Rabbit Meat

For my birthday this year my aunt Silvija taught me how to slaughter and skin a rabbit. It's not difficult, but it's also not that easy: there's a sort of mental hump you have to get over. It's a bizarre stream of consciousness: she takes out a largish bunny and has to calm him down, saying things to him, "there there, shhh, everything's okay, just relax buddy"; then she says to me, "now grab one of those sticks and whack him here or here," pointing between his ears or right behind them. I decided between the ears made for a better angle. Should I whack it as hard as I can? "Yup," she said. I had to go through the motion of bringing the stick down on it's head several times before I actually did it. I wasn't sure I could even do it; she'd offered to just let me watch this time, if I wanted, but I thought, I can do this. And I did: I brought the stick down right between the ears with a mighty whack that crushed his skull immediately. His extremities shot out and he shook for a moment, but no sound betrayed the slaughter, which was very good: my aunt told me if you don't get the job done at once they start squealing, and then all the other rabbits in the other room start squealing, and that's a sound the neighbors can hear. We then hung him up by a back foot off a roof beam and left.

You can leave rabbits hung up in the cold for days, but if you do they'll be frozen when you skin them, which will freeze your hands, so told me Silvija. So just a couple hours later we went back to finish the job. "Cut his feet off," she said, handing me a pair of tree shears. Holy shit I thought, what if he's just knocked out? Before we'd started she'd told me about a time the rabbit was only knocked out, and when she came back for it it'd escaped. What if it's like that? Well, I sure hoped not, which is about all I could do. I cut the front feet off.

Now if you're going to skin a rabbit, you should string him up first. That way, when you get to the skinning, you can just pull the skin down: otherwise you have to hold the rabbit in one hand and pull with the other, which I can't imagine is very easy. She showed me how to slice through the skin on one back leg, then I did the other one. The important thing is not to cut into the meat: first, that makes the meat not as good; second, then it gets bloody (we got through the whole process with barely any blood on our hands). We next cut down to connect the incisions and start pulling the skin down over the belly. As you pull the skin down, minus the little bit around the butt hole, steam rises, which is kind of gross. You have to keep snipping away at the transparent paper like thing that keeps the skin attached, which is even more delicate: if you cut through the intestines you'll ruin the whole meat.

Once you've pulled off the skin you snip though the same paper like thing to get at the organs. First you remove the good ones, the liver and kidneys. The most delicate cut of all is to remove the gall blatter: it's tiny organ the shape of a large vitamin, and nicking it rather than snipping it off would ruin the liver. She did that of course, and I was very impressed. Maybe I shouldn't be surprised, her son is one of the most highly regarded surgeons in Vilnius. Last, only the intestines are left; you cut through the pelvis so you can remove them still connected to the butt hole (without cutting them and risking getting shitty). A similar risk is present when removing the bladder, but luckily our rabbit had just relieved itself, apparently.

Once we got down to the end I understood why I had to cut the front feet off: the skin came off the front legs together with the feet intact easily, instead of having to pull the skin off the feet. once we got to the head it was sort of stuck, and I asked isn't it simpler to just chop the head off at this point. You don't cook the head anyway, right? And that's what we did. We actually cut it a bit farther down the neck than is necessary, but we did that because of the might whack I'd struck: there was a big bloody bruise under the skin all the way down the neck from the skull, which is apparently considered bad to eat. Although she did tell me about a blood soup that my grandfather's mother used to make when they slaughtered bigger animals. She also told me she used to save the tails for Liepa and Sirvydas to use in school plays.

I took the carcass home to butcher. I couldn't find a cook book that showed how to do it exactly, but it wasn't complicated, just like a chicken really, except with no breast. There were six good pieces: the back legs had the most meat, the front legs had less but some, the lower-back had plenty, and the ribs and upper-back had some too. Silvija said some people prefer the lower-back, which has two loin shaped pieces, and some prefer the back legs, which look sort of like chicken thighs, because the drum stick part of the leg is just bone, really.

After two days of brining I used this recipe for rabbit fricassee, and it turned out really well, the gravy especially was very tasty. My special lady and I each ate a back leg, and my five year old took a bite or two of a front leg. She was rather squeamish about eating it, because rabbits are "so polite." I made sure to butcher it out of her sight, but I didn't lie to her when she asked what's for dinner. My special lady, especially, having grown up on a farm, thought it appropriate for her to understand where food comes from.