Eat the Whole Rabbit
As part of our Lunar New Year series, #EatNZKaitaki Conor Mertens shares a fascinating story of the Sichuan dish involving rabbit head & challenges us to consider eating more of the odd bits.
I think of myself as a relatively considered diner. I spent the early part of my life in the Marlborough region, eating stuff Dad’s mates had shot.
We had a pet lamb called Thomas who went to a friend’s farm then came back and nestled into our freezer. I begged to cook the docked tail just like on footrot flats, to no avail.
I guess growing up in this way, seeing the odd bits and whole dead animals never bothered me too much. Except ironically lamb’s fry, I still hate that stuff. So it's always been in the back of my mind that offal and odd bits are delicious, pair that with a career in the kitchen and I'm pretty happy to eat and cook most things.
The dish I've centralised this piece of writing about has long been a curiosity to me as it's a beloved cultural mainstay and very much utilises an odd bit. To set the scene I'm going to run through a little history that led to this dish making it into the hearts and bellies of the people of Sichuan.
A brief history of rabbit production in Sichuan, China.
As means to set up a chat about eating everything.
The breeding of rabbits began in Sichuan in the Qing Dynasty (1636-1912) and reached scale in the late Qing Dynasty albeit predominantly for their pelts/fur.
As the Qing Dynasty gave way to the Republic of China and the incentive of foreign trade with the Soviets grew, by 1949 Sichuan farmers were being encouraged more and more to farm rabbits at home to keep up with the export demand.
Between 1952 and 1957 export grew nationally from 1.3 million skins to 6.18 million.
But as with all good things, by 1959 the number of skins purchased dropped by two-thirds and the industry fell into decline.
Fast forward to the 1980s, thanks to rural reforms and opening its doors to the outside world, Sichuan became a major rabbit-raising province. Up until the late 1970s it had ranked 10th overall in rabbit production in China and by the late 1980s the rabbit meat market fell and slowly major rabbit-producing provinces around the country drastically declined, while only Sichuan’s production remained strong.
So here we are, a province in China with a history of producing rabbit at least partially for meat, with head/offal as waste, and also a province with a rich culinary history and reputation as one of the most flavorful and confronting cuisines in China. Is it really a huge surprise that a spicy braised rabbit head or ‘mom rabbit head’ became so beloved and ingrained in the food culture of the Sichuan people?
The yarn goes, a woman named Shi Guiru who worked at the Sanqiang Roll Factory by day ran a Mala Tang stall, which is a stall specializing in hot pot. She had an abundance of rabbit heads left over after preparing a hot pot. Thinking it would be a pity to discard them, she started cooking these for her son by simmering them in leftover hotpot broth. Eventually, customers got wind of it, they tried it, loved it and demand grew for what became known as Mom rabbit head.
Having worked in restaurants, this kind of dish development isn’t uncommon. In some small casual places you might have regulars who hang out a little late, getting caught up in conversation while the staff meal is being cooked and some staff are sitting down to eat. Eventually, a customer may be offered some of the ‘staffie’, and if it’s a particularly good night and the customer pesters enough, this dish might make it as an ‘off menu’ item.
The demand for this dish grew so much that its popularity encouraged Shi Guiru to stop selling hotpot and focus solely on rabbit heads. The dish became a local delicacy and started being sold by many other street vendors, solidifying itself in the culture of the Sichuanese people, and invoking nostalgia and delight in those who enjoy it.
As you can imagine, trying to eat a rabbit's head poses many difficulties. Most of the stuff you want to eat is enclosed inside a skull, but rather than see this as negative, the people of Sichuan savor sucking the spicy seasonings off the head and cracking into the skull to get to the many textures of the different parts of offal trapped inside.
It’s worth mentioning here that in the Sichuanese dialect, they say ‘kěn tù tóu’ meaning to eat, however, colloquially this has become known to mean ‘to kiss’. This is because eating the rabbit head requires slurping and sucking also present in a French kiss.
First you crack the skull for better access, then pop out the eyes and slurp the brain, tongue and cheeks, followed by the smashing of a cold beer. Slightly more violent than a French kiss but potentially more delicious depending on your partners’ oral hygiene.
This dish in particular got me thinking about how using all the bits and reducing waste can be partially hindered by a reluctance to eat things that remind us of the animal they come from or just downright squeamishness. The effort vs reward definitely comes into it, as some food requires a large amount of effort to eat. Not only rabbit heads but also animals like crab which are finicky at best despite their fantastic flavour, or things like tripe and tendon that require excessive cooking or technique to make palatable. I think education and ability play a role too. The overwhelming task of cooking these ‘lesser cuts’ or by-products to ensure they taste good can be challenging for most people or they lack the knowledge to know it is edible at all.
Many large-scale production companies who produce most of our meat and poultry discard these extra bits because either there is no money to be made or the cost required for staff to prepare them for public sale is more than just sending them to a pet food factory.
If there were relevant demand would this change things? Or is it a licensing issue in terms of what offal can and cannot be sold depending on the abattoir where it’s been handled? Because these days finding sustainably farmed or organic offal can be a challenge - you don’t even get the giblets inside a whole chicken anymore.
It is unreasonable for me to expect people to just start eating more offal or odd bits? As a reference point relevant to our lifetimes, who remembers beef cheeks and lamb shanks being the cheap affordable cuts? These days, despite not fetching a premium they’re definitely not considered a cheap meat option. Essentially this is a cow’s head and sheep’s ankles, not such a far cry from rabbits head at all. Also what happens to the guts? Most sausages today are made with synthetic casings, so the demand from this sector has decreased too.
A very popular fixture on a menu of a place I worked was an intestine stew. I can confidently say that if given this stew without context most people would have enjoyed it and not even picked up on the fact the meat was odd bits. All this took was a pressure cooker, some good broth and a few potatoes. but if you don’t know you don’t know.
So a final thought…What is the best approach to convince the general public who may have grown up on prime cuts of meat wrapped in plastic or frozen in bags, (depending on their cultural or culinary background), that they should make more of an effort to consume ‘bits’ that are more confronting and difficult to cook? Is saving the planet and reducing waste enough of a reason? Is there time in New Zealand’s relatively young culinary heritage to create dishes using these other bits that have nostalgia and cultural meaning? Something to think about!
Happy year of the rabbit ya’ll!!
Original content and images from Conor Mertens.