Dinner Is Travel, for Now
Braised rabbit takes us back to northwest Italy, decades ago
Years — decades — ago Jackie and I visited the Valle d’Aosta in north-western Italy. It’s a beautiful mountainous area where all the road signs are in both Italian and French (take a look at the map), but, as best I can recall, the cooking was pure Italian, at least at the hotel-restaurant where we spent the night. I’ve written about this — and indeed about the ingredients used in today’s rabbit legs — and I won’t tell the same story again when you can read it here.
On our trip, we’d encountered this set of flavors — juniper, rosemary, pepper, garlic, orange zest — in an intense dish of game ravioli. There’s no mistaking a farm-raised rabbit for a wild creature but, in both flavor and texture, its flesh has its own character, and more of it than people often imagine: Though delicate, rabbit is not a bland meat — and, no, it does not taste like chicken. It seemed to me that those same Valle d’Aosta flavors, softened by chicken stock to yield a braising liquid, would support the rabbit and not overwhelm it.
This worked out well. Very well. Every bite contained something of interest — a morsel of juniper berry, a scrap of orange zest, a nugget of guanciale — but the most interesting and prominent thing was the braised rabbit itself. Very different from…
