March 14, 2023 • 52 mins
Despite bunnies being just as prolific as the sayings go, this lean protein has never been as widely popular as other meats. Anney and Lauren dig into the history and culture of eating rabbit.
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Speaker 1 (00:09):
Hello, and welcome to Savor production of iHeartRadio. I'm Annie
Reese and I'm Lauren Vogelbaum, and today we have an
episode for you about Rabbit. Yes, and I know some
of you are hearing that, and I'm like, no, we
will talk about it in a minute. But yeah, I'm very,
very excited because I don't think this is a surprise
(00:29):
to anybody. But I'm a huge fan of the Last
of Us. Huh. And as we're recording this, this season
finale is this Sunday, uh huh. And we wanted to
do one. I wanted to do one, and Lauren was
very nice about the Last of Us, and there were
a couple of food options, but I felt like Rabbit
Rabbit was a good one. Yeah, yeah, and certainly so.
(00:53):
I have not played the games, but I have been
watching the show, and that third episode with Nick Offerman
in it is one of just the best episodes of
television I've ever seen. Probably it was so lovely and
a lot and I think I think a lot. But
(01:15):
lovely is like the reason that you enjoy this franchise. Yes, oh, yes, devastating.
I probably played each of the games fifteen times each wow. Yes,
And I was telling Lauren, I think I could make
some money with the Twitch channel because I'm pretty good.
(01:37):
I can I can customize your experience by how quickly
you want it to be or if you want to
read all the know if I can do all those things,
all right, So I'm thinking about it. The funny thing is,
and we're not going to spoil I don't think we're
going to spoil anything. But the game came out in
twenty thirteen, so it's very interesting. Um. But in the game,
(02:01):
that whole scene with Nick Offerman's character Bill and Frank,
it doesn't happen in the game, right because you're you're, you're,
you're listening to them over the radio. You don't, Yeah,
you never. You don't see that much of them in
the game. Yeah, oh no, you just see the end
of their relationship. And that's all I'll say. But there
(02:23):
is a infamous rabbit scene in the game that is
not in the show, although they did hint at it
um in the most recent episode, and it's not a
big spoiler at all, but basically it's like the cutest
there's a lot of videos on YouTube of I would
say jerks, usually dudes, showing this to our girlfriends. But
(02:44):
there's like a it's a beautiful shot and it's like
a close up on a rabbit and snow is glistening
and you're like, oh and then an arrow just fly
throat and blood us Oh wow. Yeah. Yeah, Well, so
there's rabbits in the Last of Us. Um and Binging
with Babbish just did an episode on what the dish
(03:08):
that villain Frank do eat in the show. So okay,
if you wanted to learn more about that, you can
go check it out. Um it is big in our culture.
Rabbits are big in our culture. I was just like,
off the top of my head, I thought of Watership Down,
which is terrifying. Thumper from Bambi, the Easter Bunny, velveteen Rabbit,
(03:29):
Monty Python. Um frequently bought up in d and Dames.
By the way, Lauren, absolutely yeah, Donnie Darko, Jessica Rabbit, bugs,
bunny like, etcetera, etcetera. Well Yeah, yes, uh, Jessica rabbit
being married to Roger Rabbit, who is an actual rabbit. Yeah,
(03:49):
I mean, I mean a cartoon rabbit, but anyway, Uh yeah,
the white rabbit from Alice in Wonderland, Peter Rabbit bunicula. Yes, yeah,
popular fixture on this show. Sure, yes, uh. And we
are going to talk about some of the impact of
that in terms of eating rabbit, because again, we are
(04:12):
a food show ostensibly. Ostensibly, I will say I had
rabbits as a kid, and as I said in the
turtle episode, I really bad like with pets. So my
rabbit's names were Amber and Fluffy. Oh they both died
untimely deaths um. I would visit Fluffy's grave at least
(04:35):
very like daily for a while. But my brother had
this rabbit called Shack, and Shack got in a scrap
with this dog and came out on the other side victorious,
like a scar on his ears. Wow. So Shack lived
many years because he could jump you see. Oh oh sure, yeah,
(04:55):
yeah yeah. I don't have very much much personal experience
of rabbits. Most most of the ones that I've met
have been really mean. Like I've known a lot of
very angry rabbits that didn't want anything to do with me,
and they made it very clear, right, and which is fair,
(05:16):
I guess. I mean, you know, they were up to
their own rabbit stuff, like hating people. I suppose that
I I don't know, I know plenty of people who
who grew up with pet rabbits and loved them very much.
Holly Fry has a very sweet, very sad, very funny
rabbit story. Yeah about her, about her sweet French grandmama
(05:40):
coming and visiting and deeply misunderstanding what the children meant
by we have a special rabbit set aside. Ah, yes, yeah,
I see, yeah, yeah, Well that's okay. There all these
(06:03):
other pathways are opening up in my mind. I will
tell you last night when I was I struggled asleep
and I was thinking about this rabbit thing. And now
I've got a whole conspiracy theory about what happened to
my rabbit amber. But it is for a different pots. Okay,
all right, I'm curious, but we do have a lot
(06:24):
of material to cover. We do, we do? And I
will say I have eaten rabbit, but I would say,
like maybe three times in my whole life. Oh wow,
not much. I yeah, I've got about I I do
enjoy it and um uh could not count the number
of times. Yeah. Oh interesting, Okay, Well I guess this
rings those too, awk question. I guess it does. Rabbit,
(06:49):
what is it? Well, rabbits are a type of small
mammal that can be raised or hunted for their meat.
They reproduce quickly and only live a years at most,
during which time they can grow to about four pounds
or two kilos or so. And they are real cute,
long ears, long hind legs that they used to leap,
very soft and fuzzy. You got those twitchy little noses. Yeah.
(07:13):
Rabbit meat is considered a white meat. It's mild and
flavor a little bit gamy or or earthy. They're well muscled,
and certain cuts can be a little tough, like the
meat from from those powerful hind legs. So rabbit is
often cooked low and slow, frequently bone in in liquid
to get you know, like the most out of the animal,
as in a stew or braise. It's like a it's
(07:35):
like meaty or pork, but from a tiny pig. It's
like a chicken that you're genetically motivated to like think
is adorable and want to care for. To me, rabbit
meat is it's really homey, even though I didn't like
grow up with it. Like it tastes sort of simple,
(07:57):
like not in a negative connotation. It's it's just like
nice without being a complicated. It's it's it's unpretentious. Yeah, yeah,
it's not. It's like every time you bite into it.
It's nothing that's super special. But at the same time
it's so comforting. It's like, oh yeah, yeah, it's just nice. Yeah,
(08:19):
it's just a nice thing. Yeah. Rabbits and their cousins
hairs are in their own family Um paridiate No, no, Laporidae. Sure,
let's go with that. UM. And rabbit farming is called
cuniculture um, after the species name for the European rabbit,
which is a cuniculus. Uh. They are a social mammal.
(08:42):
They live in groups and are hierarchical um. They'll have
like a lead buck or male and a lead female
or dough. They're from temperate climates and like burrowing. Um.
They're herbivores and we'll eat just about any plant matter
m in the wild. They'll forage like tender growing things
in the warm months and strip bar from hardier plants
in the winter. Their teeth never stopped growing. Yeah, that's
(09:05):
my mom hated that. That's horrific. That's like one of
the worst sentences I can imagine uttering out loud. I
have a picture I can show you I don't ever
want to see it. I great, it's it's very disturbing
to me that their teeth never stopped growing anyway. Their
coats can come in any number of patterns and colors
and lengths of hair. They are sometimes raised for that
(09:27):
fur and either shorn or pelted. And right, they really
are like the saying is true. They really are prolific breeders.
Their pregnancies only last about a month and rabbits can
bear like eight kits or babies per pregnancy, so a
mature dough can produce like forty kits a year. They
grow to full size in just two to four months. However,
(09:53):
as a as a farm animal, they are a little
bit more delicate and hands on than a lot of
other livestock. Like kits need to spend their first month
with their mother. They can be aggressive in groups and
that can lead to a lot of animal death before
they reach their their harvest weight. But a bunch of
research is being done into the potential of rabbit farming
(10:17):
as like unconventional in heavy quotes protein source, especially in
places where larger mammals are less sustainable. And I mean,
you know, like they are pretty great as a small
scale type of livestock because like they do reproduce quickly
and grow rapidly, and they're small, you know, they don't
take up a whole lot of space. They can forage
(10:37):
or be fed on like farm scraps and buy products,
and they grow more efficiently than some larger mammals like
cattle or pigs, and their diets can be easily manipulated
to increase the amount of micronutrients like a like like
vitamin E that their meat contains. Different varieties can be
(10:57):
a little bit larger or a little bit smaller. There
are hundreds of domesticated varieties of rabbits, and many places
where they've been introduced to have wild varieties as well.
You can raise them yourself or find rabbits sold whole
or or in cuts or in products like sausages, though
in the United States you might need to track down
like a specialty butcher or a small farm or a
(11:19):
purchase online. It is a lean meat and right can
be can be a little bit tough, so brazen and
stewing are common forms of cooking. Sometimes I like a
nice wine sauce or a mustard sauce. Oh yeah, well,
I guess this brings us to our second very important question. Yes,
(11:40):
is rabbit really Does rabbit really pair well with a Bourgelais? Yes,
I don't know. You've got to tell me the answers. Yes,
the answers yes, that's a frank and Bill would not
have done us wrong on that one. This is the
last of us reference. If you haven't seen the episode, Yeah,
(12:04):
the two bond over a meal of I think like
a like a roasted rabbit, perhaps served with a Bogelais valage.
