The Continental Cony

Ravenous, a food column by Jennifer Brizzi

The continental cony

This column originally ran September 6, 2007, in The Woodstock Times, The Saugerties Times and The Kingston Times, etc.

“[Rabbit] can serve as a touchstone to separate food snobs from those earthy characters who really like to eat.”

--Waverly Root

“There was an Old Person whose habits
Induced him to feed upon rabbits;
When he'd eaten eighteen
He turned perfectly green

Upon which he relinquished those habits.”

--Edward Lear

When most of us consider the rabbit, we think of furry pets or perhaps their pelts, or clever characters from stories and folklore. Although rabbit has long been popular on European tables, few of us Americans think of it as food. That’s our loss, because it tastes sweet and mild, with a clean fine texture, is leaner than pork, beef or chicken, and makes a kick-ass gravy revered by plain folks from Appalachia to Umbria. The highest per capita consumption of rabbit is on the Mediterranean island of Malta, where it’s the stuff of the most celebratory occasions.

Its leanness isn’t the only way it’s good for us. Because rabbits are such great growers the farmed ones need no hormones or chemicals to increase production. Rabbit meat is easy on the digestion and high in B vitamins and protein, but low in fat, calories, cholesterol and sodium.

Culinarily speaking, there are several types of rabbit-like creatures eaten around the world. Farmed rabbits are small and chubby, two to four pounds, and mildest in flavor due to their controlled diet and lazy lifestyle. The smaller ones, under 12 weeks old, while eschewed by Iberians as insipid, have fine tender flesh and are good for frying like chicken without drying out. Rabbits over 8 months old and 4 pounds have coarser, firmer flesh and are often roasted. Wild rabbits are much like any wild meat or fish in that they have more character and flavor than those bred on farms. The jackrabbit and the snowshoe rabbit can range from 4 to 10 pounds, and with their sinewy meat are the most similar to the European wild hare. The largest bunny is the 12-pound Arctic, from Greenland and other icy places. With anything bigger than a wee cottontail, braises and stews are best.

Hares have long been loved for their full flavor and dark flesh. In full disclosure I don’t think I’ve ever had a hare but would love to try one. The gourmet blue hare from Scotland and Scandinavia is the same species as the northern hare of Alaska, but hare is pretty hard to find around here; occasionally specialty meat sellers like Savenor's or D’Artagnan have it available for mail-order.

The rabbit family is versatile in the kitchen. Most things that you can do with chicken, pheasant or veal, you can do with rabbit. It’s traditional to marinate it before cooking for a day or two, originally to mute any wild taste, but now more often to add flavor to mild farmed critters. One Umbrian recipe I have for a hare alla cacciatora calls for two whole liters of red wine, one “mediocre” and one “good,” the former to wash the hare with, the latter to marinate it in.

All over Italy there are myriad ways to eat rabbit and hare. The first time I really enjoyed rabbit was at a farm restaurant in Tuscany called Da Baffo, where I had it alla cacciatore with a tomato sauce rich with herbs, wine and lots of fat black olives. My old Italian cookbook Il Cornaccino shows graphic photos for getting the furry beast ready for cooking and includes an intriguing hare treatment of salmi with mushrooms, brandy and pig’s blood, to be served with polenta. Another classic hare dish is pappardelle sulla lepre, wide ribbons of egg-enriched fresh pasta. In central Italy there’s alla porchetta, stuffed with soppressata, prosciutto and fresh fennel. I miss the rabbit stemperata, or agrodolce (a.k.a. bittersweet or sweet and sour) with celery, pine nuts and golden raisins from Kingston’s late lamented Sicilian restaurant Antichi Sapori. Sometimes in Sicily the dish can include chocolate, too.

I probably first had rabbit unawares when in 1980 and 1981 I stayed at my Uncle Conrad’s house in the Pyrenées mountains of France, where the bunny population in my uncle’s hutch grew and then dwindled. Years later at the same place my cousin Douglas made it for my husband and me, deliciously devilled with mustard and grilled. Paula Wolfert’s original The Cooking of Southwest France (Dial Press, 1983) offers three rabbit treatments: the first with prunes, sorrel and salt pork, then a soup with leeks and cream and finally sautéed with preserved pears with ginger. Other French dishes are roast saddle of hare, rabbit roasted with herbs and anise liqueur and the deservedly classic rabbit in mustard sauce.

