Rabbit in Salmì

Rabbit itself: look for one close to the 1.2 kg mark, young rather than old — an old rabbit has tougher muscle fibre that even twelve hours of wine won't fully soften, and no amount of extra braising time will make up for the wrong animal. If rabbit isn't something your butcher stocks easily, chicken thighs on the bone will take the same marinade and method, though you lose the particular dry, gamey backbone the dish is built around — this stops being salmì in the strict sense and becomes something adjacent and still worth eating.

The wine is not a flavouring, it's the solvent. A full litre for 1.2 kg of meat looks like a lot until you remember it has to both marinate overnight and then reduce down to a sauce at the end — you're budgeting for evaporation and absorption, not just taste. Use something dry and unremarkable; an expensive bottle is wasted here because twelve hours of soaking, plus a long simmer, flattens anything delicate about it. This is where the cheap end of "cooking wine" earns its keep.

The spice list looks excessive until you notice what it actually is: cloves and cinnamon are there because this recipe has one foot in medieval and Renaissance Italian cookery, when game was routinely spiced the way we'd now reserve for puddings — sugar and sweet spice weren't yet divided off into "dessert" the way British kitchens divide them. So don't be alarmed that a savoury rabbit stew has a cinnamon stick in it; it's not a mistake, it's a fossil of an older palate. If you haven't got every single herb on the list — sage, thyme, rosemary, basil, parsley — don't panic and don't substitute for the sake of it. The point is bulk and variety of aromatic oil hitting the wine, not any one herb's personal contribution; losing one or two changes nothing you'll notice.

The flour dusting before browning is there to solve a specific problem: wine-soaked meat is wet meat, and wet meat put straight into oil steams rather than browns, giving you grey rabbit instead of a proper crust. Pat it properly dry first — paper towels, pressed on, not wiped — because flour on top of surface moisture just goes gluey rather than crisping. This is the one place your domestic hob matters: a kazan holds heat evenly across a wide base; your pan on a British hob will have a hot spot in the middle and cooler edges, so brown in batches rather than crowding the pot, or you'll end up with pieces that are pale on one side and nearly burnt on the other.

Olive oil here is just "an oil with no flavour you'll fight against" — any neutral oil with a reasonably high smoke point does the same job; olive oil is traditional because it's what an Italian kitchen had, not because rapeseed oil would ruin anything.

Blending the braising liquid at the end, rather than straining it and discarding the solids, is the whole economic logic of peasant and hunter cooking in one gesture: onion, celery and carrot that spent hours absorbing wine and rabbit fat are not rubbish, they're half the sauce's body. Throwing them away and serving a thin, strained gravy instead would be the real waste here — not of money, since vegetables are cheap, but of the hours you already spent extracting flavour into them. Patience is the ingredient that makes all the others worth using; everything else on the list is just doing what patience lets it do.