Conejo en Salmorejo

Conejo en salmorejo is rabbit left overnight in a marinade of garlic, paprika, herbs, wine and vinegar, then cooked slowly in that same marinade until the sauce is thick and dark. It is the great inland dish of the Canary Islands, the thing to order when you have driven up out of the resorts into the hills and found a restaurant with six tables and a car park full of local cars.

The first thing to clear up is the name. If you know Spanish food, salmorejo means a chilled tomato-and-bread soup from Córdoba, thick enough to stand a spoon in, served with ham and egg on top. That dish and this one have nothing whatsoever to do with each other beyond a shared word. Order conejo en salmorejo in the Canaries and you will get a hot plate of stewed rabbit, not a bowl of cold soup, and anyone who tells you the islanders have misnamed it has the history backwards.

It arrives as pieces of rabbit on the bone in a reddish-brown sauce that clings rather than pools, almost always with potatoes beside it. It is rich, garlicky and slightly sharp from the vinegar, and it is filling in a way that suits the mountain weather it belongs to.

The word came first, the soup came later

Here is the detail worth knowing. Salmorejo is built on salmuera — brine — and in old Spanish it meant a spiced, vinegary preserving liquid for meat. It appears in Spanish cookery writing long before the tomato was in common use in Spain at all, since tomatoes arrived from the Americas in the sixteenth century and took a very long time to be trusted as food. The Cordoban soup that now owns the word is, in culinary terms, the newcomer.

The Canarian usage preserves the older sense: a brine-based marinade, applied to meat. That is why the islands' version contains no tomato, is served hot, and is a way of treating rabbit rather than a dish in its own right. You will occasionally see the same marinade used on pork or chicken under the same name. If you want the Andalusian version on a mainland trip, our southern Spain guide covers where it is done properly — just do not expect it here.

What goes into the marinade

Recipes vary house to house, and arguing about the proportions is a regional sport, but the frame is consistent:

• Garlic, a great deal of it, crushed rather than sliced.
• Pimentón — Spanish paprika, usually sweet, sometimes with a little hot mixed in. This is what colours the sauce.
• Wine and vinegar, normally a dry island white and a white wine vinegar. The acid tenderises the meat and carries the garlic into it.
• Herbs — thyme and oregano above all, plus bay leaf, and very often a pinch of cumin, which is the flavour visitors cannot quite place.
• Olive oil, and in some kitchens a chopped onion and a little chilli.

The rabbit is jointed, submerged in the lot and left in a cool place for at least twelve hours, often a full day. It is then lifted out and browned, and the marinade is poured back in and reduced with the meat until the sauce thickens. Nothing is strained; the garlic and herbs stay in the pan and end up on the plate. That is why a good one looks rough and speckled rather than smooth.

Wild rabbit, and why it matters to the taste

Rabbits are not native to the Canaries. They arrived with European ships, found islands with almost no predators and bred exactly as rabbits do, becoming both a pest on farmland and a free source of meat for people who had very little of it. That combination is the whole origin of the dish: a strong marinade makes lean, tough, gamey meat into something delicious.

Restaurants today use a mixture of farmed and wild rabbit, and the difference is noticeable. Farmed rabbit is pale, mild and tender. Wild rabbit — conejo de monte — is darker, firmer and considerably more flavoured, and it is what the recipe was designed around. The hunting season runs in the late summer and autumn, with hunting permitted on set days of the week and rules that differ between islands, so autumn is when you are most likely to be offered the wild version. Ask; kitchens are usually pleased to be asked.

The hunting is done with the podenco canario, a lean, upright-eared hound bred in the islands for exactly this work and still kept in numbers in the countryside. If you walk in the hills and hear a pack working a slope below you, that is what it is.

Where to eat it

Inland and uphill, essentially always. This is not seafront food, and the standard drops sharply the closer you get to a promenade.

On Gran Canaria the mountain villages are the heartland. Tejeda, high in the centre near Roque Nublo, has several restaurants that do it well and views to match; Artenara above it is the highest village on the island and includes cave restaurants dug into the rock. Down the southern side, the palm valley at Fataga and the old town of Santa Lucía de Tirajana are both reliable stops on a day's drive.

On Tenerife it belongs to the hill villages too — Vilaflor on the road up to the national park is the obvious one, and rabbit turns up regularly on the short handwritten menus of the guachinches in the northern wine country. Lanzarote, Fuerteventura and La Palma all have their own versions, and on Lanzarote the dish carries a small extra joke: islanders there are nicknamed conejeros, rabbit-people, after the animals that overran the place.

What comes with it

Potatoes, in one of two forms. Either a pile of fried potatoes to push through the sauce, or papas arrugadas with mojo on the side. The mojo is not strictly needed — the salmorejo sauce is already doing that job — but it appears anyway on most tables in the islands, and the green coriander one suits the dish better than the red.

Bread matters more than usual here, because the sauce is the best part and there is always more of it than meat. Ask for extra if the basket runs dry. A robust red is the right drink: a young listán negro from the islands handles the garlic and vinegar in a way a white cannot, and island wine in general is better and cheaper inland than it is on the coast.

Eating rabbit when you would rather not

Plenty of British and Irish visitors baulk at rabbit, and it is worth saying plainly that it is a perfectly ordinary meat across southern Europe with no more ceremony attached to it than chicken. It tastes closer to chicken thigh than to game, especially the farmed version, and the marinade dominates in any case.

There are, though, bones — small, numerous and sharp-ended, and the dish is eaten with fingers as much as cutlery. If that will spoil the meal for you, most of the same restaurants cook goat, cochino negro black pork or ropa vieja from the same repertoire, and the country cooking will be just as good.

Making the drive worth it

The dish and the landscape go together, and the honest recommendation is to build a day around both rather than hunting for rabbit near your hotel. Drive up in the morning, walk something, eat at two o'clock when the locals do, and come down in the late afternoon.

Mountain roads in the Canaries are narrow, steep and full of hairpins, and the drive up to Tejeda or Vilaflor takes longer than the distance suggests — read how driving works in the islands if you are hiring a car, and bear in mind that this is a dish served with wine at the top of a mountain road. Village restaurants also close early in the evening and often shut one day a week, which catches people out; the islands' opening hours run on the Spanish clock, and lunch is the main event.

Is it worth ordering?

Yes, and it is the single best argument for leaving the coast. Conejo en salmorejo is the dish that shows what Canarian cooking does when there is no fish in sight: a cheap animal, a fistful of garlic, a bottle of vinegar and a day of patience, turned into something that people drive across an island for.

Eat it inland, in autumn if you can, with the wild rabbit if it is offered and the bread basket kept coming. Then try the salt-fish sancocho for the coastal half of the same story, or work through the wider Canarian menu to see how the two halves of the archipelago's kitchen fit together.