A fine meal made from hare found on the road

After midnight, driving home from Cork Airport — the last leg of our 15 hour journey from La Gomera, a small island off Tenerife in the Canary Islands — we came upon a fortunate, if regrettable, treat.

It was cold night, and windy, rain driving against the windscreen. Nearing Timoleague, I spotted, between the beating wipers, a white scut of a tail attached to a russet body stretched on the verge and said to my wife “That’s a hare!”

We were past it before we had time to think but as we plunged downhill toward the village, I suggested that, if it was a hare, and undamaged, it would make a great goodbye dinner for our son and wife, arriving from London to spend two nights with us before flying out of Cork to Canada, there to spend a year.