daube à lapin, en croûte

Leg of lamb is the traditional Easter repast in this part of the world, where lambs and the herbs that best suit them thrive on the rocky hills. But I got the idea to eat rabbit instead when Cleek and I were walking to Castellane, over the old roman road, several days before Paques, and saw an extraordinarily fat brown rabbit in the trail ahead of us. As we approached this rabbit, who couldn’t conceivably be classified as a hare, shuffled off the trail by a few feet and sat there while we passed, like some well-fed corgi, built for comfort, not speed.

It’s a two-hour walk to Castellane, and we were hungry. This rabbit got me thinking.

After consulting Pascal to ascertain that around here it is not the Easter Bunny who brings us our chocolate eggs but rather some kindly churchbells, flying through the sky on their way home from Rome (ok, whatever you’re havin’ yourselves, lads!...) I returned to Castellane on the Saturday to buy a rabbit.

I went to the little out-of-the-way butcher shop on a sidestreet, where the brisk young butcher sells his wares for steeper prices than you’ll find in the big Casino grocery store at the edge of town, but his locally sourced critters come with all their parts attached (if you want them for the soup pot) and he’ll happily hack your purchase into whatever kind of pieces you’d like right in front of you, with a maximum of expert flourishes of his knife for the benefit of the ladies. You get what you pay for with this fellow: everything I’ve bought from him has been an absolute credit to its species.

The interior of a rabbit is a tricky pancake, with about twice as many bones as any fowl; kind of like chicken for people who like puzzles. To ensure that one rabbit would feed six people (I certainly couldn’t afford two, chez the Brisk Young Butcher!) I decided to cook it as a daube, a Provençal classic in which meat, often game, is stewed in red wine and a mixture of herbs and spices that varies according to the meat and the cook’s disposition, but can include thyme, laurel, winter savory, juniper, clove and orange peel.

I simmered my rabbit until it was sloughing off the bone the day before Easter, in red wine, Pascal’s homemade red wine vinegar, with roulade garlic, onion, laurel, thyme and clove.

Cleek was at hand to cut the thyme from the hillside above the house and pick it from the stems, and was rewarded for his labors with a pint of pastis.

Once I’d picked the meat off all those maddening little bones and reduced the sauce, I added a bushel of sautéed crimini mushrooms and some par-boiled potatoes.

Daube is usually served over egg noodles, but having conceived an infatuation for meat pies of all sorts during my stay in London in January, and also being much taken with the economy of encasing a dollop of saucy meat in a crust--always a crowd-pleaser and so cheap to produce--I decided to make individual rabbit pies from the daube.

Sydney, who is visiting Nancy and Pascal for six weeks, danced while she made a gratin of cauliflower to accompany the pies,

and Nicolas, who brought homemade beer from Marseille, made a fire on the terrace in preparation for the meal.

Pascal went rummaging and found some Easter Bunnies after all, just to be perverse.

Nobody could quite finish the pies, but they make good leftovers and we’ve been eating them ever since...