Of course I am not one to suspect my Mistress of orchestrating a set-up. But after inquiring about my New Year’s Eve dinner plans and requiring that my cooking should involve three courses I of course looked up regular dinners and found a few decent recipes that looked like it could form a good starter and main course with a generic desert. But clearly I could have expected this to return back to Victorian era recipes. After the bread baking, the pigeon… well the obvious next step would be the continuation of that trend.

Well, I started looking and it turns out there was a weird obsession with serving rabbit as New Year’s Eve dishes, larded rabbit, or rabbit pie being some of the choices. Of course some others too, one with mutton and turbot (which is a kind of fish) which seemed a bit strange. At least in the Day-by-Day cooking books there was not too much attention to any kind of special New Year’s dish either, nor in other cooking books which do feature segments on Christmas meals but that is about it. Maybe its something that came later as a celebration that includes good food. Nevertheless, I do really enjoy those Day-by-Day cooking books. Like imagine Jamy Oliver or some other big chef of today whom makes cookbooks makes on for 356 days, breakfast, luncheon and dinner specified for each day, that would be some good value for money instead of just pages about how they discovered the recipe and how amazing the family was who cooked it for them and so on. No, just tell me what to cook when, that’s way better. Maybe I just like being told what to do, can you tell?

Anyway, rabbit it is now so its time for me to figure out if I can still buy that for tomorrow and find one of the recipes that does not remind me of the Simpson’s Lard Boy statue when it comes to the way of preparing it.