoons of cream is closer to the intent and less likely to curdle against the cheese.
- Oven and dishThe recipe gives no oven heat; an hour in a moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern reading. Use a deep straight-sided dish or charlotte mould, well buttered, so it will turn out; the puff paste lid becomes the base once inverted, so roll it thin and dock it or it will dome and refuse to sit flat.
- Turning out"If possible" is honest. Let the pie stand 10 minutes so the custard firms, run a knife round, then invert onto a warm plate. If it looks unwilling, serve it from the dish with the pastry on top and nothing is lost but the theatre.
- YieldFour servings as a main course with the brown or tomato sauce and a green vegetable, six as a first course.
The name is generally traced to the timballo, the Italian moulded pie of pasta, meat and sauce baked in a lined dish and turned out whole, which English and American cookbooks of the later nineteenth century picked up and simplified under labels like "Roman pie" and "Neapolitan pie." What survives here of the original seems to be the structure rather than the grandeur: a pastry lid instead of a full pastry case, a modest two ounces of macaroni doing the lining, and rabbit as the filling. Rabbit was the obvious choice for a book of this kind, being cheap, widely available, and mild enough to take cheese and tomato without argument; the instruction to save the cooking liquor as soup is the frugal housekeeping habit of the period showing through a supposedly foreign dish.