Rabbit Pie

So, as I mentioned earlier, our friend Katie has been visiting for the month of December.  Anyway, her first reaction to the butchers in Mercato Sant Ambrogio went something along the lines of "Bunnies!  Must make rabbit pie!"  Which we put off doing for a while, for various reasons involving bistecca, pheasant and small, tied up packages of meat.  And impending Christmas dinner.  Christmas being past (and her flight back to California imminent) we finally got around to the rabbit pie.

I actually have a somewhat contentious history with rabbit.  It was one of those meats I really wanted to love, built it up in my head, listened to and believed my grandmother's fondly proclaimed "rabbit makes the best fried chicken" (I suspect she was right, but I haven't tried it), etc.  Yet, every time I went to cook the stuff it came out, well, less exciting than I was hoping.  I've since read that there are some general issues with cooking rabbit in that various parts cook at rather different rates and the like, but I think the biggest issue was that rabbit, rather like an American chicken, if functionally all white meat.  Hare (lepre), which I adore, is all dark meat.  I'm not generally that excited about white meat, which may be a personality flaw, but I (biasedly) think it's more likely to be related to the fact that dark meat tends to have more flavor.  Think chicken vs. duck.  I mean, I love good roast chicken, but duck is just more inherently awesome.  Which is to say, I have a history of disappointment with rabbit I wasn't very eager to extend with more mediocre formerly fluffy chicken stand ins.

Meat pies, in my mind, fall into two large categories: bones or no bones.  Lauren put in a strong vote (arguably a veto) for the boneless version, so that's how it went down.  The one recipe we found online called for stewing the rabbit then boning it, but I didn't really want to spend the time cooking (and wanted the rabbit less well done) so I took about the same amount of time to remove all the meat I could from the bones with a knife.  I tend to think that animals taste most like themselves when cooked in their own fat, and this half-rabbit came equipped with a fair amount of fat around it's few remaining internal organs, so I started off by rendering the rabbit fat with a bit of olive oil to get things started, then used it for all of the subsequent cooking.

Pie Filling:
1/2 rabbit
2 sausages (Italian, duh)
carrots (four or so)
fennel bulb
celery
1 onion
3 cloves garlic
sage leaf, herbs de provance, salt and pepper
white wine

Everything got browned in batches, a lot, and then tossed together.  In more detail, the boned bunny got chopped into fairly large (inch or so) gobbets and browned fairly quickly (so as not to overcook the center) on high heat in two batches.  I used a deep saucepan for most of this and deglazed with the wine we were having with dinner between most of the batches.  The sausage got browned next, then the carrots, which also got a short bit of simmering with some of the wine (a Villadoria Manolo, fascinating stuff, a piedmontese white made from Nebbiolo, the red grape Barolo and many other famous wines are made from) and herbes de provance.  Then the fennel and celery (just a couple of stalks with the leaves included) followed by the onions and garlic.  Mixed everything together in a large bowl and poured the juices back in the pan with a bit more wine and the sage leaf to reduce a bit before joining the pie crust and the oven.  I'd been adding salt and pepper as I went along, but here is where one should stop and make sure everything tastes good together.  Also, I bet this would be good if you threw in an apple and maybe some raisins, but that would be a different angle and should probably involve slightly different spicing.  There is one raisin involved, but I don't know that it, or the rosemary whiskers really count as ingredients.

On to crust, which was made by Lauren:  "it wasn't hard, I just took all the lard we had, added some butter, flour, bit of cold water, an egg, did the normal pie crust thing..." the making was accompanied by slightly more cursing than the reminiscence implies, but mostly because it was a tiny bit on the dry side which made the rolling more difficult than it could have been.  Otherwise (and most importantly, eventually) it turned out quite well.  I'm (Jeremy) becoming more and more convinced of lard's general superiority as a pie crust fat for savory pies.  Might also be good for the sweet ones, but most of our lard comes via our prosciutto and contains slightly more savory elements than should be tossed around sweet dishes without thinking about it first.

It probably goes without saying, because I've been willing to write about it, but the rabbit pie worked very well.  The rabbit wasn't at all over cooked, all the elements blended together well but still highlighted the bunny and the crust was great.