A slow cooked rabbit stew

Rabbit is free range, available almost everywhere and delicious. It’s a very lean meat, which means it is prone to drying out, but whether you choose a faster recipe involving cuts of rabbit or decide to cook the meat more slowly, these rabbit recipes will help you keep the meat moist. Always remember that wild is best; farmed rabbits lack the depth of flavour that makes this such a tasty game meat.

You can cook rabbits in a pie, over with sauce, slow cook in a casserole or roast over a barbecue. It’s a very versatile meat.

Here are some delicious rabbit recipes to try out when you’re back from a spot of walked-up shooting with a brace for the pot.

Do small rabbits taste better than larger ones?

Q: I recently shot a few rabbits and gave a few of the smaller ones away, keeping the larger ones for myself. I think this may have been a mistakes because the ones I cooked were strong in flavour and very tough. Can you advise?

A: You are right. It is tempting to give away the bigger, tougher, older and more robustly flavoured bunnies and keep the smaller, sweeter, more tender ones for yourself. But it is worth looking at older, male , tougher and stronger flavoured rabbits and working out a better way to deal with them.

First remove the dark grey/browning glands from beside the tail – that will lessen the overall odour of dominant male rabbit. Then cook them low and slow with the addition of some sort of fat and almost always with some spice as well to help balance the accounts.