Raspberry Debacle

Rabbits really shouldn’t be hard to find. They’re notorious for overbreeding, and they’re dreadful pests, vermin even: surely the problem should be getting rid of them, more and more rabbits appearing faster than anyone could possibly cook them.

“What was that?”

“What?”

“That noise in the freezer. Sort of… nibbly. Nibbly and cold.”

“Oh it can’t be… it is, it’s those bloody rabbits again. Get me the rabbit-poking stick, Germaine.”

But somehow they’re harder to get hold of than I’d expect. Rabbit-poachers are forced to resort to bulletproof cars:

The poachers had fitted a halogen lamp on the outside to blind their prey and shielded the car’s number plates with lead sheeting to avoid identification.

There was also a device to eject two old bicycles fixed on the back of the car on to the road.

The North Koreans are forced to resort to German breeders, hoping to bulk out the nation’s food supply with terrifying eight-kilogram super-rabbits.

And I’m forced to resort to… well:

In Battersea, it’s easy to convince yourself that you aren’t middle class. Middle-class people don’t have housemates, do they? They have multiple tablecloths instead, and matching cutlery. They have a solicitor, or at least a jug. They certainly don’t live in SW11, which the statistical analysis and glib generalisations of Up My Street characterise as “crowded flats in multi-ethnic areas”. SW is the area Alec Guinness’s disgraced mother moves to when, in Kind Hearts and Coronets, she is disowned by her aristocratic family; it has a history of gun crime stretching back to 1829, when the Duke of Wellington and the Earl of Winchelsea fought a duel over Catholic emancipation, standing among asparagus fields in the marshes that would later become Battersea Park.

The trouble with crowded flats and gun crime, though, is that they aren’t very conducive to rabbit-hunting, so earlier this week I left SW11 (”unemployment levels are high, although given the large numbers of lone parents with children under school age, a high proportion of people are not on the job market at all”) for W8 (”in the winter, this type is the most likely to go skiing”). At High Street Kensington, a blonde woman tossed her hair: “If this bag gets stolen I’ll just cry, it has my Valentino dress and my fur coat”. Her friend looked up from a text message on her mobile phone: “She says they weren’t allowed to smoke at all, so you could just smell everyone’s bodies.” At the organic shop, the people’s rice was deepest red but the chocolate cost three pounds a bar… but ohh, this galangal stuff at last, and orange flower water across the road in Waitrose, and I don’t know what they taste like but don’t they sound exciting? And beyond, in the cold groceries section: where my local supermarket sells pork, beef chops, occasional pigs livers, and chicken, here there were shelves upon shelves of poussin! Osso buco! Rabbit!

I’ve only eaten rabbit once, and that was just a bite of somebody else’s main course in a restaurant, so I didn’t really know what to do with it, but most online sources seemed to agree on a few general points (put some wine on it, make it warm for twenty-five minutes), and everyone in the world has been urging me to put green leafy stuff in mashed potato lately; surely it would be hard to go wrong from there?

Kensington Rabbit

2 rabbit hindquarters
A handful of flour
2 tablespoons oil
50 grams butter
8 shallots, peeled
6 twigs of fresh thyme
120ml dessert wine
200ml chicken stock
2 quarters of a lemon (zest the lemon before cutting if you want to make the mash as well)
Salt
Pepper

Rub the rabbit hindquarters with a little salt and pepper, then roll them in flour to cover (though don’t worry too much about missing spots).

Heat the oil and butter in the bottom of a big saucepan, then put the rabbit in the pan and brown it for two or three minutes on each side.

Add the shallots, the thyme, half the dessert wine, half the chicken stock, and the lemon quarters to the pan.

Turn the heat down low, put the lid on the saucepan, and cook the rabbit for about half an hour, or just under. (Many recipes I looked at suggested twenty to twenty-five minutes cooking time, but USDA food safety regulations suggest you let the rabbit reach an internal temperature of at least 160F, which took half an hour for me).

Ten minutes or so into the cooking time, turn the rabbit over, add the rest of the stock and wine, and continue to cook on low with the lid on.

When the rabbit is done, remove the rabbit and the shallots from the pan, then pour the remaining juices through a sieve — to strain out the lemon and thyme — into a bowl or another pan. Keep this sauce warm until you’re ready to serve up, and then pour it all over the rabbit and any vegetables.

Serves 2.

Spinachy Mash

4 medium-sized potatoes
2 cups spinach, coarsely chopped
3 tbsp chicken stock
2 tbsp milk
1 tbsp fresh thyme
1 tbsp olive oil or butter
Zest of one lemon
Squeeze of lemon juice

Peel the potatoes, if you feel like it. I don’t like peeling potatoes, but my boyfriend doesn’t like eating mashed potato with skin in it, so this is the point where I’d gesture at the potatoes imperiously. If this doesn’t work for you, you might have to peel them yourself.

Chop the potatoes into quarters, and cover them with water in a saucepan. Boil until they start to fall apart when you stick a fork in - fifteen or twenty minutes, perhaps.

Take the potatoes off the heat, drain out the water, and add the stock, milk, thyme, oil or butter, and lemon (zest and juice).

Mash it all up, then put the chopped spinach in the saucepan on top of the mash, and replace the lid. Leave this for a few minutes to let the spinach wilt a bit, and then stir the spinach in.

Serves 2.

And it didn’t go wrong, and it was delicious.