Coniglio alla Romagnola

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Rabbit is the traditional Sunday meat of Romagna — more common historically than beef in this part of the Emilian lowlands, where families kept rabbits in backyard hutches alongside chickens and the household pig. Coniglio alla romagnola is a braised rabbit preparation that exemplifies the Romagnol approach to meat: straightforward, flavour-forward, and deeply tied to the garden. The rabbit is jointed, browned in olive oil (Romagna uses more olive oil than butter-centric western Emilia), then braised slowly with white wine, tomato, rosemary, garlic, and often green or black olives. The technique is a braise that walks the line between dry roasting and wet braising — the liquid should reduce as the rabbit cooks, concentrating around the meat rather than submerging it. The result is rabbit with deeply browned, almost caramelised skin, tender meat that falls from the bone, and a concentrated sauce that is somewhere between a pan jus and a ragù. In Romagna, rabbit is served on its own as a secondo with bread to mop up the sauce, or the sauce is used to dress pasta (pappardelle or strozzapreti) as a primo, and the rabbit follows as the secondo — the classic Romagnol two-course extraction from a single protein.

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