It was a huge hirsute blanket quilted from dozens of silken rabbit pelts on which I was deflowered. The dreamy dichotomy on my skin of course beard and velvety blanket still floods me with warm, sticky pleasure.
It was desire yet again that led me to rabbits: specifically to a strip of scrappy row houses in the bowels of Oakland for the most sublime rabbit rillettes. As I approached my destination, dirty ribbons of freeway overhead provided the white noise of our collective hurried insanity. A few blocks to the east lies a recycling center and the same number of blocks to the west, a scrap yard; the vague venting of grinding metal adding to the bleak din. A burnt, industrial smell from the nearby ports clung to the grayish haze like the tattered lining of a smoker’s pea coat.
Varying shades of humanity with glazed eyes and manic energy pushed pinched shopping carts over potholes in the sidewalks, the red plastic nameplates of their rightful retail owners banging against the scuffed metal baskets where toddlers once sat, their fat legs protruding through the gaps.
Smack in the middle of the block sits a small forlorn house and its tiny driveway surrounded by a high chain-linked fence, a metal-mouth of braces safeguarding a bright smile in the midst of crookedness and blight.
The house’s wood floors, stripped by hand and lightly stained, shone in the late morning sun; vintage furniture bore fine lines and the scattering of art hung by a honed eye. The generous kitchen was anchored by an antediluvian commercial stove, a black behemoth scored on Craigslist and helmed for decades by various captains of their canteens. Glass jars filled with dried herbs, oils, and spices lined the counters, and a row of good carbon steel knives stood at attention, affixed to a thick magnet mounted on the wall.
We pushed through to the back of the house and down a rickety, rotting staircase to a long, narrow garden. Wooden beds set in bark paths overflowed with herbs and flowers and lettuces gone to seed. Propped against the fence were bee boxes painted a long faded robin’s egg blue, producing gallons of wonderfully distinctive honey (for which I trade decent Barolo to lavish on my morning’s tea).
At the end of the garden, butted against a concrete wall resides a chicken coop built on stilted legs and overflowing with straw. Across from the poultry was a large cage, its several levels housing a dozen fat, well raised, Florida White rabbits.
As we fawned over the rabbits and marveled at their albino red eyes, it was explained to me that these small mammals reside in the family Leporidae of the order Lagomorpha. All of the eight different genera classified as rabbit are herbivores, subsisting on a diet high in hard-to-digest cellulose. Cattle and sheep, also herbivores, chew their food, regurgitate it, and re-chew the cud, making it easier to digest. Rabbits, however, utilize hindgut fermentation, passing two types of feces: a hard dropping, and later, a softer black pellet made up of microorganisms and undigested plant cell walls. Also called a caecotroph, the soft pellet is immediately eaten. This double digestion allows the bacteria in the pellets to fully process the plant carbohydrates, enabling the rabbit to extract all of the nutrients.
While they can be found in many parts of the planet, more than half of the world’s rabbit population lives in North America.
Minus two.
We chose two males, their fur as thick and sensuous as the hair on a young lover’s head. We made haste to the basement, where we gave our thanks and quickly broke their necks, their deaths immediate. They were then strung up on a small jerry-rigged gambrel to bleed out and be skinned and eviscerated; the blood and guts returned to the garden as compost to begin the lifecycle once again.
Rillettes: the word trips off the tongue. Similar to pâté, rillettes were originally made with pork, but rabbit, bird, and fish are now often made into this decadent treat. The meat is cooked in seasoned pork fat until terribly tender, pounded into a paste, packed into small pots and covered with a thin layer of the fat. A thick spoonful spread across a crusty butt of hot country bread, pain de campagne, makes one believe in the superiority of the French; they grok the gastronomic harmony of fineness and rusticity. Dishes prepared for kings made from whatever the land afforded.
And while the recipe for rillettes is different in each region of the France, Anjou and Touraine are noted for their fine spread, usually made from pork, often molded into the shape of a pyramid and topped with the pig’s tail. God help you, if you are the guest of honor.
In a heavy cast iron pot, we rendered two pounds of pork fat in a dribble of olive oil, adding cubed smoked bacon and roughly chopped mirepoix, just barely browning everything before adding a coarse pestle of black pepper and sea salt. With a heavy cleaver, we split the two rabbits into quarters and laid them to rest in the pot, adding thyme and a bottle of French white wine, an Arbois worthy of a half-glass before lunch. The entire medley was covered in a dense chicken stock before being blessed with a fresh bay leaf and lidded tightly; set to roast in the oven until fragrant, the meat falling from the bone.
Rabbit and wild hare hang from hooks in London’s markets next to braces of game bird in autumn, and are easily found in butcher’s windows and cases across Europe. In Morocco, rabbit is cooked in tagines with raisins, in Italy it’s often stewed with garlic and green olives, and in China’s Sichuan kitchens, rabbit is made spicy and fried. Leaner than chicken, pork and beef, rabbits are labeled as fryers (4.5-5 pounds and up to 9 weeks in age), or roasters (over five pounds and up to 8 months old).
Once the pot was removed from the oven, and the rabbit only mildly searing to the touch, we removed the meat from the bones, chopping half and pulsing half. The vegetables and fat were strained from the liquid and puréed, while the liquor was reduced to a mere quarter of itself. Half of this silky rich reduction was combined into the vegetable/meat mixture and pulsed together, then combined with the chunky chopped meat. We packed the mélange tightly into ramekins and topped each with the remaining half of the reduced liquid, wrapping them tightly and hiding them in the back of the freezer.
Never am I able to sit down to a meal of anything I’ve harvested on the same day I took it for the pot. The stink of death from the fish, pig, lamb, cow, or bird I’ve slaughtered still lingers on my fingertips and remorse needs at least a day to resolve into gratitude.
Cobwebs were swept from a wicker basket’s interior before being lined with rough antique linens. A crock of stone ground mustard, a loaf of sesame wheat bread pulled from a wood fired oven, and a jar of pickled baby vegetables were all cradled next to a bottle of Dujac’s Morey St. Denis older than my ancient cat. In the center was tucked a rather large ramekin of the rabbit rillettes, a frozen meat pop sure to be the ideal temperature once unwrapped on a quiet stretch of West Marin beach.