Picking bunnies’ brains

> Chinese diners in Sichuan are tucking in to spicy marinated rabbit heads with gusto, sucking out the grey matter and nibbling on the meat

CHINA’S Sichuan province is renowed for its spicy, peppery local dishes. And one of its favourites are bunny brains, often eaten as a late-night treat on the streets of its capital, Chengdu.

At the Shuangliu Laoma Tutou, a wellknown restaurant in the heart of the city, dozens of customers use their gloved hands to prise open the skulls covered in sauce, suck out the brain and nibble on the cheeks amid cries of satisfaction.

“If Sichuanese people don’t eat spicy dishes every day, they’re unhappy,” said one 20-something woman surnamed Ma, as she dined with friends. “I eat them at least once a week.”

Westerners often avoid animal parts – duck beaks, chicken feet, heads and tripe – that Chinese gourmets treat as delicacies.

But even in China, there is little appetite for rabbits’ meat, much less their heads, which are overwhelmingly eaten in Sichuan, a remote province long isolated by mountain ranges.

The dish is a speciality of the region – rarely found outside of a few popular restaurants in Beijing and other major cities.

“Two out of three rabbit heads consumed in China are eaten in Sichuan,” said Wang Min, the manager of the Chengdu restaurant, adding that locals were proud of the snack.

“My parents and grandparents ate them. I’ve been enjoying them since my childhood,” she said, adding that the tradition goes back several centuries.

In Wang’s restaurant, head chef Yin Dingjun said the rabbit head recipe required a well-established technique.

“You have to drain the rabbits of their blood, then remove the guts before marinating the head in a broth for several hours,” he said. “Diners then use their teeth to gnaw at the flesh.”

Rabbits feature in Chinese mythology, and are regarded as cute by many young people rather than thought of as a delicacy.

For people in Sichuan, playing with your food is part of the fun, said Fuchsia Dunlop, a London-based expert in Chinese gastronomy, adding that they like “the grapple factor. Using your fingers and teeth to get a little bit of meat, it’s part of the pleasure”.

As a result, nearly 20% of rabbit heads marketed by the company are imported from Europe, mainly from Italy and France, and mostly frozen.

France exported 166 tonnes of meat and edible offal from rabbits to China in 2014, according to French government figures.

Hage, China’s top supplier of rabbit meat and products, says the heads are healthy since they contain little flesh.

Hage has agreed to a partnership with French firm Hycole to provide breeding rabbits to its farms in China, according to Hycole’s manager Fabien Coisne.

He hopes that the taste for the treat will one day expand beyond Sichuan, but, he admits, the barrier is high.

“A lot of people outside our province do not dare taste them, because the rabbit heads do look quite terrifying.” – AFP