[Sca-cooks] Bunny vs. bunny

[Christiane]

Well, I made two rabbit dishes as a compare and contrast for an A&S competition this past weekend. One was the qanura of rabbit from the Anonymous Andalusian, the other was a traditional Sicilian dish, rabbit in a sweet and sour sauce. 

For the qanura, I redacted it thusly:

1 3 pound rabbit, cut roughly into quarters
1 cup red wine vinegar
10 ounces or so of finely chopped walnuts
7 or so small cloves of garlic
boiling, salted water (enough to immerse the rabbit parts)

I boiled the rabbit parts, skimming off the froth. When the rabbit parts were no longer pink, I took them out of the pot and browned them in olive oil. I ground up the cloves of garlic with the walnuts (mashing them in a ceramic bowl with the back of a wooden spoon), poured the garlic/walnut mixture into the vinegar, and poured the vinegar mixture into the pan. I cooked it for about half an hour, adding about a cup of broth from the boiling pot, ladling it in a little at a time. When the vinegar sharpness had cooked off, I essentially called it done. 

The traditional Sicilian recipe I pulled off of inmamaskitchen.com, adding capers and pine nuts to it (which other recipes called for, but this one didn't for some reason). I used this recipe because it called for marinading the rabbit parts in red wine, garlic, cloves, and pepper, and I'm up for marinading meat in red wine whenever I can. ;-) 

At any rate, I was trying to show that the traditional Sicilian dish had antecedents in period medieval Islamic cooking (in the continued use of vinegar-based sauces in Sicilian cuisine, though the Sicilian differs from the Andalusian in the use of sugar). Both dishes got fairly high ratings from the judges – one even said that I had made rabbit taste good, which apparently is not easy to do. ;-) Another judge said I should have done a better job of explaining the connection between the two dishes, and that's a fair criticism, as I was not happy with the way the paper came out because I rushed it. The same judge also said I should have used ground walnuts instead of finely chopped, and that's another fair criticism, as again I was rushing and didn't want to drag out the food processor nor do I have a mortar big enough to handle 10 ounces of nuts. Another lesson for next time.

But a Lady of the Rose did tell me she LOVED the Andalusian dish, and when I found her with a notebook trying to jot down my redaction, I just handed her the paper. It's on my computer after all. I was just happy she loved it so much.

If anyone wants both recipes and the paper, let me know. I can e-mail them to you.

YIS, 
Adelisa Salernitana