Rabbit Soup [1861]
Begin this soup six hours before dinner. Cut up three large but young and tender rabbits, or four small ones (scoring the backs) and dredge them with flour. Slice six mild onions, and season them with half a grated nutmeg, or more, if you like it. Put some fresh butter into a hot frying-pan (you may substitute for the butter some cold roast-veal gravy that has been carefully cleared from the fat), place it over the fire, and when it boils put in the rabbits and onions, and fry them of a light brown. Then transfer the whole to a soup-pot; season it with a very small teaspoonful of sweet marjoram leaves stripped from the stalks, and four or five blades of mace, adding three large carrots in slices. Pour on, slowly, four quarts of hot water from a kettle already boiling hard. Cover the soup-pot, and let it simmer slowly, skimming it well, till the meat of the rabbits is reduced to shreds and drops from the bones, which will not be in less than five hours, if boiled gently as it ought. When quite done, strain the soup into a tureen. Have ready the grated yolks of six hard boiled eggs, and stir them into the soup immediately after it is strained and while it is very hot. Add, also, some bread cut into dice or small squares, and fried brown or fresh buttered toast, with all the crust removed, and cut into very small bits or mouthfuls.
- Courtesy University Press of Kentucky