And uh right, it's it's this nice little moment of
like of leg oh man who knows to pair rabbit
with Boujelais. Um. Then I love how the other characters
are like, oh, I know, I don't look like the
(12:25):
type and thanks, like, now you do you do? It's
very oh, it's very dear. Um. Any anyway, I watched
that episode if you if you like upsetting things, Um,
it's great. Uh okay. And we have talked before on
the show about Bougelais nouveaux, which is a very young
wine meant to be consumed immediately. This is not what
we're talking about, um here, this is not what they
(12:46):
were pouring there, right. This is a Boujelais Valage, which
um and the one that they were pouring on the
show is specifically from this. This very common in America
brand Louis jadel Um. But okay, So, Boujelais volage is
a type of wine from the northern region of Boujelais
in France, and it's made mostly from game grapes. Tends
(13:08):
to taste like juicy, a little bit spicy flavors, including
like like strawberry and cherry in there, those kind of
like bright red fruits. Um. It's light to medium and
body not supertannic and sort of like rabbit, it's just
kind of nice, like it's not overwhelming, um, which is
important because rabbit is sort of a delicate meat. And yeah,
(13:28):
Beulais Valage shows up, like always shows up on pairing
recommendations for rabbit, along with stuff like peanot noir. Oh.
I love that. And it is funny because I saw
I saw a few articles after that episode came yeah
where everyone and I will say I've had some sense
then as well. Yeah, it's uh yeah, Luisiado is very common.
(13:55):
I think it's like the number one French wine sold
in the United States or that's like like a marketing
line that I saw on their website as I was
doing this reading today, And yeah, you can buy a
bottle for like thirteen fifteen bucks, totally affordable. Yeah, yes, yes, yes, yes, Well,
thank you for answering that very important question. It brings
us to another point. What about the nutrition? A rabbit
(14:19):
is lean? It's it's high in protein, low and fat.
Got a good spread of minerals of vitamins, other micro
nutrients in there. Uh yeah, M eat a vegetable, heat
a vegetable. Yeah, we do have some numbers for you.
We do, okay. As of the early twenty teens, about
one point eight million metric tons of rabbit meat we're
(14:41):
being produced globally every year. China was producing like forty
percent of that, mostly for export. Other leading producers were Italy, Spain, Egypt,
and France. And in Italy, rabbit farming makes up like
nine percent of the gross domestic product. Whoa, it is
the fourth largest animal farming venture there. That's interesting. I know,
(15:07):
I had no idea either. As of the late nineteen nineties,
the cost to produce rabbit meat was more than double
the cost to produce chicken, turkey, or pork, and was
also way higher than beef. It was like two dollars
and eleven cents a kilo to make rabbit happen, whereas
it was like a buck twenty eight per kilo for
(15:29):
beef and under a buck per kilo for the rest.
So yeah, so it just does not lend itself to
large scale farming the way that some of those other
animals do, right, And that's something we'll talk about throughout
the history. And also, yeah, kind of makes it hard
(15:50):
to pin down some of these numbers because I couldn't
find too many about rabbit consumption in the United States.
But one source I found posted that according to the
usd A, about five hundred thousand rabbits were sold live
by farms for any purpose in twenty seventeen. But that
can trast wildly with the number from the American Rabbit
(16:13):
Breeders of America because they claim that the amount of
rabbit sold for food is somewhere around fifty million, and
that the discrepancy is due to the fact that a
lot of those sales are not on the USDA's radar.
They're sold from small farms, like they're just kind of
flying beneath what they're monitoring. Yeah, huh, and it is interesting.
(16:36):
Like here in the US, rabbit seems to be either
a thing that you eat because it is local and
like you can't afford other proteins, or a thing that
you eat because it's local and you're buying like fancy
dishes made with it from fancy restaurants. It's a very
like like white tablecloth kind of protein. There's a survey
(16:59):
in the early nineteen nineties that reported that people in
Louisiana who ate or would eat rabbit either made less
than twenty five thousand dollars a year or more than
fifty thousand, with a very little in between. Oh yeah,
that is interesting, really fascinating. I feel like one of
the dishes I had it was a very fancy restaurant
(17:21):
and it was like um ravioli with rabbit in the middle. Yeah,
so good. Oh which, speaking of I want to shout
out Swattie listeners who a long time ago wrote in
and sent us this recipe for fancy chef br d ravioli.
Huh and chef your Rabbitli was featured in the fourth
(17:43):
episode of the Last of Us. And let me tell
you I have been making that recipe probably twice a
week since then. So appreciate it. Oh dang, okay, I've
really enjoyed it. Spicy, spicy, spicy. Um. Well, back to rabbits,
because at least in the US, they're kind of a
largely in the no type of food when it comes
(18:05):
to these small farms and they're produced on this smaller scale. Generally.
They did see a boost of popularity during the supply
chain issues of the pandemic, but that was mostly for
home chefs because in the early days of the pandemic,
chefs at restaurants had kind of the opposite problem where
they needed simpler meats that were easy to put into
(18:28):
go containers. So rabbit didn't really fit the sure. Yeah,
and I guess for people who are less familiar with it,
like I feel like in those early days, we were
also like comfort food driven. We were like I just
want a burger, Like I just want a pork loin, Like,
just give me something familiar and easy to put in
my face because I don't have any I don't have
(18:51):
any brain space left for anything else. Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Oh but do you have the history for years? Oh
my heck, we do. I am excited to get into it,
and we are going to do that as soon as
we get back from a quick break for a word
from our sponsors, and we're back. Thank you sponsor, Yes,
(19:19):
thank you. Okay. So rabbits, there are a lot of
different types of rabbits. I'll say that to start, there
are fifteen varieties of wild rabbit that are native to
North America, just North America. They have long been incorporated
into the diet of Native Americans and have been a
part of indigenous mythology. Archaeological evidence out of Europe suggests
(19:42):
that as far back as twenty thousand years ago people
were hunting and eating rabbits, and because they're you know,
typically small, they were consumed immediately in general, as opposed
to being preserved. And so this means that in Europe
up they were eaten across the continent relatively regularly, but
(20:03):
they weren't usually processed or preserved. But by at least
the first century BC, people were fattening up rabbits they
kept in hutches for the slaughter and the I would say,
one of the through lines throughout this history is people
fighting about when they got domesticated. Oh yeah, so this
people are like well they were doing this, but that
(20:24):
doesn't mean domestication. Yeah, I believe a lot of research
has been done. It has it has been We are
going to talk about it extensively. And I love this
and I feel like and I honestly feel like part
of this is like because rabbits are kind of like
they remind me in temperament of cats that like that
don't have claws, so they have like less to say
(20:45):
to you about it, but they're still but they're really
I mean, like like they have an emotion and they
want you to know about it, like they sure do. Yeah, yeah,
you can ask my mom. Anyway. I did want to
bring up some stuff about hairs okay, yeah, which are
(21:06):
not rabbits. They are closely related. They are very closely related.
And I almost had a panic attack those ones where
I got to the end and I was like, wait
a minute, well I have to talk about hair as well.
Am I missing an entire half of this outline exactly exactly.
I did want to mention some of the early history
of hairs, though, because I really wanted to know what
(21:27):
the heck is up with the easter bunny okay, yeah,
which in Europe is known as the Easter hair. Sure, okay,
so this is going to be a very abbreviated okay story,
No love it though, let's yeah, let's go yes, all right, So,
going back to Neolithic times, European hairs were given ritual
burials alongside humans. Okay, and some archaeologists believe that the
(21:52):
hairs one of the reasons this was happening was they
were meant to be symbolic of rebirth. Julius Caesar did
that British folks didn't eat hairs because of their religious
importance in five hundred fifteen BC. Okay, But meanwhile, in
Greek mythology, they were sacred to Aphrodite. They were used
(22:13):
to represent desire. Apparently, they were used to symbolize how
the virgin Mary didn't give in to sexual temptation. She
was often painted with a hair or rabbit, usually a
white hair or rabbit in Renaissance art, which made me
wonder if that's why they're there's that hair in the Bitch,
the movie, which Lauren and I have talked about on
(22:35):
movie Crush. If you want to go yeah, yeah, no,
I think I think that that's actually because of this
next point that you're about to come to yes as well.
So I got to this and I was like, oh, okay,
but then I found this thing. So in the sixteen hundreds,
English and German folklore started having these instances of the
(22:56):
Easter hair, which is what a lot of people think,
that's the first thing that they can find of this.
Though some religious folks attempted to stop the traditions around
this Eastern hair or like the hair pie scramble where
people quote scrambled for a slice of hair meat pie.
(23:17):
The reason these religious folks were, you know, raising their
hand like we shouldn't do this is because of the
pagan roots of these types of traditions. Huh. So, according
to some sources, people at the time held the belief
some people did, particularly in northern Europe, that witches could
take the form of a hair for mischief purposes. Yeah,
(23:42):
so to banish the witches of winter, people might have
eaten hair at spring equinox celebrations like Easter. So that's
probably why it was in the bitch, you're right, and
then like this is a food show. I could have
gone way more into this, but essentially all of that
(24:02):
got mixed up with a Grimm's fairy tale and the
general idea of rebirth during spring, like, oh, look at
all those bunnies during the springtime. Wow, and presto, we
got the easter bunny. I guess, yeah, yeah, I have
I have two I have two notes here, Okay. The
(24:23):
first is that um, bugs bunny. While we're talking about hairs, bugs,
bunny is morphologically speaking, more like a hair than a bunny. Okay, okay,
I just need to put that out there. That's just important,
important fact. This brings us to a fun Times with
History segment. Yea, because there is a very popular story
(24:45):
about rabbit domestication, which as I said, is huge in
the story of rabbits, that is often repeated but has
been largely debunked. Some people still fight for it, but
all right, I'm going to all also repeat it because
it's interesting and because it's like in the top ten
results of what you're going Yeah, but grain of salted
(25:09):
come on this, okay, arney, Okay. So, the popular story
goes that French monks were the first to domesticate rabbits
in six hundred CE. The legend tells that this is
when Pope Gregory the Great declared that fetal rabbits did
not count as meat during lent, which again comes all
(25:31):
the time in these episodes. Um, and he decreed that
because the amniotic sacks filled with fluid that encompass fetal
rabbits made them fish. Okay, uh sure, sure, um so yes,
they were not against the rules to eat during lent,
(25:52):
and because of this they were something of assault after
delicacy to the point that the monks and the story
started them and through their efforts they bread the wild
European rabbit into a breed that tolerated humans, which I love,
tolerated humans. I saw that a lot of places too.
