Any reason why they didn't get their own "meat name" then? I thought that the "cow/beef"-"pig/pork" split was due do that, with the initially Norman nobles consuming most of that luxury meat. Thus nothing for "chicken", either. Did "lapin" or something like that get lost?
Chicken/pullet seems to have gone the opposite way: pullet (French) is exclusively for the animal but chicken (Germanic) can be either the animal or its meat.
QI s05e03 “Eating” talked about how Hudson Bay trappers were so fond of eating rabbit that they died! Rabbit is so delicious that they didn’t eat a balanced diet and suffered - fatally - from lack of vitamins etc!!
I have lived in many cities across three countries, and the price of chicken has always been a good proxy for the cost of living. And maintains the same ratio to the price of a bus ticket (and similar things).
Rabbit is comparatively cheap to produce, and available at low price wherever it is produced in larger quantities. Apparently no significant economies of scale where you live.
Rabbits were a depression-era food for Australians and was always considered a poor people's food. Being a pest does give make it popular either, much the same as carp is. Which is a shame, as both make great sources of cheap food.
Growing up in rural Australia I remember eating rabbit as a kid in the late 70s and early 80s. One of my favourite meals was a sweet rabbit curry with rice that Mum used to make. Haven't eaten it in probably close to 40 years and my salivary gland is activated right now as I type this.
Also our most successful rugby league team’s name was given as a derogatory put down: “Rabbitoh”, which was seen as a poor sales person flogging rabbit meat for money
South Sydney being a poor area, yielded the South Sydney Rabbitohs
Since their introduction for a spot of recreational hunting, European rabbits have had a devastating effect on the ecology of Australia in general. Hence the Rabbit-Proof Fence, and its corresponding novel and film.
> Hence the Rabbit-Proof Fence, and its corresponding novel and film.
You do realise, one hopes, the film has FA to do with either rabbits or any rabbit related ecological devastation.
The fence served as a navigational aid for a long journey home, had it not existed Daisy, Molly, and Gracie would have had to fall back on the Seven Sisters for directions.
I've only eaten rabbit once and it was bathed in garlic butter so I don't really remember it. Besides the "tastes like chicken hehe" stereotype, is there any knock-your-socks-off dish made with rabbit where it's center stage?
you need an example of what you consider such a dish.
Rabbits are pretty decent, as a kid we used to have quite a few of them at the village (along with all other kind of animals, incl. lambs, pigs, and goats). Either way it's rather easy to tell the meat apart and most meat(s) can be prepared to be delicious.
> First time I heard of rabbit being considered to taste like chicken, they taste nothing alike.
They don't. It's just a reference to the standing joke that any meat that is unfamiliar "tastes like chicken" as a generic way of describing meat taste.
Yes. In fact, the famous ultra-orthodox traditional paella that Valencians stick to has rabbit. But many other variants do as well. In my family we often eat a simpler version from Murcia with no chicken, but more rabbit, called just "rice with rabbit", and IMHO it's even better (https://okdiario.com/recetas/arroz-conejo-murcia-2538513). The best rice you can have without seafood in it :) And I've always liked fishing for the rabbit's liver.
At one of my ancestral villages in Galicia, rabbit empanada is also a thing, and tastes amazing. But it's seen less and less often because it's messy to eat (it's cooked with bones so you have to open the empanada, remove the bones and close it again) so people tend to use fillings without that problem now. (You can cook it without the bones, there are also areas where they do that, but in that specific area they shun that variant).
The european rabbit (and the domesticated rabbit, which descends from it) is native to the Iberian peninsula. There are ~20 extant species called rabbits all over the world (most though not all leporids outside of Lepus, the true hares).
well they are native almost everywhere but according to legend it was named i-spn-ya (Land of the Rabbits) by the Phoenician although some suggest that SPN could also have meant North instead of rabbits so land of the north.
If I recall, the word 'España' or 'Hispania' refers to an old word for 'hyrax', for which rabbit were mistaken for. Could be apocraphyl but it's a nice idea.
Hare is pretty common game here in Finland and I think I must have eaten that fairly regularly when I was little but I have absolutely no recollection what it actually tasted like.
Only recipe I've seen was indeed a stew where the ingredients were almost "one rabbit, unholy amounts of garlic".
