Mulligatawny

[igenlode]

The mulligatawny soup made with remains of a rabbit -- in my case, rabbit stock and some shredded roast rabbit -- proved to be extremely successful. I didn't have any curry powder, so I went the whole hog of cooking up ginger and garlic with my onion at the start and adding chopped chilli and cumin and coriander, and it was very tasty.

I served it alongside a bowl of "well-boiled rice" as recommended in the recipe, presumably a nod to its Indian origins, which served to make more sustaining what was really only suitable as a starter -- the small proportion of meat isn't bulked out by anything bar onion and apple, and I hadn't thickened it with flour as directed because it already seemed pretty thick. Perhaps I should have.

I note that in the recipe for a plum mulligatawny in my 1960s cookbook the rice is cooked in the actual soup, which is a less unexpected procedure!

Comments

[sallymn]

Rabbit isvery hard to get here, but I remember it from my childhood, and I loved it.

[igenlode]

You can actually see them running around in the wilder areas locally, although I don't know where the game actually on sale in the market comes from. One of the neighbouring counties, probably (the eggs on the same stall do).

It's not an 'artisan' farmer's market (as the reviews on TripAdvisor comment disparagingly) with soya candles and little handmade gifts, but a traditional marketplace with flies and squashed fruit and cabbage-leaves, and hawkers yelling "Get'cha luvvly strawberries, two for a pahnd". However the fishmonger does sometimes (but not always) sell rabbits and sometimes chickens as well as sea-fish and duck eggs.

I did have a duck egg from our old butcher's once when I was little, but I was very disappointed by it. I suppose I expected it to taste like a hen's egg, and it didn't, so I thought it rather nasty :-(

[sallymn]

I think for a large part of the early-mid 20th century rabbit was a ubiquitous and cheap meat here, and over the course of the latter part of the century it became unfashionable and just not something that butchers sold.

I had a wonderful rabbit casserole at a Swiss restaurant in the Blue Mountains some years back; maybe if it starts showing up in the shops again we can have it (though Sis was not keen on the sheer number of bones).

[igenlode]

It's not something butchers normally sell here either (although you do see butchers with the traditional LICENSED TO SELL GAME notice in their front window; I don't think it is actually a legal requirement to have a special shop licence any more, but as you can't get wild-caught meat at the wholesale meat markets it does involve having an individual source of supply somewhere).
Our old butcher used to be able to get rabbit on request, and put a handwritten notice up in the door from time to time saying that he had some in.

Supermarkets only sell packaged meat, although they seem to have branched out into exotic packages. I see Sainsbury's are advertising "Duck, game & venison" online, although if you look at the actual products included it's almost all farmyard duck, plus a single shrink-wrapped guinea-fowl (and I don't think those live wild anywhere in England!) and some farmed venison products, none of which is legally wild game at all...

People traditionally seem to complain about 'the number of bones' in rabbit, but from my experience so far I'm not very clear why. They are about the same size as chickens and have the same basic structure -- rib-cage, tiny 'wings' (forelegs) and big thighs (back legs) -- so the only real difference I can think of is that maybe they've got longer backs and more spine? I haven't been conscious of encountering a large number of bones, and they're all in very predictable places, e.g. attached to the ribcage or down the middle of the limbs.