After years of speculating about doing it, I have finally put on a rabbit-and-barley pot, using the same recipe I have used for my other barley pots. I've talked about my earlier experiments with it here, here and here. It's a recipe that's more or less consistent with what we know of Anglo-Saxon cooking.
This time, I followed the recipe almost exactly as I found it, except: 1) I added the sage with the other vegetables; 2) I left out the vinegar, and 3) I've wrapped my rabbits in cheesecloth, so that I can pull them out when the stew is done and remove the bones. I browned the meat and sauteed the vegetables in a skillet before moving them to my crockpot, instead of doing all the frying and simmering in one pot (more practical if you are using a cauldron or soup pot to cook in). I will provide an update after the stew is done and my husband and I have had an opportunity to taste the results.
Like the cheesecloth wrapping idea.
ReplyDeleteThe point of the cheesecloth was to make it possible to cook the rabbit with the barley and leeks without fear of having loose bones in the stew. It didn't work perfectly, though, because I missed some of the tiny bones when I was picking off the meat and returning it to the stew. The cheesecloth would probably work better with meat that contains fewer bones, such as chicken legs.
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