So that's the popular story you'll find. However, when researching it,
(26:16):
experts discovered that there was no real proof of this
story at all. And again it's a story that has
long been accepted that researchers themselves said they had used
this story before because they just heard it from reputable resources.
And we're like, okay, sure, but there was nothing. There's
like no record of the eat it. There's no record
(26:37):
of eating rabbits during lent. And not only that, the
consensus seems to be there is no single domestication event
for rabbits. Yeah yeah, all right, so there's this genetic
divergence in rabbits. I'm telling you this episode, I was
(26:57):
trying to make sense of everything. I was so confused.
But there was this genetic divergence and rabbits that potentially
indicates domestication that goes back as far as seventeen thousand
and seven hundred years ago, so way longer ago than that. However,
even that evidence isn't entirely clear in its implications, because
some experts think that that might be because the sample
(27:21):
of wild rabbits that was used wasn't close enough to
our modern day domesticated rabbits to give like an accurate
reading at all. Oh okay, okay, yep. Some also point
out that people in France have long enjoyed rabbit meats,
so it is within the realm of possibility that they
were domesticated there or near there. Separately, again, multiple events
(27:45):
of domestication events. Some even think we've mixed up this
Pope Gregory fellow with another guy, a historian named Saint
Gregory of Tours, who once mentioned the lent time practice
eating baby rabbits. However, even that falls apart upon closer examination,
(28:06):
because it seems this whole thing is based on the
writings of a German author out of nineteen thirty six
who was seeming to attribute a story to Saint Gregory,
wherein the Saint describes one person, possibly not even Christian
what they noted, eating fetal rabbits during lent and then
(28:27):
dying from an illness not related to the rabbits. Wow,
So like a much later retelling of this, it's a mess,
It's what I'm saying. Yeah, that I had a quote.
I had a quote. I deleted it because I was like,
I think it's gonna be clear. But it was a
quote from all the historians who was like, basically, I
(28:49):
don't know that. Yeah. Part okay, part of the problem
that researchers do run into here is that is that
rabbit bones are relatively small and fragile, like like even
if you compare it to a cat, a cat is
(29:11):
like thirteen percent bone mass, by way, a rabbit is
only like eight percent. I'm quoting those numbers from memory,
but I think that's what I read. And so the
fossil record isn't nearly as well preserved with rabbit as
it is for larger mammals or for like shellfish stuff
like that. So all right, we think, I mean human
(29:36):
scientists think not like not like me and Anny, that
animals similar to modern rabbits lived throughout Europe like a
couple million years ago, but that they went nearly extinct
during one of the glacial periods, and the only ones
that survived in order to start spreading again in the
past like twenty thousand years were in the Iberian Peninsula
(29:57):
and what's now southern France. But yeah, yeah, basically it's complicated. Yes,
the consensus does seem to be that domestication both for
food and for cute pet rabbits worked in tandem and
(30:17):
happened in several different places at several different times, and
saul ups and downs in terms of food as whether
it was a high status food that was getting recorded
and talked about as opposed to a low status food
that was not. Yeah. Um, pretty certainly, by the time
the Phoenicians arrived in the western Mediterranean circle like eleven
(30:41):
hundred BC, there were enough rabbits there that they named
the Iberian Peninsula the Land of Rabbits. It's thumb something
something like that. Um, I read a few different and
like possibly this is a grammatically contentious and etymologically contentious,
(31:03):
but that's possibly where the Romans got the name Ispania
and where we get the word Spain from. But anyway,
either way, Phoenicians began trading rabbits around the Mediterranean right
around the bc CE turnover. Greeks lovedom Aristotle wrote their
(31:24):
meat is nice and delicate. Romans farmed rabbits in the
Iberian area, and around the eight hundreds CE, both wild
and domesticated rabbits began spreading back out to other areas
of Europe, although it did take a while for rabbit
farming to catch on in new places, because although rabbits
are prolific when well cared for, it's a little finicky
(31:47):
to get a good set up started. As of the
early thirteen hundreds, in England, a rabbit had the same
market price as a whole pig. Dang, yeah yeah. In
the Middle Ages, in Britain, rabbits were kept in artificial warrens,
and that was because the soil wasn't ideal for them
(32:08):
to burrow, and through this process they slowly chilled out.
I guess that's kind of what I took away from
a lot of the research. Skeletal differences started appearing in
rabbits as early as the eighteenth century in Europe, which
matches up with when people started breeding rabbits specifically to
(32:28):
be kept as pets. Yeah, colonialism did bring rabbits around
the world. A British sailors would raise rabbits on board
as food. The Spanish also introduced European rabbits to the
Americas early on, and European rabbits were introduced to Australia
in the eighteen hundreds and they have done a significant
(32:50):
amount of damage there since then. Oh yeah, oh yeah.
Some have even gone so far as to label this
as a case study of one of the fastest instances
of an invasi of manimal species in history. These days,
there's an estimated two hundred million feral rabbits in Australia. Yeah,
I read that. I read that. After wild rabbits were
(33:15):
imported into Victoria in eighteen fifty nine, they had twenty
four rabbits and within six years there were twenty thousand.
And it was a problem. It was a hecken problem.
It was a huge, huge problem. There's another story. There's
a story that goes that like this rich dude was
just like I want to hunt rabbits in Australia, semiso rabbits,
(33:38):
and he got thirteen and they escaped and they multiplied
like rabbits, as the saying goes, But it has been
a huge problem. In the nineteen fifties, the Australian government
released rabbits infected with a rabbit based virus to whittle
down wild population. Yeah, and this was the first instance
(34:00):
of a virus being deliberately introduced to the wild to
eliminate a species. In the words of an Australian scientist,
thus inadvertedly began one of the great experiments and natural
selection conducted on a continental scale. Yeah. And then there
was another virus that was designed to kill rabbits within
forty eight hours that escaped a lab in the nineteen
(34:24):
nineties and decimated rabbit populations by up to ninety percent
in dry areas. It only really worked in dry areas.
And those are only a few examples of the methods
that have been employed to control this population. Because they
have been working on it, there was a lot. Yeah. Yeah.
(34:45):
When European rabbits were introduced to North America in the
nineteenth century, they became invasive as well, particularly in places
like Chatham County at North Carolina. As a solution to
their proliferation of all these rabbits, they shipped thousands of
them northeast as soon as railroads arrived in the area
in the eighteen eighties, and this was like a fairly
(35:06):
successful solution. Mental rabbit fever, which is this illness that
results from skinning rabbits, pretty much killed the rabbit industry
in that area. So yeah, yeah, yeah. A US rabbit
experiment station was established near Los Angeles in the nineteen twenties,
(35:27):
and rabbits saw a spike in popularity as a food
thing in the US during meat shortages of World War Two.
An ad campaign spearheaded by Life magazine at the time
came with this quote, Domestic rabbits are one of the
few pets which can be enjoyed dead or alive. Yep,
(35:49):
like that they put pet in there. That was a
real nice wow twist. All right. Another ad from the
time from Gourmet magazine read, although it isn't our usual habit,
this year, we're eating the easter rabbit again. Take those
shouted dreams and like twist the knife. Yeah fun. That
(36:09):
is actually quite a longer slogan and I shut it,
I shortened it. But if you want to read more,
all right, great. However, when beef became more readily available
in the US in the fifties and sixties, rabbit once
again declined to popularity in the mainstream of note, though
it never faded in certain communities, which has been true
(36:31):
throughout the history and present of eating rabbit. Yeah. Yeah,
because for most of history, rabbit really has been a
local thing. Like large scale farming didn't begin in earnest
pretty much anywhere until the nineteen seventies, and that was
after a couple decades of specialized breeds and diets and
management practices being developed. In nineteen seventy six, of note,
(36:56):
the World Rabbit Science Association organized in Paris. They hold
a Rabbit Congress once every four years. I don't think
that it's a congress made up of rabbits. I think
it's a congress made up of rabbit scientists and enthusiasts.
But either way, I love that by that phrase. We
did not get an American branch of the World Rabbit
(37:16):
Science Association until nineteen ninety six, so we were slow
on the pickup mm. And there are a couple of
reasons why that might have been. And one is something
we've been alluding to throughout, so similar to what we
mentioned in our turtle Soup episode, the perception that rabbits
were cute, a perception that was really reinforced by their
(37:38):
various depictions in our entertainment, had a huge impact on
people's willingness to eat rabbit. Yeah, in this country, a
lot of things I read pointed to Bambi's thumper as
an example. There's also a term for it called the
easter bunny syndrome. Yeah, this is in scientific papers, like
(37:59):
science papers about rabbit meat will list this as a
scientifically accepted reason that people don't eat more rabbit, right,
And yeah, like we said in that turtle Soup episode,
it's kind of the same. You know, they've been anthropomorphized,
they're cute in a lot of our media. So it's
it does it has like a measurable impact, it does. Uh.
(38:24):
That kind of changed in the US in the twenty
tens with the growing interest of the nose to tail movements,
So people were more interested in like, Okay, I want
to make the most out of these meats and try
these things, and then I gotta put in here twenty
thirteen is when The Last of Us came out, which
certainly again didn't have this like lovely scene that's in
(38:46):
the show of Eating rabbit, but it certainly has scenes
of hunting rabbit. Okay, yeah, yeah yeah. In a twenty
fourteen though, Whole Foods launched a rabbit meat pile program
that drill a lot of ire from some folks. Some
of their flyers read boycott Whole Foods because they're selling
(39:07):
rabbits and because rabbits aren't protected by the humane methods
of slaughter acts. There have recently been a few instances
of horrific conditions that have been exposed, including in twenty
fifteen when the US's largest producer got in trouble from
some pretty for some pretty terrible things despite advertising as humane,
(39:28):
and the protests largely worked. I believe Whole Foods stopped
selling rabbit in twenty fifteen. Yeah goodness, uh huh um.
In twenty seventeen, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro introduced Plan Rabbit
to combat food shortages, basically trying to convince people to
eat rabbit. You can find a lot of those flyers
online should you desire. Yeah, huh it is it is
(39:53):
so fascinating to me, and I mean that there are
we didn't really go that deeply into it, aside from
that very coo using sidebar about the Easter hair. But yeah,
like like rabbit's feature in a whole lot of of
of mythology and folklore from the places where they do exist,
(40:13):
and it's I mean like like that was a short
list at the top of cultural references to rabbits. Um.
