Food
Michele Roberts samples the neighbour's rabbit
Published 26 April 2004
My female friends here show their affection with gifts of food
Annique gave me a rabbit: bon appetit! She lives at the top of the hill. I know her house well because Yvette's mother-in-law used to live there, and I used to help her with the gardening. Now Annique's farm has been sold to English people bent on making money from gItes, and Yvette's mother-in-law is dead. But Annique has moved into that hilltop house and continues the gardening. The rabbits used to roam wild in that potager and consume the newly sprouting lettuces. Yvette set traps for them, springy iron jaws with fearsome teeth, but caught only a hedgehog. Annique keeps her rabbits in hutches, cramped in together, for eating. She collects dandelions from my garden.
My women friends here show their affection with gifts of food. Pots of jam, a basket of chitted spuds for planting, a bucket of newly caught snails, a white cheese. Their kindness is practical, moving, constantly renewed. I am surrounded by robust saints in wellington boots. I embarrass them by telling them I love them and they flap their hands and harrumph.
Annique told me to choose my rabbit. You don't know how to kill it, do you? Never mind. I'll do it. The following day, her son, who is a baker in the supermarket, and very cheerful despite having to get up at three o'clock every morning to bake, brought the rabbit round.
I opened La Bonne Cuisine by Mme de Saint-Ange. Cut off the four paws to just above the knees, she instructs: lay the beast on its back, and make the first slit in the fur of the belly. I checked the red corpse in the plastic bag. Thank goodness. Thanks, Annique: already skinned. All I had to do was choose the right recipe. No time to drive to the shops ten miles off. I had to cook with what I had. Chez moi, there is always plenty of wine, and I had some bitter black chocolate left over from Easter. I decided, therefore, on Patricia Green's recipe quoted in Elizabeth David's French Provincial Cooking - sauce au vin du Medoc, a dish from that wine region. The rabbit is cooked so long and gently, in red wine spiced with chocolate, that it is practically just sauce at the end.
The only way to thank my neighbours for their kindness was to invite them to dinner. I felt nervous. Would Yvette prod suspiciously with her fork and ask what this was supposed to be?
All went well. We ate asparagus with sauce hollandaise mousseline, my home-made pate flavoured with chestnuts, apples and Calvados, stewed rabbit, green salad, cheese, poached pears. They liked the food: Ah, you have a Norman mother, this must be Norman cooking, she taught you well. We drank a lot, laughed a lot, drank a grog of Calvados in hot water with sugar, then played cards until one.
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