Rabbit Pudding with mushrooms – This recipe, in its heyday, would have been the ultimate in terms of living off the land outside your front door.  For country dwellers, most of the ingredients would have been growing in your garden, or on your allotment, waiting to be picked in woodland, or running wild across a field nearby.  Today, you could still catch your own rabbit, but are more likely to catch one already skinned and quartered for you at a quality butcher’s shop.

Ingredients

• Two young rabbits skinned and cut up into joints
• A few slices of fat bacon cut into thin strips
• 4 large finely-chopped sage leaves
• I tablespoon of chopped onion
• Salt & pepper to taste
• 4 oz (113 g) suet
• 8 oz (225 g) flour
• 8 oz (225 g) mushrooms

Method

1. Combine the flour and suet to make a suet crust.
2. Line a big pudding basin with the crust
3. Put in the centre of the crust a layer of rabbit, chopped sage and onion, bacon strips,then a layer of chopped mushrooms, and continue until the basin is full. Put a good sprinkle of flour between each layer.
4. Add water to almost the top of the crust and cap the pudding with a layer of suet crust. Seal it well.
5. Steam the pudding on a low heat for 3 hours.

Source: Carol Wright. Cassells Country Cookbooks: Yorkshire (1975). Published by Cassell.