The trouble with rabbits
Monday, November 2, 2009 at 10:11PM 
I just happened to jump into a conversation the other day (okay, it was on Twitter) about why more people don't eat rabbits. They're an incredibly sustainable animimal to raise for food: they multiply quickly, are easy to feed, don't require large resources. Also, rabbit is delicious. So why don't we eat rabbit like we eat chicken? Here are a few reasons.
1. Many people think they're too cute to eat.
2. They are tricky to cook and eat because they have a lot of tiny bones, and once you get beyond the legs you really have to work hard to extract meat.
3. They're relatively expensive: $22 for a rabbit vs. $12 for a comparably sized chicken at the Park Slope Food Coop.
4. Some people think rabbit tastes gamey.
Okay, the cute thing kind of underscores the denial we all have over eating meat/animals in the first place. I'll leave that aside. And I'll get to #2 later. As for cost, if they're so cheap to raise, why are rabbits so expensive?
Fellow food blogger Ulla Kjarval (Goldilocks Finds Manhattan), who grew up on a farm upstate and knows a thing or two about eating rabbits, tells me it's because rabbit processing is expensive. Processing means slaughtering and butchering. Neither hooved nor poultry, rabbit exists in a highly-regulated no-man's land or processing. No one wants to deal with them, and those who do charge a lot for the trouble. I joked a little about becoming a rabbit processor myself just to keep the bunnies coming. (By the way, Ulla was on Hot Grease today!)
Anyway, Ulla recommended this recipe for rabbit with prunes from Colloquial Cook. As you can see from the photo, I overcooked mine a bit, but it was still delicious. And if you buy your rabbit from Dartagnan it will not taste remotely gamey (#4). For this dish I used just the legs.
Mustard greens are a bright accompaniment to rabbit
The rest of the rabbit I browned in a pot and them simmered in water with onion, bay leaf, and rosemary for stew. This takes care of #3, the bones. I extracted all that delicious rabbit flavor from the bones into a broth. Then I let it cool overnight.
The next day I pulled off all the meat and shredded it. It's not so hard when you do it by hand rather than with a fork and knife.
Then I strained the broth and added about 2 cups buttermilk, a chopped yukon gold potato, and a couple of chopped carrots (Lane picked out the veggies). The buttermilk went especially well with the stew, but I should point out that I used raw buttermilk from a farm. Most commercial buttermilk sold in the supermarket is made with thickening agents, while natural buttermilk is think like skim milk (it's the liquid leftover from when you make butter, hence the name). You can boil or simmer natural buttermilk, but my experience is that commercial buttermilk curdles if you boil it, so be careful. And then enjoy your cute, expensive yet economically cooked, hardly gamey stew!
buttermilk, rabbit, sustainable food
Reader Comments (6)
great post!! rabbit is very lean it is easy to over do:) looks lovely!
Adriana, great post! You almost have me convinced to buy a rabbit and give it a whirl. Do you know what questions I should ask of the farmer or butcher? I wouldn't know where to start.
That's a good question! I think you're lucky if you can find rabbit at all, much less find any information about the rabbit. I'm just learning about it myself at this point so I'm not sure what the key rabbit questions would be. But I'd start with asking about how the rabbit was raised, what it ate, how old it was when slaughtered.
There's an upcoming workshop in Brooklyn on raising, slaughtering, butchering, and cooking rabbit. I can't make it this time, but it sounds amazing and I'm hoping they run the workshop again.
I can't get past eating something from the rodent family. I think we all have a variety of meats that we are culturally comfortable eating that don't seem "strange" to us. I have lived in Montana for 7 years now so I am fine with eating elk and have tried antelope jerky which may seem odd to people on the East Coast. I can say I have never looked for rabbit at the grocery store.
Ellen, I've tried elk and would love to try antelope. Send some over! But I'm wondering... have you had jackelope? ;)
You're brilliant.