Rabbits - lots out there but not in the shops

"eat a rabbit, save the land" Australian saying

As I was walking into Eltham today I passed my neighbour who is building a rabbit-proof fence around his property. They are eating everything he said - and they probably are. He is a relatively new neighbour and has been doing a lot of work re-landscaping his property, which involves putting in lots of new plants and no doubt the rabbits have had a go. I know if I ever do any serious planting I protect the plants with little cages - either of plastic or wire. And when we came back from our holiday I found they had eaten all my silver beet and parsley. In Australia they are a menace. The picture above is obviously old but I gather the numbers are growing again in spite of myxamatosis and the calicivirus. They are not quite in plague proportions as above, but there are a lot around. Parks Victoria regularly puts down poison to kill them off. If you come home in the dark around here you will see rabbits hopping around everywhere.

Rabbits therefore have a really bad image in Australia. This is not helped by the fact that during the Depression - which was a very big thing in Australia - much more so than in England it seems to me - rabbits were viewed as the food of the poor and trapping them for their skins provided people with a little bit of extra income. They were shot and trapped for food too. And they were not rationed in WW2 either, and so again they became a poor man's food. Indeed they have been down the ages. In Britain they were shot and trapped - often using ferrets - and this has been going on since medieval times. Ferreting, as it was called, was the working man's weekend sport. So rabbits do not have a good image and since the two big biological attempts to get rid of them, wild rabbits have been avoided for fear of contamination and illness I guess, even though I believe the calicivirus is not transferable to humans.

medieval ferrets

ferreting

To confirm the food of the poor image, I remember that we used to have it a fair bit when we were young - often towards the end of the month when the money was getting short. For rabbit was cheap. Rabbit stew was one of my very favourite dishes. My mother used to soak the rabbit overnight in water, to make it whiter I think. And then it was cut up and put in a pot with vegetables and water, and maybe some dumplings and then just stewed. Pretty simple but I loved it.

"does anyone cook quite like mother - even if her dishes were sometimes overcooked to blazes." Maggie Beer

And I don't think my mother overcooked it - that or anything - well, maybe cabbage.

But to return to the rabbits. I believe my mother's parents kept rabbits at home for food - doubtless they killed them themselves. Indeed when I stayed in France, when I stayed with the local policeman for a week or so, they kept rabbits, and I remember him killing one. I didn't see him do it but I do remember the aftermath - the skinning and the gutting. And anyway in my childhood you used to see them hanging up at the butcher's - complete with fur. I'm afraid I thought nothing of it. Live eels in a tank were much more frightening and horrific to my youthful eyes.

"This is a food that requires you to acknowledge you are eating an animal. That's a good thing: if an oven-ready chicken looked more like, well, a chicken, more of us might choose the free-range option." Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

It's also something that could make you go vegetarian. For rabbits really illustrate the conundrum of opposites - so very cute, but such a pest.

There are endless cute children's stories about rabbits, not to mention the Easter Bunny - and people keep them as pets, though they tend to be the rather fluffier and cuter varieties shown above, rather than the wild European rabbit (below) that is such a pest.

Not that they aren't cute too. When I see one in the evening on the road, I know I should mow it down because it's a pest, but I just can't bring myself to do it. And I too have been sucked in by all those literary rabbits - Peter Rabbit, Rabbit in Winnie-the Pooh, the White Rabbit, Watership Down - the list is endless.

Why are they such a pest? Well they multiply at an enormous rate. They eat everything right down to the roots, so that the plants do not regenerate, thus causing soil erosion. Their burrowing activities also destroy the environment. They ringbark trees and all of this destruction of the environment means that the native species lose their habitat, cannot compete and die out. You would think that their behaviour would also mean destruction for them too, but apparently not. Even when those two diseases almost wiped them out, the few survivors, who were presumably more immune, were able to reproduce themselves at such a rate that we were back to square one in no time at all. People built enormously long fences - one crossed WA from top to bottom, but it was pretty useless. There were so many rabbits they stacked up against the fence and hopped over each other and over the top. Well I'm not sure whether that is an apocryphal story, but I did see it online. Maybe we should be exhorting people to go out and trap rabbits and then eat them again to save the land.

The problem with that is that the few rabbits that we do eat, are now farmed rabbits. Apparently we used to export wild rabbits - back to where they came from. It was a major industry, which collapsed with the introduction of myxamatosis and the calicivirus. It's hard to find rabbit in the shops though. Woolworths certainly didn't have any today, though I think I have seen it very occasionally in Coles, and you can get it in specialist poultry shops and butchers, but it's not that cheap, though it's not expensive either.

Mind you, in Europe, they have never stopped eating rabbit. And they have a massive range of dishes they make from it. I often choose it when it's on the menu. Terrines are an example. Here in Australia we don't seem to do terrines and only a very few pâtés too. As for rillettes - they are more or less unheard of except in fancy restaurants. In Europe every supermarket and market will have endless varieties of terrine - many of them made with rabbit. And they still hunt it too - well they hunt anything really. If you are in the French countryside you will see many signs saying 'réservé au chasse' (reserved for the hunt) and you need to be careful you don't stray into these bits of land or you might get shot! I think that across Europe the same can probably be said.

The one advantage of farmed rabbits - other than the lack of disease - is that they are fatter and juicier, though frankly I would contest that as the rabbits I see hopping around here look pretty big and fat. For rabbit is not a fatty meat and is simultaneously good for you and difficult to cook properly, at least if you try and roast it.

"Because of its leanness, the fail‑safe way to cook rabbit is slowly and carefully. Stews and braises are good treatments, and gentle cooking is key to tenderise the meat: be a bunny simmerer, not a bunny boiler. Fast, hot roasting is more risky – it will work with a bacon-barded young bunny, but that's not always easy to identify unless you've shot it yourself. ... there's not a lot of spare fat on a rabbit. So, while it's not hard to make it tender and delicious, it does require some well-chosen lubricants. Fatty bacon or pancetta is the default addition to stews (or to wrap round young rabbit for roasting), but yoghurt, cream and coconut milk are nifty, too. What you always get in spades is flavour, with a hint of gaminess and that lovely, herbal undertone from wild animals that have foraged widely." Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

All of my favourite cooks have recipes, and I'm sure yours do too. So go to a proper butcher, or the market and buy one and make it into something delicious. And if it's wild you will have the bonus of helping rid Australia of this cuddly pest.