They they really do hop up in a lot of places.
Um Uh. I was thinking. I had a very small
reference to to to to the character Anya from Buffy
(40:34):
the Vampire Slayer in my What Is Its section because
one of the funny things about this demon who doesn't
really know how to human good is that she hates bunnies.
She is terrified of bunnies. And I mean it's a
it's a good character note because like, who would be
terrified of bunnies except for a weirdo demonum and maybe
(40:58):
someone who had met rabbits and nose. Oh, I just
had a flashbagg. There was this animated short I've told
you about it, I'll tell anybody about it. It was
before ice Age, and it was one of those like
Pixar cute shorts. You know. It was about a rabbit
and her husband rabbit had died, no, and she was
(41:21):
making this pie and this moth was bothering her, and
then she got it. The moth got in the pie batter,
and then the bunny crawled into the oven and it
was a universe in there, and she died. What I'm
telling you this is a real thing. You could look
it up. I scarred me for life. Clearly. It's before
(41:46):
ice age. Just look up ice age rabbit moth that
it will come up. Okay, do you want to see it?
I don't know. It's very beautiful, all right, but it's disturbing.
Huh um yeah, no, the uh it's no, it's it's cool.
It's cool, you know. And it can like rabbits can
take that turn. And they do have in a lot
(42:06):
of folklore like a like a trickster kind of vibe
to them. Um. And I've been very slowly working through
the Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff Vandermere, which which is
what Um the movie Annihilation was based on Um and
the second in the second book authority. Um. There's this
(42:27):
whole thing about how these rabbits were introduced to the
area as part of an experiment, and they of course
got out of control, and now there's wild rabbits and
their behavior is very strange, as is the behavior of
many things in this very strange area. So, um, yeah,
magicians rabbits. Yeah, gosh, we're doing talk about that. Wow.
(42:52):
You know, there's a lot, there's a lot here. Um,
we've clearly got a lot of thoughts about rabbits. We do,
both me and Lauren and societies at large. The rabbit
in the moon in Japanese folklore, m just up there
making mochi. Yeah. If you haven't seen the nineteen seventy
(43:14):
Watership Down and you want to be disturbed by children's movie,
then that's her. That's the way to go. Oh gosh,
that check Alice in Wonderland that had the taxidermid stop
motion rabbit hoof. Oh wow. I feel like we've really
gone on a journey in this one. That was a
(43:35):
legit flashback. I just had ya Wow. Yeah, Annie's like
whole universe stopped. Oh my god, all the way back
in middle school again. Um. I've never actually seen the
animated Watership Down. I only read the book very recently. Um,
like over the past, like like during the pandemic, I think,
(43:56):
and it is very upsetting. That is an upsetting buck.
I loved it. I think you should watch the cartoon. Okay, um,
you'll see right handed a generation. And that's just not
me saying that. There's a articles written about it. Yeah,
it's disturbing because it's like, oh, watch these kids. It's
cartoon and then there's rabbits murdering each other. Like oh god, okay,
(44:19):
I'm all right. I believe you entirely. Uh okay, if
you have a specific rabbit story, we of course would
love to hear it. Yes we would, because that's what
we have to say for now. Clearly we could go on,
but we will. But we do have some listener mail
(44:39):
for you. We do, and we're going to get into
that as soon as we get back from a quick
break for a word from our sponsors. And we're back.
Thank you, yes, thank you, and we're back with Star
(45:04):
Happen Away. Yeah. You just had a moment of connection
in the break. I feel realize some things about myself
and rabbits. It's the whole thing, it is. Yeah, So
that's you know, sometimes you learn sometimes the subject that
you learn the most about is yourself. It's true. Very wise, Lauren,
(45:27):
very wise. Also, we heard from some very wise listeners,
including Jessica. Jessica wrote, I loved the episode on Garam.
It reminded me of this video that solo l y
he did for the History channel on YouTube where she
made Garam. She hasn't done anything recently for that channel,
(45:47):
but the playlist of ancient recipes with Sola is amazing.
Oh cool? Yes, oh you know we love an ancient recipe.
Oh yeah, yeah, They're so mysterious and fun. Yes, it's
like trying to decipher a riddle or a puzzle, right,
I'm like, how much like because it'll lists things in
(46:09):
like take take this monetary amount worth of an ingredient
and I'm like, I don't recognize that monetary amount. I
certainly don't don't know how much duck it would have
bought in ancient Rome. Cool but but but yeah, awesome,
thank you. Cecilia wrote The Joy of Cooking episode finally
(46:31):
got me sitting at the keyboard. I listened several days
ago and then started a thread on my family's WhatsApp group,
which we have called Culinary Adventures. I asked who had
one of these books and what edition? Mine was a
wedding gift in nineteen seventy two. Curiously, the copyright page
lists all the past copyright dates, the latest being nineteen
sixty four, and all the previous printings, the latest being
(46:54):
nineteen seventy one, but there's no mention of the date
this particular book was printed, so by checking Wikipedia, I
surmise this one is a fifth edition. In the dedication,
Marion Rombauer Becker refers to the book as The Joy
or the Joy of Cooking, but this one seems to
be the one where they dropped the from the title.
(47:15):
It does have the information on how to skin and
cook a squirrel, as well as several other animals I
normally think of as roadkill, not food. And paging through
it at random the other day I found these two
strange recipes, which I will attach to the email. Right now,
I can only think of one recipe from this book
that I use, and that is four pecan balls, which
the book calls pecan puffs. My mother had a Joy
(47:38):
of Cooking. I don't know if her copy is still
in the family, probably not, as no one mentioned it.
My sisters who responded both have copies as well as
my brother. One sister got one as a wedding gift
in nineteen eighty. It became very well worn, and she
replaced it with another. Here's what she says about the replacement.
The copyright page says the first Scribner Scribner Edition nineteen
(47:58):
ninety five. But I'm certain the cookbook itself is identical
to the first copy I got in nineteen eighty. I
went through the old cookbook and transferred all my old
handwritten notes to the new copy before discarding the old one.
Then her husband bought her a newer one for Christmas.
She says the latest date listed in that one is
nineteen ninety seven, so hers must be the sixth and
(48:18):
seventh editions. She says she uses the older one more
than the newer one, and that neither one has the
two recipes I mentioned above. Who fun Okay. Another sister
did not get one as a wedding gift, but sometime later,
in nineteen eighty seven, her husband bought her one. When
he realized every one of her sisters had one. He
wrote in it, you are a real sport to have
(48:41):
suffered so long without this. She was married in nineteen
eighty two. Here is what she said. I use the
recipes loosely for jams, and more closely for the ginger
snaps and of course the all important pecan balls puffs
to them. I may have some cake or frosting recipes
from there I use. Also. One niece has one that
(49:02):
belonged to her husband's grandmother and is from about nineteen
sixty seven. Another niece picked one up at a book
sale and it's from nineteen eighty five. Ish. I guess
the publisher never dated the books, so it seems the
tradition of giving a copy of the Joy of Cooking
is a wedding gift in my family died out with
my generation. Looking through my copy, I see that it
occasionally lists a can of condensed soup in the ingredients list.
(49:25):
I didn't realize published cookbooks did this, And in the
Know Your Ingredients section it lists can sizes with equivalent
weights and liquid measures. This can be handy in translating
old recipes. The call for a number two can of something.
Canned soups come up frequently in church lady cookbooks. I
have a number of these fundraiser cookbooks. They're fun. I
(49:45):
put one together for my church in about nineteen ninety,
I solicited recipes from my family as well as from
church members, and that is the cookbook I used the most.
It has several of my grandmother's recipes in it. My
mother bought eighteen of these books and gave one to
each of her grandchildren they got engaged, so everyone in
that generation has that book. I also have a James
Beard cookbook, as well as The Art of French Cooking
(50:06):
by Julia Child, which I might have mentioned before. Those
were also gifts, And well, I guess that's what I
have to say about the joy of cooking. I thoroughly
enjoy your podcast and frequently recommend episodes to my family.
I learned so much about foods I've never heard of
and others I'm familiar with. On the day I heard
the episode on wild rice, I had just made wild
(50:26):
rice the evening before. Note she capitalized it, and then
it says in parentheses. I don't suppose wild rice needs
to be capitalized. It just looks better that way. You
will notice a mention of mock turtle soup in one
of those recipes attached. Oh I love this, I love this.
What wonderful detective work. Oh my goodness. Yes, fantastic. I
(50:49):
love trying to find like when did people get it,
what addition is it? What recipes are the same, what
are different? Yeah, and also just I think it's interesting
that you know, you have your scipes that you follow
more closely and less, ye have your notes that you make,
and then when you brought up like the church books
and that's the one you use the most. It kind
of makes sense to me because in your area, that's
(51:11):
probably what you know is a lot of people are cooking.
Like that's yeah, be localized, personalized. Sure, yes, And I
remember my grandmother contributed to one of her church cookbooks
and my mom would get it out and I would
see like, oh, my grandmother did that recipe. I just
get so excited, like yeah, I was like she's a
celebrity or something that No, but sure, yeah that's all
(51:32):
that's really cool. Yeah, it really is. It really is
cookbooks are they're just, like we said, such a great
snapshot and look at what's going on in a family
in an area, in a community, like the whole thing.
Yeah cool. Yeah, I Um, I have my my dad
and my mom's old like like handwritten recipes my dad
(51:54):
from like professional kitchens and my mom from cooking at home,
and I really, one of these days, I really need
to digitize that collection and both both scan them in
and type them up because yeah, yeah, oh yeah, it's
always devastating to lose your recipe. So yeah, yeah, well,
(52:14):
thank you so much to both of these listeners for
writing in. If you would like to write to us,
you can our email us hello at saborpod dot com.
