Louis Nowra summer cookbook recipe: Slow-cooked rabbit
A couple of decades ago I started to collect rabbit recipes from here and across the world, and ended up with hundreds.
Every day this summer, we’ll publish a favourite recipe from an Australian author, dishes made with affection for family, friends or someone special.
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Mrs Mancini taught me how to kill a rabbit with my bare hands. The Mancinis were the only Maltese family on our housing commission estate.
I was extremely close to Mrs Mancini’s daughter, who was in the same class as me, and she often took me to see her mother kill rabbits with what can only be called a creepy relish. Mrs Mancini said rabbit stew was a Maltese favourite.
From that time as a 10-year-old on, I was fascinated by rabbits and when on holidays with my uncle in the country I’d go rabbiting. My aunty filled up the fridge with them, saying she and my uncle would eat them after I returned home.
Later I heard she hated the taste of bunnies, but I couldn’t get enough of what my mother dismissively called four-legged chicken.
A couple of decades ago I started to collect rabbit recipes from here and across the world, and ended up with hundreds. I vaguely thought of bringing out a book solely devoted to the best ways of cooking the pest.
SUMMER COOKBOOK: THE WAY TO THE HEART
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Slow-cooked rabbit
A couple of decades ago I started to collect rabbit recipes from here and across the world, and ended up with hundreds.
Sri Lankan omelette
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Ice cream with caramel and cherries
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Lamb scrag end neck chops stew
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Virginia Woolf Brittle
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Crispy Latkes
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Odd couple share recipe for great summer reading
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Summer Cookbook
Australia’s favourite authors share their most meaningful recipes.
Instead, I wrote a novella, The Wedding in Venice (now in my Collected Stories), narrated by Charles Fox, a Sydney social identity, social columnist, bon vivant and restaurant reviewer. His magnum opus is a collection of rabbit recipes published as Fox’s Rabbits, from which I include an extract in the appendix to the novella. One of his favourites – and mine too – is Ligurian rabbit stew.
The irony is that I have never cooked any rabbit dish for my wife, because as far as she’s concerned, they look like our chihuahuas, as do, she says, quails. As for the insides of animals, which I adore, she is even more horrified (“I wish you’d told me this before we were married”). Despite this, I continue to seek out the recipe for the perfect rabbit dish.
One bunny, skinned. (Ask your butcher. It may have to be ordered in.)
Handful of flour
Splash of olive oil
1 brown onion, chopped
Garlic cloves, chopped
100g black olives.
Plentiful white wine
Half cup or more of tomato pulp
Sprigs of rosemary and thyme, plus some sage leaves, salt and pepper
1. Dust the bunny with flour, heat the olive oil and brown the rabbit on both sides in a casserole dish.
2. Add the chopped onion, garlic clove and the black olives. Reduce the temperature, cover and cook until softened.
3. Stir in two glasses of white wine, allow a little to evaporate, add half a cup or more of tomato pulp, sprigs of rosemary and thyme, plus some sage leaves, salt and pepper to taste, and cook over moderate heat for 1½ to two hours. Serve with polenta.
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Louis Nowra is a playwright, novelist, essayist and screenwriter. He has also written two memoirs, The Twelfth of Never and Shooting the Moon. With his wife, writer Mandy Sayer, he co-edited the influential anthology about Kings Cross, In the Gutter … Looking at the Stars. He lives on the border between Kings Cross and Woolloomooloo.
Sydney, a biography by Louis Nowra, NewSouth