The title buries the lead: rabbits executing hunters in the Smithfield Decretal illustrations. Seems British humour has a tradition at least to the 14th Century.
Though lede is just a variation of the word lead to get a unique word for the leading section of an article. As long as we all agree that it's pronounced like in leading and not like the metal the difference in spelling doesn't feel significant
How is that an example of burying the lead? (I presume lede is the correct spelling, but burying lead for others to find in their drinking water amuses me.)
EDIT: saw the picture and yes. That certainly was catchy, but I the hn title is missing the subtitle: "until the black death made them commonplace".
From Turkey, as far as I can tell, rabbit doesn’t show up much on menus so it seems to vary a lot by region. But if you have a recipe to recommend, I’d love to try it :)
i have a very specific recipe passed down in my family, i boil in a mix of water and vinegar for about 20-25 minutes, before roasting it in the oven with potatoes and garlic. That way the specific taste and especially the smell is brought down, but it's otherwise very tasty.
The European rabbit seems to be in fact two different species. In 2026 it was proposed to split it in Iberian rabbit from West Spain and Portugal, and European rabbit from East Spain and the rest of Europe. Both were isolated in the glaciation in opposite coins of Spain and the split is supported by genetic analysis and Iberian has a darker fur. They had barely interbred since 2 million years ago.
So we know now that moving European rabbits for hunting purposes to Portugal, Malaga or Galicia may be a menace for Iberian Rabbit.
USA has the cotton tail rabbits on genus Sylvilagus that was the original carrier of Myxomathosis virus. They live in swamps and forests.
Rabbit is more "lamb" than "chicken" but none of both. It does not have a strong flavor really. Is a common dish in the Mediterranean and is tasty. Its main problems are the splinter bones that can damage a tooth, and its unappealing look in the butcher shop.
Guinea pig should be similar. More fatty maybe. Very popular in South America, but I never ate those.
You're trying to say that rabbits - which breed so rapidly that we actually use the phrase "breeds like rabbits" in just about every language across the planet - were somehow a rare luxury?
Rabbits, that left unchecked will breed like crazy across any grassy-ish space that you have and which can be caught with only slightly more difficulty than for example rocks and fallen branches?
You realise that rabbits were once so rare in Australia they had to be introduced to salve the British passion for killing small things?
The article claims:
The European rabbit is a common sight in the British countryside today.
Yet it was not always so. They are not native to the British Isles and are one of the most devastating invasive species.
If true, there was a time when they were so rare as to be non existent.
From that time, until at most 1555 when:
... the Swiss naturalist Conrad Gesner could write that "there are few countries wherein coneys (rabbits) do not breed, but the most plenty of all is in England."
there was an interstitial period of decreasing rarity.
Rabbits also happen to be an excellent source of protein for other animals. This helps keep the rabbit population under control in healthy ecosystems.
Unlike Australia, Britain had wolves and foxes for a long time. Not to mention the apex predator, Homo sapiens, who in late medieval and early modern Britain were probably much more eager to hunt and eat rabbits than modern Australians are.
> modern Britain were probably much more eager to hunt and eat rabbits than modern Australians are.
Modern as in today or modern as in, say 1940s?
I can state as a fact that here in Australia my father, born 1935 and still alive and within 20 feet as I type, kept his mother and younger siblings alive by snaring, trapping, and shooting rabbits through the WWII years his father was overseas in North Africa and Europe.
Further, the bulk of the non native population in Australia until recently was essentially composed of "modern Britains" who were so eager to hunt rabbits they're insisted on bringing their cursed invasives here.
The root of the issue here was more the sparse numbers of people hunting rabbits and the vastness of the space sans people the rabbits had for expansion.
Not even the dingos and European introduced foxes in Australia had sufficient numbers to make a dent.
Although it has spawned a lot of papers on cat, fox, dingo, rabbit, bilby, quokka population dynamics and predator - prey cycles.
Scotland at least needs the return to the native European Lynx since long time ago. Sheep are what prevents it, but it could help to put some order in the populations of rabbits, vampire deer, roe deer and red foxes.