We are also on social media hypothetically, you can find
us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at saver pod, and
we do hope to hear from you. Sabor is production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, you
can visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
(52:37):
listen to your favorite shows. Thanks as always to our
superproducers Dylan Fagan and Andrew Howard. Thanks to you for listening,
and we hope that lots more good things are coming
your way
Hello, and welcome to Savor production of iHeartRadio. I'm Annie
Reese and I'm Lauren Vogelbaum, and today we have an
episode for you about Rabbit. Yes, and I know some
of you are hearing that, and I'm like, no, we
will talk about it in a minute. But yeah, I'm very,
very excited because I don't think this is a surprise
(00:29):
to anybody. But I'm a huge fan of the Last
of Us. Huh. And as we're recording this, this season
finale is this Sunday, uh huh. And we wanted to
do one. I wanted to do one, and Lauren was
very nice about the Last of Us, and there were
a couple of food options, but I felt like Rabbit
Rabbit was a good one. Yeah, yeah, and certainly so.
(00:53):
I have not played the games, but I have been
watching the show, and that third episode with Nick Offerman
in it is one of just the best episodes of
television I've ever seen. Probably it was so lovely and
a lot and I think I think a lot. But
(01:15):
lovely is like the reason that you enjoy this franchise. Yes, oh, yes, devastating.
I probably played each of the games fifteen times each wow. Yes,
And I was telling Lauren, I think I could make
some money with the Twitch channel because I'm pretty good.
(01:37):
I can I can customize your experience by how quickly
you want it to be or if you want to
read all the know if I can do all those things,
all right, So I'm thinking about it. The funny thing is,
and we're not going to spoil I don't think we're
going to spoil anything. But the game came out in
twenty thirteen, so it's very interesting. Um. But in the game,
(02:01):
that whole scene with Nick Offerman's character Bill and Frank,
it doesn't happen in the game, right because you're you're, you're,
you're listening to them over the radio. You don't, Yeah,
you never. You don't see that much of them in
the game. Yeah, oh no, you just see the end
of their relationship. And that's all I'll say. But there
(02:23):
is a infamous rabbit scene in the game that is
not in the show, although they did hint at it
um in the most recent episode, and it's not a
big spoiler at all, but basically it's like the cutest
there's a lot of videos on YouTube of I would
say jerks, usually dudes, showing this to our girlfriends. But
(02:44):
there's like a it's a beautiful shot and it's like
a close up on a rabbit and snow is glistening
and you're like, oh and then an arrow just fly
throat and blood us Oh wow. Yeah. Yeah, Well, so
there's rabbits in the Last of Us. Um and Binging
with Babbish just did an episode on what the dish
(03:08):
that villain Frank do eat in the show. So okay,
if you wanted to learn more about that, you can
go check it out. Um it is big in our culture.
Rabbits are big in our culture. I was just like,
off the top of my head, I thought of Watership Down,
which is terrifying. Thumper from Bambi, the Easter Bunny, velveteen Rabbit,
(03:29):
Monty Python. Um frequently bought up in d and Dames.
By the way, Lauren, absolutely yeah, Donnie Darko, Jessica Rabbit, bugs,
bunny like, etcetera, etcetera. Well Yeah, yes, uh, Jessica rabbit
being married to Roger Rabbit, who is an actual rabbit. Yeah,
(03:49):
I mean, I mean a cartoon rabbit, but anyway, Uh yeah,
the white rabbit from Alice in Wonderland, Peter Rabbit bunicula. Yes, yeah,
popular fixture on this show. Sure, yes, uh. And we
are going to talk about some of the impact of
that in terms of eating rabbit, because again, we are
(04:12):
a food show ostensibly. Ostensibly, I will say I had
rabbits as a kid, and as I said in the
turtle episode, I really bad like with pets. So my
rabbit's names were Amber and Fluffy. Oh they both died
untimely deaths um. I would visit Fluffy's grave at least
(04:35):
very like daily for a while. But my brother had
this rabbit called Shack, and Shack got in a scrap
with this dog and came out on the other side victorious,
like a scar on his ears. Wow. So Shack lived
many years because he could jump you see. Oh oh sure, yeah,
(04:55):
yeah yeah. I don't have very much much personal experience
of rabbits. Most most of the ones that I've met
have been really mean. Like I've known a lot of
very angry rabbits that didn't want anything to do with me,
and they made it very clear, right, and which is fair,
(05:16):
I guess. I mean, you know, they were up to
their own rabbit stuff, like hating people. I suppose that
I I don't know, I know plenty of people who
who grew up with pet rabbits and loved them very much.
Holly Fry has a very sweet, very sad, very funny
rabbit story. Yeah about her, about her sweet French grandmama
(05:40):
coming and visiting and deeply misunderstanding what the children meant
by we have a special rabbit set aside. Ah, yes, yeah,
I see, yeah, yeah, Well that's okay. There all these
(06:03):
other pathways are opening up in my mind. I will
tell you last night when I was I struggled asleep
and I was thinking about this rabbit thing. And now
I've got a whole conspiracy theory about what happened to
my rabbit amber. But it is for a different pots. Okay,
all right, I'm curious, but we do have a lot
(06:24):
of material to cover. We do, we do? And I
will say I have eaten rabbit, but I would say,
like maybe three times in my whole life. Oh wow,
not much. I yeah, I've got about I I do
enjoy it and um uh could not count the number
of times. Yeah. Oh interesting, Okay, Well I guess this
rings those too, awk question. I guess it does. Rabbit,
(06:49):
what is it? Well, rabbits are a type of small
mammal that can be raised or hunted for their meat.
They reproduce quickly and only live a years at most,
during which time they can grow to about four pounds
or two kilos or so. And they are real cute,
long ears, long hind legs that they used to leap,
very soft and fuzzy. You got those twitchy little noses. Yeah.
(07:13):
Rabbit meat is considered a white meat. It's mild and
flavor a little bit gamy or or earthy. They're well muscled,
and certain cuts can be a little tough, like the
meat from from those powerful hind legs. So rabbit is
often cooked low and slow, frequently bone in in liquid
to get you know, like the most out of the animal,
as in a stew or braise. It's like a it's
(07:35):
like meaty or pork, but from a tiny pig. It's
like a chicken that you're genetically motivated to like think
is adorable and want to care for. To me, rabbit
meat is it's really homey, even though I didn't like
grow up with it. Like it tastes sort of simple,
(07:57):
like not in a negative connotation. It's it's just like
nice without being a complicated. It's it's it's unpretentious. Yeah, yeah,
it's not. It's like every time you bite into it.
It's nothing that's super special. But at the same time
it's so comforting. It's like, oh yeah, yeah, it's just nice. Yeah,
(08:19):
it's just a nice thing. Yeah. Rabbits and their cousins
hairs are in their own family Um paridiate No, no, Laporidae. Sure,
let's go with that. UM. And rabbit farming is called
cuniculture um, after the species name for the European rabbit,
which is a cuniculus. Uh. They are a social mammal.
(08:42):
They live in groups and are hierarchical um. They'll have
like a lead buck or male and a lead female
or dough. They're from temperate climates and like burrowing. Um.
They're herbivores and we'll eat just about any plant matter
m in the wild. They'll forage like tender growing things
in the warm months and strip bar from hardier plants
in the winter. Their teeth never stopped growing. Yeah, that's
(09:05):
my mom hated that. That's horrific. That's like one of
the worst sentences I can imagine uttering out loud. I
have a picture I can show you I don't ever
want to see it. I great, it's it's very disturbing
to me that their teeth never stopped growing anyway. Their
coats can come in any number of patterns and colors
and lengths of hair. They are sometimes raised for that
(09:27):
fur and either shorn or pelted. And right, they really
are like the saying is true. They really are prolific breeders.
Their pregnancies only last about a month and rabbits can
bear like eight kits or babies per pregnancy, so a
mature dough can produce like forty kits a year. They
grow to full size in just two to four months. However,
(09:53):
as a as a farm animal, they are a little
bit more delicate and hands on than a lot of
other livestock. Like kits need to spend their first month
with their mother. They can be aggressive in groups and
that can lead to a lot of animal death before
they reach their their harvest weight. But a bunch of
research is being done into the potential of rabbit farming
(10:17):
as like unconventional in heavy quotes protein source, especially in
places where larger mammals are less sustainable. And I mean,
you know, like they are pretty great as a small
scale type of livestock because like they do reproduce quickly
and grow rapidly, and they're small, you know, they don't
take up a whole lot of space. They can forage
(10:37):
or be fed on like farm scraps and buy products,
and they grow more efficiently than some larger mammals like
cattle or pigs, and their diets can be easily manipulated
to increase the amount of micronutrients like a like like
vitamin E that their meat contains. Different varieties can be
(10:57):
a little bit larger or a little bit smaller. There
are hundreds of domesticated varieties of rabbits, and many places
where they've been introduced to have wild varieties as well.
You can raise them yourself or find rabbits sold whole
or or in cuts or in products like sausages, though
in the United States you might need to track down
like a specialty butcher or a small farm or a
(11:19):
purchase online. It is a lean meat and right can
be can be a little bit tough, so brazen and
stewing are common forms of cooking. Sometimes I like a
nice wine sauce or a mustard sauce. Oh yeah, well,
I guess this brings us to our second very important question. Yes,
(11:40):
is rabbit really Does rabbit really pair well with a Bourgelais? Yes,
I don't know. You've got to tell me the answers. Yes,
the answers yes, that's a frank and Bill would not
have done us wrong on that one. This is the
last of us reference. If you haven't seen the episode, Yeah,
(12:04):
the two bond over a meal of I think like
a like a roasted rabbit, perhaps served with a Bogelais valage.
And uh right, it's it's this nice little moment of
like of leg oh man who knows to pair rabbit
with Boujelais. Um. Then I love how the other characters
are like, oh, I know, I don't look like the
(12:25):
type and thanks, like, now you do you do? It's
very oh, it's very dear. Um. Any anyway, I watched
that episode if you if you like upsetting things, Um,
it's great. Uh okay. And we have talked before on
the show about Bougelais nouveaux, which is a very young
wine meant to be consumed immediately. This is not what
we're talking about, um here, this is not what they
(12:46):
were pouring there, right. This is a Boujelais Valage, which
um and the one that they were pouring on the
show is specifically from this. This very common in America
brand Louis jadel Um. But okay, So, Boujelais volage is
a type of wine from the northern region of Boujelais
in France, and it's made mostly from game grapes. Tends
(13:08):
to taste like juicy, a little bit spicy flavors, including
like like strawberry and cherry in there, those kind of
like bright red fruits. Um. It's light to medium and
body not supertannic and sort of like rabbit, it's just
kind of nice, like it's not overwhelming, um, which is
important because rabbit is sort of a delicate meat. And yeah,
(13:28):
Beulais Valage shows up, like always shows up on pairing
recommendations for rabbit, along with stuff like peanot noir. Oh.
