I started the weekend off working with some rabbits I got a hold of.
Rabbit is definitely on the list of meat that some people won’t eat because of what it is, no matter how it is sourced. My family briefly had a rabbit for a while when I was a teenager and that did not particularly make me feel any great affection for rabbits as a whole. Though of course, I find them cute when I see them hopping about.
They do look awkward when you buy them almost-whole (typically by the time they get to an end consumer, they’ve had their heads removed). The restaurant I worked at many years ago also had a cheese-and-charcuterie case that we sold out of directly that included some products from a great smokehouse that operated about 40 minutes away from where we were. One time they had some smoked whole rabbits on their inventory list and my boss decided to order three of them. When we unpacked them, well. As my boss memorably put it, “I can’t put these in there like that, they look like a dead dachshund puppy”. So I was sent into the back to get all the meat off and make a smoked rabbit terrine.
I wasn’t going to do that this time, but a whole rabbit is a pain to cook with in the sense of the butchery work that’s required. I decided in this case to cleave off the front and back legs from the ‘saddle’ midsection and put the middles in a little stew with the legs getting fried. I also decided to puree the organ meat and cook it down gently with some whole cream and then run the mix through a food mill into the stew.
I think it came out really well, but now I’ve got some leftover sauce and rabbit legs to deal with tonight. I think I’m going to slice off the meat from the legs and serve that with the sauce over pasta.
The problem with this meal was really how it compressed my options for the next meal. I wanted to get some beef short ribs out of the freezer where they’d been taking up space for almost a month. But I’d usually just braise that and serve them over pasta, and two heavy tomato braises/stews in three days seemed a bit much. But there’s no choice with short ribs—they’ve got to get some kind of long cook or pressure-cooker treatment in order to do anything with them.
I decided to pull up a recipe I’ve made a couple of times from one of Stephanie Izard’s cookbooks where you take braised short ribs, cut the meat away from the fat, and then cube it and fry it enough to give it a crust, then roll that in a spice mix and serve it over avocados and grapefruit with a citrus dressing.
I figured that would create some textural space from the rabbit, plus the spicing on the meat and the acid and richness of the grapefruit-avocado mix would give it a really different flavor.
I love it when a plan comes together: this worked pretty much as intended. (I tossed a few potatoes into the fryer as well to give it a bit more textural variety.)
Right now I’m looking ahead to making some snacks for a committee I serve on where I kind of feel like I need to make it up to people because I’ve been really talking way too much lately. Something closer to silence will hopefully be golden, but maybe some good food will help too. So I’m going to make some plantain chips tonight and also some little pot-au-cremes. I was fortunate enough to find some ripe plaintains without having to go to a speciality market, so I’m feeling good about the cookery ahead.
I think rabbit occurred on the menu occasionally when I was a kid (despite having them as pets!). But my mother also cooked squirrel, so...
At a fancy restaurant I was once served rabbit brain too.