Raising, Slaughtering, and Cooking Rabbits

I've had mixed experiences with rabbit meat. I once purchased (prêt-à-manger) rabbit meat from a halal butcher in Waterloo, and it was very much like run-of-the-mill chicken breast: white, dry, and with little flavour. I also had a similar experience when someone here in Jordan cooked rabbit for me. (She baked it in the oven.) The result was dry and with very little flavour. The rabbits of my childhood, which my father raised himself, were succulent. Their meat was pink (brown when cooked), they were full of tasty, mildly gamey flavour, and they were tender. Not only that, but they also had minimal fat reserves on them. The rabbits I ate while visiting Egypt, which my mother's fellaheen neighbours hand-raised were also succulent and pink. I thought the issue was simply a matter of how the rabbits were fed.

I spoke to a neighbour here in Amman, who raises his own rabbits, about these issues. He said he has never experienced dry rabbit meat. The problem, according to him, was that either that whoever butchered the rabbit tried cooking or cooling it (in the fridge) immediately after slaughter. He told me to hang the carcass for an hour or so before attempting to cook it. Another issue, apparently, was that rabbits had to be cooked in liquid; their lean flesh does not lend well to dry cooking methods.

If you want to buy uncommon, live animals in Amman, the time and place is early Friday morning downtown. I went there with a friend and his two sons. We picked a couple rabbits, which I named molokhiyya and saniyya, after the dishes I was planning to cook them in. My friend's older son (age 5) wanted to come by and watch me butcher them. Being a sassy little boy, he decided to name the rabbits after my daughters. (The gene for being impish must rest on the Y chromosome.) I butchered them, one after the other, in the bathtub, to control the spread of the blood. I then took them to the kitchen, skinned them, and hung them up from my cupboard handles. After a couple hours, we took them down, rinsed them off, cut them up, and soaked them in a mixture of water and vinegar. After another couple hours, we threw them into a pot and cooked them into a molokhiyya dish. (Unfortunately, one rabbit is too small to feed five people.) The aroma of the cooking rabbits was scrumptuous. They took a little longer to cook than chicken. The meat was pink when raw and light brown after fully cooked.

The net result was very good, being definitely better than chicken, but not quite as good as the rabbits that my father raised or the ones I had eaten in Egypt. However, these Ammani rabbits were not home-raised and fattened before slaughtering, so it's not a fair comparison.