The Rabbit Soup That Tasted Like Chicken

Thanks to Vergeten Eten, I made stock (bouillon) for the first time in my life! It's surprisingly easy (although it takes a lot of time and quite a bit of attention) and I'll certainly try it again. But let's speak about the Konijnensoep / Jachtsoep experiment specifically!

Here are all the ingredients lined up. I found two rabbit legs in the supermarket opposite the street and didn't bother to go to another shop to buy a whole rabbit. The two legs are 5,79 EUR so not very cheap, but I love rabbit and hey, it's Easter after all!



The recipe only mentions parsil (parsley?) / peterselie as spices but I couldn't resist and added a bay leaf. I love bay leaf (laurier), especially in soups and with carrots.

This time, after the Eiervla Disaster, I did the research FIRST. I consulted my Flemish Cooking Bible and read about how to make stock (bouillon).




Here's the meat. It's extremely lean and at this point, I'm doubting if it'll be appropriate for soup.


I put it in a pot together with hot water, some cabbage leaves, three carrots, one onion + salt, pepper, dried parsley (forgot to buy fresh one), a bay leaf and two cloves (kruidnagel) in the onion. I read about that in "Ons Kookboek" and that sounded really good.


Two hours later:


I must tell you, it smelled FANTASTIC.

Draining it

I took all the meat off the bones (it was VERY tender at that point, really fell apart by itself) in order to add it to the bouillon later.

I let the bouillon cool on our balcony for a few hours and then filtered it through a sieve and a cotton cloth. It's not transparent/clear (it should be... I probably did something not 100% correctly, but the taste is OK and it's not really bothersome).

About the taste of the stock / bouillon: the rabbit flavor is not very strong or outspoken. That was to be expected: I only had 2 legs and rabbit is a very lean animal. The recipe also explicitly says that it's better to use wild rabbits, and I can totally believe that!

Finally, after putting everything (stock, meat, vegetables) back together, this is the end result:


A delicious lunch for Easter Monday. Rabbit soup that could as well be chicken soup. BUT: very good nevertheless.
I must say that I also had my doubts about the white cabbage (I used "spitskool"): strange to combine this with rabbit. But I really liked it.

The Lumpy Eiervla Disaster

I was really eager to try out the Eiervla recipe. A vla/pudding without starch sounded really good; I'm a big fan of crème brulée and this recipe seemed to go in the same direction, without the burnt sugar coat but with some lemon in the mix. Can't be bad!

All the ingredients are ready.

Beating the eggs with the sugar. I did use regular sugar, not powdered one. After a while I obtained a creamy mix ("ruban").

Grated lemon peel, yum yum.


Mixed with milk and cream. Quite foamy (I used my electric beater) and the batter is yummy (although a bit on the sweet side).

Au Bain Marie. This phase took me approx. 15 minutes, the recipe told me to keep stirring, which I did. Yawn...

And then something goes All Wrong and the Stuff goes All Lumpy.

Fluids and solids are separating. We are witnessing an interesting, but unwanted chemical reaction here.
The Stuff also tastes less good now. In fact, it's not very attractive and instead, it's very sweet and the lemon taste is too overpowering.

Boo. Bah.

Is it the recipe? Is it my fault? Let's do some research.
(I know that doing research *before* acting is often the wise thing to do... let's blame my eagerness ;-)
My Belgian cookbook, "Ons Kookboek", has several similar recipes for "flan" and one for crème brulée; they have similar ingredients (but often only cream and eggs, no milk) and all say that the substance needs to be cooked "au bain marie", but in the oven and very slowly (pour the mix in small dishes, put these in a larger dish with water and let this stiffen slowly in the oven).
If the temperature is too high, the flan will become lumpy. That's what happened to me.

Lesson learned!

Sooo... now I'm really eager to try it again!! Not with these ingredients though, just a nice vanilla flan or a crème brulée. As I've run out of eggs, this will have to be something for after the market event though...

Test-diner @ ANne's

Here a short report on my attempt to serve a 'historic diner' with 4 recipes, that I tried out today. My friends; Colette, Bernhard, Ivar and Kyra, were courageous enough to serve as a test panel. In the course of today the whole shopping process and haunting for ingredients brought to the surface interesting issues such as: which contemporary product is closest to the listed ingredients, whether or not to use a blender, to buy fillet of fish or stay as close as possible with the tradition by filleting the fish by yourself etc. etc. Most ingredients I used were ecological or biological as I figured this probably would come closest to the original taste. As the diner plan was only decided upon today, there was no time to consult the archive experts, so I decided to just go for it, and spent the afternoon in interesting spice and herb shops and on the market place.

First course
Chervil soup / Kervelsopje

All ingredients were available however, the doses in the recipe were only vaguely mentioned so the cook's sense of 'historic' mixing came into play here. My test-panel friends were in agreement about the soup or 'sopje', it was ok, the slice of bread where the soup was poured over, to make a 'sopje' was received well. However, according to our 21st century testers, the dish could use some salt and pepper. Kyra decided for a 6 mark ('average') for the soup.


Main course
Spinach / Spinagie and salmon / Salm stoven

First the spinach: the Bramley apple is not cultivated in the Netherlands anymore, see http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bramley%27s_Seedling
I decided to use Goudreinettes, an old Dutch apple that originally comes from Boskoop, close to Gouda. http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afbeelding:Goudreinet.jpg
Further more I used rough leaved wild spinach, fresh ginger and dry white wine. The verjuys was missing and replaced with vinegar (ass suggested in one of the English recipes).

So let's go back to my testing friends again: they all appreciated the spinach with apple and ginger very much! The substance of this dish was a bit juicy or soup-like, next time I'll consider to follow the suggestion to make pies or cookies from it. The taste reminded my friends to the old-fashioned Dutch red cabbage with apples, a plate that is still served these days as winter food in the Netherlands. Very Nice !




On the salmon dish I made some compromises as I decided to buy the fillet and not the whole fish (I hate fish bones, I know I'm spoiled and yes I understood people used to be much easier on these kinds of things before). Never the less with this slight adjustment the salmon was also really appreciated, the bread crump porridge-like substance was less appreciated (see Kyra's facial expression on the right picture above). Interesting details about all different parts of the nutmeg, as I wanted to know what foelie actually is see for nutmeg details http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nootmuskaat
and 'foelie' and the Dutch VOC history http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foelie


The dessert
Rum jelly / Rumgelij

ahum... I think the cook made a minor mistake here, as it was so thick of jelly that the calculations might be misunderstood ... the taste was a bit like wine gums but too little rum, lemon and sugar, it looked good but needs a secondary try! Furthermore I'm also not sure how much 'half a small bottle of rum' actually is I found myself in front of a shell with 3 sizes of small bottles ... so here is some more work ahead for my experiment with the recipes.