I’ve reused a title I’ve used before. You see, I once wrote about restaurants in which discerning gourmets could chow down on rabbit in San Francisco. When the article came out people came after me with a vengence. You’d have thought I’d asked them to eat their very own parakeets or cocker spaniels or something.
Let’s face it, bunnies seldom make good pets. They’re just cute I suppose—if you like fluffy animals who don’t give a hoot about their captors.
It’s just funny to me that in Italy a coniglio, or rabbit, is good eats, and right across the pond the they’re considered a worthy if fluffy-furred art form.
I was thinking all this when reading Little Bunny Foo-Foo Went Hoppin’ …Onto My Plate From La Tavola Marche. Coniglio alla Cacciatora was my initiation into American’s deep tradition of Rabbit taboos. Once, when cooking for an archaeological expedition in Sardinia, I decided to make the dish. Later I was told I had to make Chicken alla Cacciatora for the squeamish—and I wasn’t allowed to make it in the same pot as the rabbit!
In my village in Italy, folks keep rabbits right in the same pen with the chickens. I doubt they keep rabbits just for their eggs. There has to be something to put over the polenta when you can’t bag a wild boar, after all.
So what makes a rabbit more worthy of old age death than a wild boar?
I’ll never know I suppose. This arbitrary picking odd links in the food chain thing seems without reason and is therefore devoid of any reasonable explanation.
Of course you rabbit-lovers have a curse to use. You can wish rabbit starvation on the rest of us. That’s when all you have to eat is lean meat, like rabbit as winter comes on, and you eat it and you get sicker and sicker and you eat more and more and actually starve. A tiny bit of fat (or perhaps even some good carbohydrates) would enable you to live, enable your body, as I understand it, to produce amino acids to repair itself and bolster the immune system. But when the bunnies are running out of things to eat until they’re lean as they can be, then there’s not much vegetation around either. Gold miners in California were particularly hard hit by this dreadful disease, I’m told.
So, um, maybe I’ll just have a slab o’ cow. I mean, winter is coming on, and, you know, seeing that t-bone nestled in its little Styrofoam prison is so reassuring. I mean, it’s not like it was ever alive at all…