Cooking Rabbit

I stoked the fire and put some salt water on to boil.  This would be my second time cooking rabbit.  The first time, I’d cut the rabbit into pieces, marinated it for a couple hours in red wine and brown sugar, then sautéed the meat in a skillet.  It was terrible.  The rabbit was edible in the same sense that a marinated boot sole would be edible.  I tried to serve some of the meat to friends so that I wouldn’t have to eat it all, but they refused.  I had to throw it out.  This time, I planned to cook the rabbit mountain-man style: either roasting or boiling it.  Not, I will note, because I thought it would taste better – but because I care that much about historical authenticity.  In fact, I was not looking forward to eating it.  The unpalatability of my prior culinary product, I suspected as I listened to the fire crackle and watched the salt water boil, was attributable only in part to my marginal abilities in food preparation.  In all likelihood, part of the problem was that rabbit just doesn’t taste very good.  I checked out a few rabbit recipes online, just out of curiosity, and found most of them suspiciously complex – one involving celery, carrots, onions, water chestnuts, mushrooms, chicken broth, salt, pepper, cornstarch, sherry, and not all that much rabbit  – which suggested that rabbit meat needed significant assistance to satisfy the modern palate.  Compare the foregoing ingredient list to the way most people cook a steak: marinate in Dale’s Steak Sauce, grill, eat.  Which meat sounds better: beef or rabbit?

But I am nothing if not persistent.  I cut up some chunks of the rabbit I’d shot and plunked them into the boiling salt water.  I cut a slice of rabbit, jammed it onto a coathanger, and hung it over the fire.  Then I sat back to await results.

A slice of rabbit hanging over the fire.

Rabbit – or to be precise, hare – was an important food source for mountain men.  According to archeologist Sam Drucker, most of the discarded bones around the Green River rendezvous sites came not from buffalo, elk, deer or antelope, but from rabbits.  Rabbits were probably particularly important to members of the Walker Expedition, who traveled through lots of game-poor country.  Buffalo, the mountain men’s staple food, weren’t available west of the Great Salt Lake.  In fact, there wasn’t much game at all along the Humboldt River, the watercourse that the Expedition followed across Nevada, and the Expedition’s members struggled to find game in the Sierra Nevada Mountains during their winter crossing.  When one of the expedition’s hunters killed a deer on the western edge of the Sierras in late October, Zenas Leonard remarked in his journal that it “was the first game larger than a rabbit we had killed since the 4th of August when we killed the last buffaloe near the Great Salt Lake.”  Between the Sierras and the Great Salt Lake, the Expedition survived on jerked buffalo meat and, in all likelihood, a good number of rabbits.

The campfire-roasting method of preparation was probably most common for small groups of trappers.  It’s the way Jeremiah Johnson cooked the rabbit he killed in his eponymous movie.  The method is pretty simple: build fire, hold rabbit over it.  Well-equipped trappers might have had salt and pepper to flavor the meat.  Because the Walker Expedition was both well-equipped and had passed by the Salt River and the Great Salt Lake, they would almost certainly have had salt, and might have had pepper.  When I pulled my hunk-o-rabbit off the fire, I intended to use both.

The boiling method would have been possible only for larger expeditions that carried kettles.  There’s no record of whether the Walker Expedition carried kettles, but roughly contemporaneous, similarly-sized trapping expeditions did.  Many Indians often boiled meat, especially for ceremonial occasions.  The trappers would likely have parboiled the rabbit – which I recently learned means to boil with salt – in order to improve the taste.  In modern parlance, parboiling is supposed to draw the wild, gamey taste out of the rabbit.  When preparing my parboiling pot, I had opened the spout on a can of Morton’s and dumped liberally.

After 45 minutes, I got up to check the salty-water pot.  Reluctantly, I fished out the chunks of meat.  I set them in a bowl and stared at them.  They didn’t look bad, really.  Just like regular morsels of cooked meat.  I was still suspicious.  The rabbit I’d sautéed the time before hadn’t looked bad either, and it had still lost me friends.  Grimly, I picked a chunk up between my fingers.  I put it in my mouth.

A few chunks of parboiled rabbit.

And you know what?  It was good.  Maybe it was just the upcoming holiday, but it tasted like dark turkey meat.  The only problem was that I had used too much salt.  But not bad.  I walked to the fireplace and inspected the slice of meat hanging from the coathanger.  My hopes for this piece were dim – it even looked bad.  Burned on the bottom, fleshy on the top.  Nevertheless, I pulled it down and sliced it off the hanger.  The meat was done.  I tore a piece off the top, started to sniff it but stopped myself, then popped it in my mouth.  And damn if it wasn’t good too.  Even without salt or pepper.  Tasted like grilled dove.

These mountain men didn’t have it so rough after all.