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Spanish Olio
(Olla Podrida.) Clean, parboil, and cut up a fine fat rabbit, add 12 oysters, 2 cups of consomme, a little mace, salt, pepper, some parsley, thyme, and a bayleaf. Cook, covered, until tender, about 1 hour in an earthen pot or bowl. Strain the gravy, add 1/4 pound of butter, 1 tablespoonful of flour, an anchovy minced fine, a tablespoonful of wine or Worcestershire sauce, and pour over the rabbit. Serve with a pint of mixed cooked vegetables, in the same dish, onions, beans, green peppers, carrots, cabbage, etc.
A short, oddly cosmopolitan version of the Spanish stew, written for a cook who kept rabbit, oysters and anchovy on hand. Two things need attention before anything else: the oysters and the sauce ratio.
- The oystersTwelve oysters stewed for the full hour will be rubber. Shuck them, reserve their liquor for the pot, and slip the oysters themselves in during the last two or three minutes, off direct heat, just until the edges ruffle.
- Butter to flourA quarter pound of butter to one tablespoon of flour will not thicken; it makes a rich, split, buttery gravy in the older manner. For a sauce that holds, work equal weights of butter and flour into a paste and whisk it into the strained liquid, then finish with whatever butter you want beyond that.
- RabbitA whole rabbit runs 2.5-3 lb and is now almost always farmed, which means tender and mild. Joint it into six pieces: two forelegs, two hind legs, saddle in two. Wild rabbit is leaner and will want longer than the stated hour.
- ParboilingThe instruction to parboil was probably meant to draw out strong flavour from older or wild animals and to firm the flesh; the recipe does not say. With farmed rabbit it costs you flavour; browning the pieces in fat serves the dish better.
- The earthen potAny heavy lidded pot works. If you want the slow, even heat the original assumes, set it in a 325F oven for the hour rather than on a burner.
- ConsommeTwo cups of clear meat stock. Unsalted chicken or veal stock is the closest modern equivalent; salt at the end, since both the anchovy and the oyster liquor bring their own.
- MaceThe lacy outer covering of nutmeg, warmer and less sweet. Ground mace is still sold; a scant quarter teaspoon is enough for this quantity, and grated nutmeg at half that amount substitutes acceptably.
- The vegetablesA pint means about two cups, cooked separately and added to the serving dish rather than stewed with the rabbit. Cut them to similar size and cook each to its own point; the cabbage in particular will turn grey if it goes in early.
- YieldServes four as a main course with the vegetables and bread to catch the gravy.
Olla podrida is literally "rotten pot" in Spanish, the name generally read as a corruption or a wry description of a long-simmered stew of many meats and pulses, cooked in an earthenware olla and associated above all with Castile and Burgos. English cooks borrowed the dish and the word from at least the seventeenth century, usually anglicising it to "olio" and treating it as a licence to put anything in one pot. This version keeps the earthen pot and the mixed vegetables but is otherwise thoroughly Anglo-American: the oysters, the anchovy and the Worcestershire sauce belong to the English-speaking kitchen's habit of adding a salty, savoury note to plain meat. Rabbit appears here because it was cheap and widely available, in a way it has not been in the English-speaking world for several generations.