See also the note at rabbit: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rabbit#English apparently rabbits themselves are all French. "hare is indeed inherited from Proto-Germanic."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F8JN1tlXHo
> Rabbit starvation (also called protein poisoning or mal de caribou)
The body can only digest so much protein and rabbits are so lean there is basically no fat to them outside their organs.
That seems a reasonable estimate to me even today.
Does this phenomenon have a name?
South Sydney being a poor area, yielded the South Sydney Rabbitohs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbits_in_Australia
You do realise, one hopes, the film has FA to do with either rabbits or any rabbit related ecological devastation.
The fence served as a navigational aid for a long journey home, had it not existed Daisy, Molly, and Gracie would have had to fall back on the Seven Sisters for directions.
you need an example of what you consider such a dish.
Rabbits are pretty decent, as a kid we used to have quite a few of them at the village (along with all other kind of animals, incl. lambs, pigs, and goats). Either way it's rather easy to tell the meat apart and most meat(s) can be prepared to be delicious.
First time I heard of rabbit being considered to taste like chicken, they taste nothing alike.
They don't. It's just a reference to the standing joke that any meat that is unfamiliar "tastes like chicken" as a generic way of describing meat taste.
At one of my ancestral villages in Galicia, rabbit empanada is also a thing, and tastes amazing. But it's seen less and less often because it's messy to eat (it's cooked with bones so you have to open the empanada, remove the bones and close it again) so people tend to use fillings without that problem now. (You can cook it without the bones, there are also areas where they do that, but in that specific area they shun that variant).
Only recipe I've seen was indeed a stew where the ingredients were almost "one rabbit, unholy amounts of garlic".
The guys from Fallow made a video on YouTube about attempting to make a really good one.
Apparently Lapin à la Moutarde is the classic rabbit dish.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/bury-the-lede-versu...
EDIT: saw the picture and yes. That certainly was catchy, but I the hn title is missing the subtitle: "until the black death made them commonplace".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJtdtekV7xo
Let's just say it didn't make me want to try rabbit any time soon.
This also works for goat or sheep meat.
So we know now that moving European rabbits for hunting purposes to Portugal, Malaga or Galicia may be a menace for Iberian Rabbit.
USA has the cotton tail rabbits on genus Sylvilagus that was the original carrier of Myxomathosis virus. They live in swamps and forests.
Rabbit is more "lamb" than "chicken" but none of both. It does not have a strong flavor really. Is a common dish in the Mediterranean and is tasty. Its main problems are the splinter bones that can damage a tooth, and its unappealing look in the butcher shop.
Guinea pig should be similar. More fatty maybe. Very popular in South America, but I never ate those.
You're trying to say that rabbits - which breed so rapidly that we actually use the phrase "breeds like rabbits" in just about every language across the planet - were somehow a rare luxury?
Rabbits, that left unchecked will breed like crazy across any grassy-ish space that you have and which can be caught with only slightly more difficulty than for example rocks and fallen branches?
These were a rare luxury, somehow?
Bollocks they were.
The article claims:
If true, there was a time when they were so rare as to be non existent.From that time, until at most 1555 when:
there was an interstitial period of decreasing rarity.Unlike Australia, Britain had wolves and foxes for a long time. Not to mention the apex predator, Homo sapiens, who in late medieval and early modern Britain were probably much more eager to hunt and eat rabbits than modern Australians are.
Modern as in today or modern as in, say 1940s?
I can state as a fact that here in Australia my father, born 1935 and still alive and within 20 feet as I type, kept his mother and younger siblings alive by snaring, trapping, and shooting rabbits through the WWII years his father was overseas in North Africa and Europe.
Further, the bulk of the non native population in Australia until recently was essentially composed of "modern Britains" who were so eager to hunt rabbits they're insisted on bringing their cursed invasives here.
The root of the issue here was more the sparse numbers of people hunting rabbits and the vastness of the space sans people the rabbits had for expansion.
Not even the dingos and European introduced foxes in Australia had sufficient numbers to make a dent.
Although it has spawned a lot of papers on cat, fox, dingo, rabbit, bilby, quokka population dynamics and predator - prey cycles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_Concerning_Diet_and_Ap...
Above is a Wikipedia article about that law. And here is a direct link to the text of that 1363 law:
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=pst.000017915496&seq=...