Rabbit flamande
10 February 2021 12:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeMy rabbit flamande (from Jocasta Innes' "Pauper's Cookbook", although according to the Web what makes the dish Flemish is the ingredient she lists as optional and that I omitted, namely the beer/cider!) was a great success. I ended up stewing it with two and a half onions and some slices of elderly butternut squash -- as this is also a sweet vegetable -- instead of the 'eight small onions' listed in the recipe, put in 4oz mixed sultanas and raisins, added the optional prunes and a bayleaf as well as the thyme, and stirred in a tablespoon of homemade chutney at the end instead of three tablespoons of sugar caramelised in vinegar. The resulting casserole was extremely tasty, with the joints of meat nestling in a rich dark sauce.
It did taste much like chicken, as the man who sold it to me said it would; I was a bit alarmed when browning the joints, as it smelt more like hare, and I really didn't enjoy my one taste of roast [roadkill] hare, but the end result was much more mild, and not at all gamey.
I didn't have too much trouble jointing the carcase myself, even managing to cut the body section in half by finding the joint between the vertebrae, although I couldn't do much with the ribcage, which I couldn't open out and which had to go in as a separate conical piece. Oddly enough my rabbit only had one front leg -- maybe the other one came off when they were trying to skin it ;-p
It did have the giblets inside, as I suspected, although the body cavity had clearly been cleaned out. I was a bit surprised to find what appeared to be three kidneys in addition to the liver, although possibly one of the small dense round objects was something else... or simply belonged to a different animal, having been traded for the foreleg perhaps! Referring to my recipe for roast rabbit, I chopped them all up fine and browned them with the onions, as I would have done for stuffing, and they were quite undetectable in the finished stew although presumably served to deepen the flavour.
I served myself half the 'saddle' (the body minus the ribcage) -- the recipe book said that one joint of rabbit will feed one person and the saddle is reckoned to be the best bit. It felt like incredibly weird luxury to be cutting up actual large chunks of pure meat; the portion wasn't nearly as bony as I'd expected, despite having a spine down the middle, and I'm used to my meat coming in tiny pieces spread throughout a dish rather than being carved off the bone entire. As accompaniment I just had plain boiled rice, as Jocasta Innes suggested (plus a couple of leaves of shredded cabbage popped on top of the stew at the last minute), and it soaked up the juices from the stew beautifully.
(This blogpost helpfully shows the different joints of a cooked rabbit -- though she casseroled hers whole and I jointed mine before cooking.)
Afterwards I was reminded of my first ever (and so far one and only) attempt at roasting an entire chicken; strip the meat from the remaining joints, divide between multiple small bags and freeze, then boil the bones in a couple of pints of water until clean and store away several helpings of strong stock -- plus in this case, since the meal was casseroled and not roasted I got three leftover portions of flavoursome stew with the scrapings from the rib-cage (which has a very thin layer of meat over the ribs and some more between the bones)in it. So one rabbit may cost five pounds, but it provides about the same amount of meals as a small free-range chicken at a lower price. (And probably even free-er range, given that this was from the game stall rather than the butcher's!)
Definitely worth buying rabbit again, I think. Now I need to remember to turn off that stockpot before I go to bed :-D
I also managed to retrieve all the remaining FFNet reviews for my stories -- including the ones on the old account, which I'd forgotten about -- and to grab the text for the three stories on that account and the translation of "Please Pretend", which I thought I didn't have the original document for. (Actually, I still do -- it turns out to be in the form of plain text files in my "Internet" directory as opposed to documents in my "Fanfiction" sub-directory, but I've now got the HTML version anyway!)
It did taste much like chicken, as the man who sold it to me said it would; I was a bit alarmed when browning the joints, as it smelt more like hare, and I really didn't enjoy my one taste of roast [roadkill] hare, but the end result was much more mild, and not at all gamey.
I didn't have too much trouble jointing the carcase myself, even managing to cut the body section in half by finding the joint between the vertebrae, although I couldn't do much with the ribcage, which I couldn't open out and which had to go in as a separate conical piece. Oddly enough my rabbit only had one front leg -- maybe the other one came off when they were trying to skin it ;-p
It did have the giblets inside, as I suspected, although the body cavity had clearly been cleaned out. I was a bit surprised to find what appeared to be three kidneys in addition to the liver, although possibly one of the small dense round objects was something else... or simply belonged to a different animal, having been traded for the foreleg perhaps! Referring to my recipe for roast rabbit, I chopped them all up fine and browned them with the onions, as I would have done for stuffing, and they were quite undetectable in the finished stew although presumably served to deepen the flavour.
I served myself half the 'saddle' (the body minus the ribcage) -- the recipe book said that one joint of rabbit will feed one person and the saddle is reckoned to be the best bit. It felt like incredibly weird luxury to be cutting up actual large chunks of pure meat; the portion wasn't nearly as bony as I'd expected, despite having a spine down the middle, and I'm used to my meat coming in tiny pieces spread throughout a dish rather than being carved off the bone entire. As accompaniment I just had plain boiled rice, as Jocasta Innes suggested (plus a couple of leaves of shredded cabbage popped on top of the stew at the last minute), and it soaked up the juices from the stew beautifully.
(This blogpost helpfully shows the different joints of a cooked rabbit -- though she casseroled hers whole and I jointed mine before cooking.)
Afterwards I was reminded of my first ever (and so far one and only) attempt at roasting an entire chicken; strip the meat from the remaining joints, divide between multiple small bags and freeze, then boil the bones in a couple of pints of water until clean and store away several helpings of strong stock -- plus in this case, since the meal was casseroled and not roasted I got three leftover portions of flavoursome stew with the scrapings from the rib-cage (which has a very thin layer of meat over the ribs and some more between the bones)in it. So one rabbit may cost five pounds, but it provides about the same amount of meals as a small free-range chicken at a lower price. (And probably even free-er range, given that this was from the game stall rather than the butcher's!)
Definitely worth buying rabbit again, I think. Now I need to remember to turn off that stockpot before I go to bed :-D
I also managed to retrieve all the remaining FFNet reviews for my stories -- including the ones on the old account, which I'd forgotten about -- and to grab the text for the three stories on that account and the translation of "Please Pretend", which I thought I didn't have the original document for. (Actually, I still do -- it turns out to be in the form of plain text files in my "Internet" directory as opposed to documents in my "Fanfiction" sub-directory, but I've now got the HTML version anyway!)
