Wild Rabbit

After cleaning the rabbit, wash it in cold water and hang up to freeze in order to loosen the meat fibers. Soak for a short time in salt water before cooking, to draw out the blood. Cut into pieces, washing each in cold water. Then put pieces in a stew pan filled with water in which a pinch of soda has been dissolved. Bring to a simmer, remove from the heat, and pour off the water. Put pieces back in the pan, add more water, and stew until the meat is loosened from the bone but not shredded. Then drain, add a little bacon fat, and fry the pieces brown; or bake them for about half an hour. Wild rabbit is best in the fall and winter months.

Beginning in the 1840s, the Platte River route became a major highway for travelers to Oregon and California. One of the first large groups of emigrants to follow that road were the Mormons who spent the winter of 1846-47 at Winter Quarters, now part of north Omaha, in their exodus to the Great Salt Lake. The Mormon women were notable for their resourcefulness, according to a contemporary observer.

They could hardly be called housewives in etymological strictness; but it was plain that they had once been such, and most distinguished ones. Their art availed them in their changed affairs. With almost their entire culinary material limited to the milk of their cows, some store of meal or flour, and a very few condiments, they brought their thousand and one receipts into play with a success that outdid for their families the miracle of the Hebrew widow's cruse. They learned to make butter on a march by the dashing of the wagon, and so nicely to calculate the working of barm in the jolting heats that, as soon after the halt as an oven could be dug in the hillside and heated, their well-kneaded loaf was ready for baking, and produced good leavened bread for supper.

Yeast bread was made by the sponge method, and the "harm"--yeast or starter--might or might not contain commercial yeast powders or compressed yeast.