Spain’s name “Hispania” means “land of the rabbits,” some scholars maintain. There’s the Catalan surf and turf called mar i muntanya, which mixes rabbit up with some decadent combination of mussels, snails, shrimp, monkfish, squid or sole. In other regions you’ll find rabbit with chestnuts from Aragón or conejo con migas with onion, garlic and crispy bread bits. There’s also rabbit with green olives and almonds, with blackberries and brown sugar, with honey-garlic mayonnaise or in sherry sauce. The original paella was not studded with lobster, shrimp and sausage but rather a dish of rice with rabbit, snails, limas and green beans. It’s the very next rabbit dish I plan to cook.

In Diane Kochilias’ scrumptious The Glorious Food of Greece (Morrow, 2001), you’ll find a simple stew with red wine and cinnamon, rabbit with a rich egg and cheese sauce, or with garlicky brown butter and walnuts, hare with a nutty skordalia, and a pricey dish calling for half a bottle of white wine, five lemons, six artichokes, fresh dill and ten scallions.

A Turkish dish studs rabbit with slivers of garlic, covers it with mint and tarragon and spit roasts it. In Germany there’s classic hasenpfeffer, pickled and stewed with bacon, carrots and vinegar. British restaurateur Fergus Henderson, who wrote The Whole Beast (HarperCollins, 2004), offers a lush dish of two rabbits simmered with 60-80 cloves of garlic, bacon, shallots and sherry. In this country, despite rabbit’s lack of trend status, we’ve been cooking it a million ways, from barbecued or southern fried to tamale pied. Cy Littlebee’s Guide to Cooking Fish and Game offers it simply baked, or with gravy, maybe with lots of onion or a little ham, garlic, thyme and mushrooms, or in a decadent dish with six slices of bacon, a cup of sour cream and a cup of melted butter. At a sportsmen’s club's game dinner last year in Rhinebeck I enjoyed a moist tasty rabbit sautéed with tarragon. The late James Beard in his American Cookery (Little, Brown, 1972) seasoned and spiced his rabbit, browned it in bacon fat and braised in a little stock, with a final enrichment of sour cream. Chez Panisse Cooking by Paul Bertolli with Alice Waters (Random House, 1988) offers a recipe for rabbit salad with browned shallots.

I’ve collected so many rabbit recipes I want to try, like Rabbit Pie, Rabbit Jerky, Smothered Rabbit with Apples and Onions, Fried Rabbit in Breadcrumbs, Baked Stuffed Rabbit and those endless French, Spanish and Italian stews and braises. Rabbit’s friends in the stew pot include any kind of mushroom, tomatoes, garlic, fennel, prosciutto, pine nuts, raisins, prunes, raisins, olives, sweet bell peppers, cabbage, shallots, brandy, cider, wine (white and red both work beautifully), cumin, bay, rosemary, thyme, oregano, basil and sage. And always essential is something to sop up the tasty sauce that the low-fat rabbit miraculously makes: polenta, grits, rice or mashed potatoes.

I was long in coming around to loving rabbit. Although I wouldn’t refuse it if served to me, I didn’t go out of my way to buy and cook it. Maybe it reminded me of cat, although actually, as a rodent, the rabbit is closer to Jerry than Tom. Or maybe it was because “Bunny” has been my father’s nickname for me since I was tiny. Many of us, even self-styled gourmets and gourmands, have a visceral aversion to cooking and eating rabbit. Many of my hundreds of cookbooks focus on Mediterranean regions but leave out the rabbit recipes, since it’s such a hard sell. It’s our culture, I guess, where we personify rabbits and give them character, charm and wily ways. Maybe it’s Peter Rabbit, Brer Rabbit, Alice’s White Rabbit, the Velveteen Rabbit, Thumper, Bugs and Playboy Bunnies that keep us from trying such a great meat.

Although Betty Fussell said, “If you live in the country, keep a garden and are a good shot, you will have no trouble securing a constant supply of rabbits,” that doesn’t seem to be true and they’re often hard to find. For a lucky while it was readily available and inexpensive at my closest supermarket, and I went on a rabbit-cooking spree, but then they stopped carrying it. Northwind Farm in Tivoli, who raises natural meats, often has rabbits for sale at the farm and at their booth at the Kingston Farmers Market on Saturdays. Call the farm at 757-5591 for more information.

“This is one species, at least, that we cannot endanger—because wild or tame, in city or in country, the rabbit is a creature of infinite breeding.”

--Betty Fussell in Food in Good Season (Knopf, 1988)

Jennifer Brizzi | P.O. Box 48 | Rhinecliff, New York 12574 | U.S.A.

jenniferbrizzi@yahoo.com