I love that. And it is funny because I saw
I saw a few articles after that episode came yeah
where everyone and I will say I've had some sense
then as well. Yeah, it's uh yeah, Luisiado is very common.
(13:55):
I think it's like the number one French wine sold
in the United States or that's like like a marketing
line that I saw on their website as I was
doing this reading today, And yeah, you can buy a
bottle for like thirteen fifteen bucks, totally affordable. Yeah, yes, yes, yes, yes, Well,
thank you for answering that very important question. It brings
us to another point. What about the nutrition? A rabbit
(14:19):
is lean? It's it's high in protein, low and fat.
Got a good spread of minerals of vitamins, other micro
nutrients in there. Uh yeah, M eat a vegetable, heat
a vegetable. Yeah, we do have some numbers for you.
We do, okay. As of the early twenty teens, about
one point eight million metric tons of rabbit meat we're
(14:41):
being produced globally every year. China was producing like forty
percent of that, mostly for export. Other leading producers were Italy, Spain, Egypt,
and France. And in Italy, rabbit farming makes up like
nine percent of the gross domestic product. Whoa, it is
the fourth largest animal farming venture there. That's interesting. I know,
(15:07):
I had no idea either. As of the late nineteen nineties,
the cost to produce rabbit meat was more than double
the cost to produce chicken, turkey, or pork, and was
also way higher than beef. It was like two dollars
and eleven cents a kilo to make rabbit happen, whereas
it was like a buck twenty eight per kilo for
(15:29):
beef and under a buck per kilo for the rest.
So yeah, so it just does not lend itself to
large scale farming the way that some of those other
animals do, right, And that's something we'll talk about throughout
the history. And also, yeah, kind of makes it hard
(15:50):
to pin down some of these numbers because I couldn't
find too many about rabbit consumption in the United States.
But one source I found posted that according to the
usd A, about five hundred thousand rabbits were sold live
by farms for any purpose in twenty seventeen. But that
can trast wildly with the number from the American Rabbit
(16:13):
Breeders of America because they claim that the amount of
rabbit sold for food is somewhere around fifty million, and
that the discrepancy is due to the fact that a
lot of those sales are not on the USDA's radar.
They're sold from small farms, like they're just kind of
flying beneath what they're monitoring. Yeah, huh, and it is interesting.
(16:36):
Like here in the US, rabbit seems to be either
a thing that you eat because it is local and
like you can't afford other proteins, or a thing that
you eat because it's local and you're buying like fancy
dishes made with it from fancy restaurants. It's a very
like like white tablecloth kind of protein. There's a survey
(16:59):
in the early nineteen nineties that reported that people in
Louisiana who ate or would eat rabbit either made less
than twenty five thousand dollars a year or more than
fifty thousand, with a very little in between. Oh yeah,
that is interesting, really fascinating. I feel like one of
the dishes I had it was a very fancy restaurant
(17:21):
and it was like um ravioli with rabbit in the middle. Yeah,
so good. Oh which, speaking of I want to shout
out Swattie listeners who a long time ago wrote in
and sent us this recipe for fancy chef br d ravioli.
Huh and chef your Rabbitli was featured in the fourth
(17:43):
episode of the Last of Us. And let me tell
you I have been making that recipe probably twice a
week since then. So appreciate it. Oh dang, okay, I've
really enjoyed it. Spicy, spicy, spicy. Um. Well, back to rabbits,
because at least in the US, they're kind of a
largely in the no type of food when it comes
(18:05):
to these small farms and they're produced on this smaller scale. Generally.
They did see a boost of popularity during the supply
chain issues of the pandemic, but that was mostly for
home chefs because in the early days of the pandemic,
chefs at restaurants had kind of the opposite problem where
they needed simpler meats that were easy to put into
(18:28):
go containers. So rabbit didn't really fit the sure. Yeah,
and I guess for people who are less familiar with it,
like I feel like in those early days, we were
also like comfort food driven. We were like I just
want a burger, Like I just want a pork loin, Like,
just give me something familiar and easy to put in
my face because I don't have any I don't have
(18:51):
any brain space left for anything else. Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Oh but do you have the history for years? Oh
my heck, we do. I am excited to get into it,
and we are going to do that as soon as
we get back from a quick break for a word
from our sponsors, and we're back. Thank you sponsor, Yes,
(19:19):
thank you. Okay. So rabbits, there are a lot of
different types of rabbits. I'll say that to start, there
are fifteen varieties of wild rabbit that are native to
North America, just North America. They have long been incorporated
into the diet of Native Americans and have been a
part of indigenous mythology. Archaeological evidence out of Europe suggests
(19:42):
that as far back as twenty thousand years ago people
were hunting and eating rabbits, and because they're you know,
typically small, they were consumed immediately in general, as opposed
to being preserved. And so this means that in Europe
up they were eaten across the continent relatively regularly, but
(20:03):
they weren't usually processed or preserved. But by at least
the first century BC, people were fattening up rabbits they
kept in hutches for the slaughter and the I would say,
one of the through lines throughout this history is people
fighting about when they got domesticated. Oh yeah, so this
people are like well they were doing this, but that
(20:24):
doesn't mean domestication. Yeah, I believe a lot of research
has been done. It has it has been We are
going to talk about it extensively. And I love this
and I feel like and I honestly feel like part
of this is like because rabbits are kind of like
they remind me in temperament of cats that like that
don't have claws, so they have like less to say
(20:45):
to you about it, but they're still but they're really
I mean, like like they have an emotion and they
want you to know about it, like they sure do. Yeah, yeah,
you can ask my mom. Anyway. I did want to
bring up some stuff about hairs okay, yeah, which are
(21:06):
not rabbits. They are closely related. They are very closely related.
And I almost had a panic attack those ones where
I got to the end and I was like, wait
a minute, well I have to talk about hair as well.
Am I missing an entire half of this outline exactly exactly.
I did want to mention some of the early history
of hairs, though, because I really wanted to know what
(21:27):
the heck is up with the easter bunny okay, yeah,
which in Europe is known as the Easter hair. Sure, okay,
so this is going to be a very abbreviated okay story,
No love it though, let's yeah, let's go yes, all right, So,
going back to Neolithic times, European hairs were given ritual
burials alongside humans. Okay, and some archaeologists believe that the
(21:52):
hairs one of the reasons this was happening was they
were meant to be symbolic of rebirth. Julius Caesar did
that British folks didn't eat hairs because of their religious
importance in five hundred fifteen BC. Okay, But meanwhile, in
Greek mythology, they were sacred to Aphrodite. They were used
(22:13):
to represent desire. Apparently, they were used to symbolize how
the virgin Mary didn't give in to sexual temptation. She
was often painted with a hair or rabbit, usually a
white hair or rabbit in Renaissance art, which made me
wonder if that's why they're there's that hair in the Bitch,
the movie, which Lauren and I have talked about on
(22:35):
movie Crush. If you want to go yeah, yeah, no,
I think I think that that's actually because of this
next point that you're about to come to yes as well.
So I got to this and I was like, oh, okay,
but then I found this thing. So in the sixteen hundreds,
English and German folklore started having these instances of the
(22:56):
Easter hair, which is what a lot of people think,
that's the first thing that they can find of this.
Though some religious folks attempted to stop the traditions around
this Eastern hair or like the hair pie scramble where
people quote scrambled for a slice of hair meat pie.
(23:17):
The reason these religious folks were, you know, raising their
hand like we shouldn't do this is because of the
pagan roots of these types of traditions. Huh. So, according
to some sources, people at the time held the belief
some people did, particularly in northern Europe, that witches could
take the form of a hair for mischief purposes. Yeah,
(23:42):
so to banish the witches of winter, people might have
eaten hair at spring equinox celebrations like Easter. So that's
probably why it was in the bitch, you're right, and
then like this is a food show. I could have
gone way more into this, but essentially all of that
(24:02):
got mixed up with a Grimm's fairy tale and the
general idea of rebirth during spring, like, oh, look at
all those bunnies during the springtime. Wow, and presto, we
got the easter bunny. I guess, yeah, yeah, I have
I have two I have two notes here, Okay. The
(24:23):
first is that um, bugs bunny. While we're talking about hairs, bugs,
bunny is morphologically speaking, more like a hair than a bunny. Okay, okay,
I just need to put that out there. That's just important,
important fact. This brings us to a fun Times with
History segment. Yea, because there is a very popular story
(24:45):
about rabbit domestication, which as I said, is huge in
the story of rabbits, that is often repeated but has
been largely debunked. Some people still fight for it, but
all right, I'm going to all also repeat it because
it's interesting and because it's like in the top ten
results of what you're going Yeah, but grain of salted
(25:09):
come on this, okay, arney, Okay. So, the popular story
goes that French monks were the first to domesticate rabbits
in six hundred CE. The legend tells that this is
when Pope Gregory the Great declared that fetal rabbits did
not count as meat during lent, which again comes all
(25:31):
the time in these episodes. Um, and he decreed that
because the amniotic sacks filled with fluid that encompass fetal
rabbits made them fish. Okay, uh sure, sure, um so yes,
they were not against the rules to eat during lent,
(25:52):
and because of this they were something of assault after
delicacy to the point that the monks and the story
started them and through their efforts they bread the wild
European rabbit into a breed that tolerated humans, which I love,
tolerated humans. I saw that a lot of places too.
So that's the popular story you'll find. However, when researching it,
(26:16):
experts discovered that there was no real proof of this
story at all. And again it's a story that has
long been accepted that researchers themselves said they had used
this story before because they just heard it from reputable resources.
