I have made what I think is a rather nice plate of stewed rabbit with some very creamy (no cream, just milk and butter) potato, a few glazed button onions and fine ribbons – chiffonade, as we cooks call it – of sorrel. “What was your thinking behind that?” asks a sous chef, just as we are getting rather busy. I didn’t have time to explain. Some dishes just seem right.

One slightly boring answer is the acidity in the sorrel serves to offset the richness of the rabbit. It gives the bunny and mash a lift. Another answer is a matter of seasonality. Sorrel in a dish is the gustatory equivalent of a bank of snowdrops or daffodils: it lifts it out of the drab passage of winter into the promise of spring. To put rabbit and sorrel together seems the most natural and perfect conjunction: both survive on the margins of the countryside, wild but unregarded. The British still have little interest in our most common wild mammal and sorrel only captures the imagination of the few.