A Single Man's Kitchen
By Jeremy Goodwin (June 2, 2006)


Cooking a rabbit: no mammoth chore

We are dreadfully spoiled; we have such a diverse selection of meats and vegetables all year around. We tend to forget how constrained the diet was before establishment of the transportation infrastructure, refrigeration and factory-style farming.

As little as 200 years ago, many people in the Americas lived or starved by the success of their kitchen gardens and root cellars and the health of their livestock. If you go back further than that, outside of the few major cities hunting wild game was a major factor in the plenty of the larder on this continent. In fact, meat was far more important than it is today. A manifest from the Lewis and Clarke expedition estimated 11 pounds of meat per day per man. When they were stuck around the Continental Divide and faced with a shortage of game, the explorers had to rely on the munificence of local tribes to avoid starvation. The men complained bitterly about having to eat tubers and greens, and they bemoaned their deprivation in their journals, complaining of gastric distress due to such an unnatural diet. Wars were often planned around the harvest; often, the easiest way to win was to have a larger agricultural surplus than your opponents. In the spirit of contrariness, the logistics of food supply was the inspiration for the Russian concept of scorched earth: hungry soldiers do not fight well.

Agricultural surplus is not the only determining factor in the successful growth of a culture or the winning of wars. The Maya's clearing of the forests may have resulted in aberrant microclimates that adversely affected crop yields, but their more fundamental problem was a shortage of energy. Without the wheel but with their inexplicable insistence on coating every stone surface with plaster that, in a rainforest environment, had to be replaced every three to five years, they rapidly depleted their energy. To make plaster, you have to dry limestone until it is desiccated to the point at which its hydroscopic profile is akin to that of concentrated nitric acid, and that takes enormous amounts of heat. The common fuel in the Americas was wood. Without draft animals and carts, they eventually broke their backs manhandling sufficient amounts of wood to make plaster for their monuments. They scarcely had enough wood left over to cook the food from the increasingly less productive farms around their cities. That can make for problems when you have a rapidly burgeoning population.

Most people must be familiar with the macho trophy mentality: the biggest buck, the most quail or dove, the biggest fish. Being a successful hunter and bringing back the figurative bacon has always been associated with social status. Personally, I prefer meat to antlers, but somebody always has to prove it was "this big." 

Although in modern times we are often insulated by Styrofoam and plastic wrap, there is still that instinctive appreciation of a big hunk of steak. There are plenty of tribal societies around the world in which the superior hunter still enjoys increased standing and privileges. Most of us are left with the remnants of this cultural standing: Taking people out to eat in fancy restaurants is actually a subconscious statement about one's ability to provide.

When we think of superior hunting skills, a pervasive image crops up in the minds of many of European heritage: the cliché image of fur-clad men hunting a mammoth or mastodon across the snow fields, armed with only short spears with flint points. For the moment, let us ignore the fact that a four-ton pachyderm requires 400 to 600 pounds of vegetable matter per day, very little of which is available on a glacier or snow pack. Let us also ignore the tendency of Neolithic man in Europe to prefer some warmth, and assume that large grazers were available prey on the southern edge of the ice pack. The effort required for a bunch of men about five feet three inches tall and weighing less than 130 pounds to bring down the largest of the mega-fauna would be a huge risk, as well as something that might have been done only once a generation, mainly for bragging rights at the intertribal meetings. Given that scarcity of sustainable resources is thought to have limited tribal groups to between 30 and 50 people, some simple math banishes the mammoth-hunter myth forever.

If you have 50 people with a normal lifespan of about 30 to 35 years (being generous), half of whom are female and approximately one third of whom are children, and some of which are too old or sick to hunt, manpower is a major problem. You may be left with 10 willing and able males, some of whom are guaranteed major injury or death when facing off against a 4-ton behemoth harboring a very bad attitude toward subdermal flint penetration.

If you hunt too many mammoths you may end up facing a shortage of virile males and capable hunters in your tribe. Yes, I know that women are equally efficient in providing dietary protein, and the archeological evidence supports my view. The earliest sites of post-Ice Age settlements that can be dated congruent with the existence of mega-fauna show a significant paucity of pachyderm bones, but a superabundance of rabbit and rodent bones. Knowing how men can be, it is very likely that rabbits were too small for any self-respecting hunter to concentrate on, leaving the women to set the snares and keep everyone from dying of exposure and malnutrition.

Yes, the men may have brought down a mammoth once in their living memory, but they were dressed in rabbit skins and fed on rabbit, hare, lemming, ground squirrels and anything else that did not make you pay for its meat in spilled blood. They would have been acutely aware of what really kept them alive, well-fed and clothed.

It took a long time to get around to it, but rabbit is the focus of the recipe today. It should not be something at which you turn up your nose-it is easy to prepare and tasty. If you need to justify serving rabbit, just tell everyone that you are following the mammoth hunter's tradition, and then wave a flint-tipped spear around a bit. Nobody will gainsay you or criticize your cooking.

This dish will serve about four people if you serve other dishes with it.


Mammoth Hunter's Rabbit

1 rabbit, cleaned, beheaded and with feet removed 2 medium onions, finely diced 2-3 carrots, diced 2-3 stalks celery, diced 2-4 tablespoons olive oil 1 cup sweet vermouth or marsala 1 tablespoon brown sugar 3 allspice berries 1 tablespoon dried thyme 1 bay leaf Salt and pepper to taste

Common optional additions include garlic, cinnamon stick, chiles, white raisins, ginger and anything else that sounds like fun.

Preparation time: approximately 1 hour

Cut up the rabbit into manageable pieces. You will find it will dislocate quite easily, but usually I just use a cleaver. In a large Dutch oven or any heavy pot with a tight-fitting lid, heat the oil until it is almost smoking and brown the rabbit pieces on all sides. Set the browned meat aside and add the carrots, celery, onion, bay leaf, allspice, sugar and thyme. Stir and sauté until the onion is translucent. This is a classic basis for a lot of French cooking, known as mirepoix, and a delightful base for braising meat.

When the vegetables begin to soften, pour in the vermouth and deglaze the pan, rubbing the fond left from searing the rabbit, preferably with a wooden spoon. Then, add the rabbit pieces, put the lid on, and put it in a 375-400°F oven for 40 minutes.

Remove the rabbit pieces from the cooking fluid, allow them to cool for a few minutes and remove the meat from the bone. I have found this very important; many people are put off rabbit by the sharpness of the bones. At this point you can put the mirepoix in a blender and make fabulous vegetable gravy. Blended or not, add the rabbit meat back to the Dutch oven and heat prior to serving.



Jeremy Goodwin is an author, freelance food writer and owner of The Best Kept Secret. He may be contacted at Jeremy@dcnet2000.com.