And we're like, okay, sure, but there was nothing. There's
like no record of the eat it. There's no record
(26:37):
of eating rabbits during lent. And not only that, the
consensus seems to be there is no single domestication event
for rabbits. Yeah yeah, all right, so there's this genetic
divergence in rabbits. I'm telling you this episode, I was
(26:57):
trying to make sense of everything. I was so confused.
But there was this genetic divergence and rabbits that potentially
indicates domestication that goes back as far as seventeen thousand
and seven hundred years ago, so way longer ago than that. However,
even that evidence isn't entirely clear in its implications, because
some experts think that that might be because the sample
(27:21):
of wild rabbits that was used wasn't close enough to
our modern day domesticated rabbits to give like an accurate
reading at all. Oh okay, okay, yep. Some also point
out that people in France have long enjoyed rabbit meats,
so it is within the realm of possibility that they
were domesticated there or near there. Separately, again, multiple events
(27:45):
of domestication events. Some even think we've mixed up this
Pope Gregory fellow with another guy, a historian named Saint
Gregory of Tours, who once mentioned the lent time practice
eating baby rabbits. However, even that falls apart upon closer examination,
(28:06):
because it seems this whole thing is based on the
writings of a German author out of nineteen thirty six
who was seeming to attribute a story to Saint Gregory,
wherein the Saint describes one person, possibly not even Christian
what they noted, eating fetal rabbits during lent and then
(28:27):
dying from an illness not related to the rabbits. Wow,
So like a much later retelling of this, it's a mess,
It's what I'm saying. Yeah, that I had a quote.
I had a quote. I deleted it because I was like,
I think it's gonna be clear. But it was a
quote from all the historians who was like, basically, I
(28:49):
don't know that. Yeah. Part okay, part of the problem
that researchers do run into here is that is that
rabbit bones are relatively small and fragile, like like even
if you compare it to a cat, a cat is
(29:11):
like thirteen percent bone mass, by way, a rabbit is
only like eight percent. I'm quoting those numbers from memory,
but I think that's what I read. And so the
fossil record isn't nearly as well preserved with rabbit as
it is for larger mammals or for like shellfish stuff
like that. So all right, we think, I mean human
(29:36):
scientists think not like not like me and Anny, that
animals similar to modern rabbits lived throughout Europe like a
couple million years ago, but that they went nearly extinct
during one of the glacial periods, and the only ones
that survived in order to start spreading again in the
past like twenty thousand years were in the Iberian Peninsula
(29:57):
and what's now southern France. But yeah, yeah, basically it's complicated. Yes,
the consensus does seem to be that domestication both for
food and for cute pet rabbits worked in tandem and
(30:17):
happened in several different places at several different times, and
saul ups and downs in terms of food as whether
it was a high status food that was getting recorded
and talked about as opposed to a low status food
that was not. Yeah. Um, pretty certainly, by the time
the Phoenicians arrived in the western Mediterranean circle like eleven
(30:41):
hundred BC, there were enough rabbits there that they named
the Iberian Peninsula the Land of Rabbits. It's thumb something
something like that. Um, I read a few different and
like possibly this is a grammatically contentious and etymologically contentious,
(31:03):
but that's possibly where the Romans got the name Ispania
and where we get the word Spain from. But anyway,
either way, Phoenicians began trading rabbits around the Mediterranean right
around the bc CE turnover. Greeks lovedom Aristotle wrote their
(31:24):
meat is nice and delicate. Romans farmed rabbits in the
Iberian area, and around the eight hundreds CE, both wild
and domesticated rabbits began spreading back out to other areas
of Europe, although it did take a while for rabbit
farming to catch on in new places, because although rabbits
are prolific when well cared for, it's a little finicky
(31:47):
to get a good set up started. As of the
early thirteen hundreds, in England, a rabbit had the same
market price as a whole pig. Dang, yeah yeah. In
the Middle Ages, in Britain, rabbits were kept in artificial warrens,
and that was because the soil wasn't ideal for them
(32:08):
to burrow, and through this process they slowly chilled out.
I guess that's kind of what I took away from
a lot of the research. Skeletal differences started appearing in
rabbits as early as the eighteenth century in Europe, which
matches up with when people started breeding rabbits specifically to
(32:28):
be kept as pets. Yeah, colonialism did bring rabbits around
the world. A British sailors would raise rabbits on board
as food. The Spanish also introduced European rabbits to the
Americas early on, and European rabbits were introduced to Australia
in the eighteen hundreds and they have done a significant
(32:50):
amount of damage there since then. Oh yeah, oh yeah.
Some have even gone so far as to label this
as a case study of one of the fastest instances
of an invasi of manimal species in history. These days,
there's an estimated two hundred million feral rabbits in Australia. Yeah,
I read that. I read that. After wild rabbits were
(33:15):
imported into Victoria in eighteen fifty nine, they had twenty
four rabbits and within six years there were twenty thousand.
And it was a problem. It was a hecken problem.
It was a huge, huge problem. There's another story. There's
a story that goes that like this rich dude was
just like I want to hunt rabbits in Australia, semiso rabbits,
(33:38):
and he got thirteen and they escaped and they multiplied
like rabbits, as the saying goes, But it has been
a huge problem. In the nineteen fifties, the Australian government
released rabbits infected with a rabbit based virus to whittle
down wild population. Yeah, and this was the first instance
(34:00):
of a virus being deliberately introduced to the wild to
eliminate a species. In the words of an Australian scientist,
thus inadvertedly began one of the great experiments and natural
selection conducted on a continental scale. Yeah. And then there
was another virus that was designed to kill rabbits within
forty eight hours that escaped a lab in the nineteen
(34:24):
nineties and decimated rabbit populations by up to ninety percent
in dry areas. It only really worked in dry areas.
And those are only a few examples of the methods
that have been employed to control this population. Because they
have been working on it, there was a lot. Yeah. Yeah.
(34:45):
When European rabbits were introduced to North America in the
nineteenth century, they became invasive as well, particularly in places
like Chatham County at North Carolina. As a solution to
their proliferation of all these rabbits, they shipped thousands of
them northeast as soon as railroads arrived in the area
in the eighteen eighties, and this was like a fairly
(35:06):
successful solution. Mental rabbit fever, which is this illness that
results from skinning rabbits, pretty much killed the rabbit industry
in that area. So yeah, yeah, yeah. A US rabbit
experiment station was established near Los Angeles in the nineteen twenties,
(35:27):
and rabbits saw a spike in popularity as a food
thing in the US during meat shortages of World War Two.
An ad campaign spearheaded by Life magazine at the time
came with this quote, Domestic rabbits are one of the
few pets which can be enjoyed dead or alive. Yep,
(35:49):
like that they put pet in there. That was a
real nice wow twist. All right. Another ad from the
time from Gourmet magazine read, although it isn't our usual habit,
this year, we're eating the easter rabbit again. Take those
shouted dreams and like twist the knife. Yeah fun. That
(36:09):
is actually quite a longer slogan and I shut it,
I shortened it. But if you want to read more,
all right, great. However, when beef became more readily available
in the US in the fifties and sixties, rabbit once
again declined to popularity in the mainstream of note, though
it never faded in certain communities, which has been true
(36:31):
throughout the history and present of eating rabbit. Yeah. Yeah,
because for most of history, rabbit really has been a
local thing. Like large scale farming didn't begin in earnest
pretty much anywhere until the nineteen seventies, and that was
after a couple decades of specialized breeds and diets and
management practices being developed. In nineteen seventy six, of note,
(36:56):
the World Rabbit Science Association organized in Paris. They hold
a Rabbit Congress once every four years. I don't think
that it's a congress made up of rabbits. I think
it's a congress made up of rabbit scientists and enthusiasts.
But either way, I love that by that phrase. We
did not get an American branch of the World Rabbit
(37:16):
Science Association until nineteen ninety six, so we were slow
on the pickup mm. And there are a couple of
reasons why that might have been. And one is something
we've been alluding to throughout, so similar to what we
mentioned in our turtle Soup episode, the perception that rabbits
were cute, a perception that was really reinforced by their
(37:38):
various depictions in our entertainment, had a huge impact on
people's willingness to eat rabbit. Yeah, in this country, a
lot of things I read pointed to Bambi's thumper as
an example. There's also a term for it called the
easter bunny syndrome. Yeah, this is in scientific papers, like
(37:59):
science papers about rabbit meat will list this as a
scientifically accepted reason that people don't eat more rabbit, right,
And yeah, like we said in that turtle Soup episode,
it's kind of the same. You know, they've been anthropomorphized,
they're cute in a lot of our media. So it's
it does it has like a measurable impact, it does. Uh.
(38:24):
That kind of changed in the US in the twenty
tens with the growing interest of the nose to tail movements,
So people were more interested in like, Okay, I want
to make the most out of these meats and try
these things, and then I gotta put in here twenty
thirteen is when The Last of Us came out, which
certainly again didn't have this like lovely scene that's in
(38:46):
the show of Eating rabbit, but it certainly has scenes
of hunting rabbit. Okay, yeah, yeah yeah. In a twenty
fourteen though, Whole Foods launched a rabbit meat pile program
that drill a lot of ire from some folks. Some
of their flyers read boycott Whole Foods because they're selling
(39:07):
rabbits and because rabbits aren't protected by the humane methods
of slaughter acts. There have recently been a few instances
of horrific conditions that have been exposed, including in twenty
fifteen when the US's largest producer got in trouble from
some pretty for some pretty terrible things despite advertising as humane,
(39:28):
and the protests largely worked. I believe Whole Foods stopped
selling rabbit in twenty fifteen. Yeah goodness, uh huh um.
In twenty seventeen, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro introduced Plan Rabbit
to combat food shortages, basically trying to convince people to
eat rabbit. You can find a lot of those flyers
online should you desire. Yeah, huh it is it is
(39:53):
so fascinating to me, and I mean that there are
we didn't really go that deeply into it, aside from
that very coo using sidebar about the Easter hair. But yeah,
like like rabbit's feature in a whole lot of of
of mythology and folklore from the places where they do exist,
(40:13):
and it's I mean like like that was a short
list at the top of cultural references to rabbits. Um.
They they really do hop up in a lot of places.
Um Uh. I was thinking. I had a very small
reference to to to to the character Anya from Buffy
(40:34):
the Vampire Slayer in my What Is Its section because
one of the funny things about this demon who doesn't
really know how to human good is that she hates bunnies.
She is terrified of bunnies. And I mean it's a
it's a good character note because like, who would be
terrified of bunnies except for a weirdo demonum and maybe
(40:58):
someone who had met rabbits and nose. Oh, I just
had a flashbagg. There was this animated short I've told
you about it, I'll tell anybody about it. It was
before ice Age, and it was one of those like
Pixar cute shorts. You know. It was about a rabbit
and her husband rabbit had died, no, and she was
(41:21):
making this pie and this moth was bothering her, and
then she got it. The moth got in the pie batter,
and then the bunny crawled into the oven and it
was a universe in there, and she died. What I'm
telling you this is a real thing. You could look
it up. I scarred me for life. Clearly. It's before
(41:46):
ice age. Just look up ice age rabbit moth that
it will come up. Okay, do you want to see it?
I don't know. It's very beautiful, all right, but it's disturbing.
Huh um yeah, no, the uh it's no, it's it's cool.
It's cool, you know. And it can like rabbits can
take that turn. And they do have in a lot
(42:06):
of folklore like a like a trickster kind of vibe
to them. Um. And I've been very slowly working through
the Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff Vandermere, which which is
what Um the movie Annihilation was based on Um and
the second in the second book authority. Um. There's this
(42:27):
whole thing about how these rabbits were introduced to the
area as part of an experiment, and they of course
got out of control, and now there's wild rabbits and
their behavior is very strange, as is the behavior of
many things in this very strange area. So, um, yeah,
magicians rabbits. Yeah, gosh, we're doing talk about that. Wow.
(42:52):
You know, there's a lot, there's a lot here. Um,
we've clearly got a lot of thoughts about rabbits. We do,
both me and Lauren and societies at large. The rabbit
in the moon in Japanese folklore, m just up there
making mochi. Yeah. If you haven't seen the nineteen seventy
(43:14):
Watership Down and you want to be disturbed by children's movie,
then that's her. That's the way to go. Oh gosh,
that check Alice in Wonderland that had the taxidermid stop
motion rabbit hoof. Oh wow. I feel like we've really
gone on a journey in this one. That was a
(43:35):
legit flashback. I just had ya Wow. Yeah, Annie's like
whole universe stopped. Oh my god, all the way back
in middle school again. Um. I've never actually seen the
animated Watership Down. I only read the book very recently. Um,
like over the past, like like during the pandemic, I think,
(43:56):
and it is very upsetting. That is an upsetting buck.
I loved it. I think you should watch the cartoon. Okay, um,
you'll see right handed a generation. And that's just not
me saying that. There's a articles written about it. Yeah,
it's disturbing because it's like, oh, watch these kids. It's
cartoon and then there's rabbits murdering each other. Like oh god, okay,
(44:19):
I'm all right. I believe you entirely. Uh okay, if
you have a specific rabbit story, we of course would
love to hear it. Yes we would, because that's what
we have to say for now. Clearly we could go on,
but we will. But we do have some listener mail
(44:39):
for you. We do, and we're going to get into
that as soon as we get back from a quick
break for a word from our sponsors. And we're back.
Thank you, yes, thank you, and we're back with Star
(45:04):
Happen Away. Yeah. You just had a moment of connection
in the break. I feel realize some things about myself
and rabbits. It's the whole thing, it is. Yeah, So
that's you know, sometimes you learn sometimes the subject that
you learn the most about is yourself. It's true. Very wise, Lauren,
(45:27):
very wise. Also, we heard from some very wise listeners,
including Jessica. Jessica wrote, I loved the episode on Garam.
It reminded me of this video that solo l y
he did for the History channel on YouTube where she
made Garam. She hasn't done anything recently for that channel,
(45:47):
but the playlist of ancient recipes with Sola is amazing.
Oh cool? Yes, oh you know we love an ancient recipe.
Oh yeah, yeah, They're so mysterious and fun. Yes, it's
like trying to decipher a riddle or a puzzle, right,
I'm like, how much like because it'll lists things in
(46:09):
like take take this monetary amount worth of an ingredient
and I'm like, I don't recognize that monetary amount. I
certainly don't don't know how much duck it would have
bought in ancient Rome. Cool but but but yeah, awesome,
thank you. Cecilia wrote The Joy of Cooking episode finally
(46:31):
got me sitting at the keyboard. I listened several days
ago and then started a thread on my family's WhatsApp group,
which we have called Culinary Adventures. I asked who had
one of these books and what edition? Mine was a
wedding gift in nineteen seventy two. Curiously, the copyright page
lists all the past copyright dates, the latest being nineteen
sixty four, and all the previous printings, the latest being
(46:54):
nineteen seventy one, but there's no mention of the date
this particular book was printed, so by checking Wikipedia, I
surmise this one is a fifth edition. In the dedication,
Marion Rombauer Becker refers to the book as The Joy
or the Joy of Cooking, but this one seems to
be the one where they dropped the from the title.
(47:15):
It does have the information on how to skin and
cook a squirrel, as well as several other animals I
normally think of as roadkill, not food. And paging through
it at random the other day I found these two
strange recipes, which I will attach to the email. Right now,
I can only think of one recipe from this book
that I use, and that is four pecan balls, which
the book calls pecan puffs. My mother had a Joy
(47:38):
of Cooking. I don't know if her copy is still
in the family, probably not, as no one mentioned it.
My sisters who responded both have copies as well as
my brother. One sister got one as a wedding gift
in nineteen eighty. It became very well worn, and she
replaced it with another. Here's what she says about the replacement.
The copyright page says the first Scribner Scribner Edition nineteen
(47:58):
ninety five. But I'm certain the cookbook itself is identical
to the first copy I got in nineteen eighty. I
went through the old cookbook and transferred all my old
handwritten notes to the new copy before discarding the old one.
Then her husband bought her a newer one for Christmas.
She says the latest date listed in that one is
nineteen ninety seven, so hers must be the sixth and
(48:18):
seventh editions. She says she uses the older one more
than the newer one, and that neither one has the
two recipes I mentioned above. Who fun Okay. Another sister
did not get one as a wedding gift, but sometime later,
in nineteen eighty seven, her husband bought her one. When
he realized every one of her sisters had one. He
wrote in it, you are a real sport to have
(48:41):
suffered so long without this. She was married in nineteen
eighty two. Here is what she said. I use the
recipes loosely for jams, and more closely for the ginger
snaps and of course the all important pecan balls puffs
to them. I may have some cake or frosting recipes
from there I use. Also. One niece has one that
(49:02):
belonged to her husband's grandmother and is from about nineteen
sixty seven. Another niece picked one up at a book
sale and it's from nineteen eighty five. Ish. I guess
the publisher never dated the books, so it seems the
tradition of giving a copy of the Joy of Cooking
is a wedding gift in my family died out with
my generation. Looking through my copy, I see that it
occasionally lists a can of condensed soup in the ingredients list.
(49:25):
I didn't realize published cookbooks did this, And in the
Know Your Ingredients section it lists can sizes with equivalent
weights and liquid measures. This can be handy in translating
old recipes. The call for a number two can of something.
Canned soups come up frequently in church lady cookbooks. I
have a number of these fundraiser cookbooks. They're fun. I
(49:45):
put one together for my church in about nineteen ninety,
I solicited recipes from my family as well as from
church members, and that is the cookbook I used the most.
It has several of my grandmother's recipes in it. My
mother bought eighteen of these books and gave one to
each of her grandchildren they got engaged, so everyone in
that generation has that book. I also have a James
Beard cookbook, as well as The Art of French Cooking
(50:06):
by Julia Child, which I might have mentioned before. Those
were also gifts, And well, I guess that's what I
have to say about the joy of cooking. I thoroughly
enjoy your podcast and frequently recommend episodes to my family.
I learned so much about foods I've never heard of
and others I'm familiar with. On the day I heard
the episode on wild rice, I had just made wild
(50:26):
rice the evening before. Note she capitalized it, and then
it says in parentheses. I don't suppose wild rice needs
to be capitalized. It just looks better that way. You
will notice a mention of mock turtle soup in one
of those recipes attached. Oh I love this, I love this.
What wonderful detective work. Oh my goodness. Yes, fantastic. I
(50:49):
love trying to find like when did people get it,
what addition is it? What recipes are the same, what
are different? Yeah, and also just I think it's interesting
that you know, you have your scipes that you follow
more closely and less, ye have your notes that you make,
and then when you brought up like the church books
and that's the one you use the most. It kind
of makes sense to me because in your area, that's
(51:11):
probably what you know is a lot of people are cooking.
Like that's yeah, be localized, personalized. Sure, yes, And I
remember my grandmother contributed to one of her church cookbooks
and my mom would get it out and I would
see like, oh, my grandmother did that recipe. I just
get so excited, like yeah, I was like she's a
celebrity or something that No, but sure, yeah that's all
(51:32):
that's really cool. Yeah, it really is. It really is
cookbooks are they're just, like we said, such a great
snapshot and look at what's going on in a family
in an area, in a community, like the whole thing.
Yeah cool. Yeah, I Um, I have my my dad
and my mom's old like like handwritten recipes my dad
(51:54):
from like professional kitchens and my mom from cooking at home,
and I really, one of these days, I really need
to digitize that collection and both both scan them in
and type them up because yeah, yeah, oh yeah, it's
always devastating to lose your recipe. So yeah, yeah, well,
(52:14):
thank you so much to both of these listeners for
writing in. If you would like to write to us,
you can our email us hello at saborpod dot com.
We are also on social media hypothetically, you can find
us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at saver pod, and
we do hope to hear from you. Sabor is production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, you
can visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
(52:37):
listen to your favorite shows. Thanks as always to our
superproducers Dylan Fagan and Andrew Howard. Thanks to you for listening,
and we hope that lots more good things are coming
your way
Savor News
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Anney Reese
Lauren Vogelbaum
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