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.
Interestingly enough, since I was wholly ignorant of much of Australia's history, I only became aware of the rabbit infestation and devastation because I noticed the title of the film. I have neither seen the film, read the novel, nor been to Australia at all. Thanks though.
It's great you learned something of Australia from the title of a film.
The film itself might well have taught you a great deal more, specifically about the colonial practices of forced assimilation of "assumed to be dying off" indigenous people and attitudes towards miscegenation.
It's a retelling in film of the biography of sisters who escaped "white capture" to return home across more than a thousand miles of desert.
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.
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?
> 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.
There is some base to it. Chicken breast and rabbit are both very lean therefore lacking the fat which gives it the distinctive flavor of the animal. All lean meat basically tastes the same.
Maltese thick rabbit stew (think: ragu) is delicious. And as mentioned in a parallel thread, hare is fairly common in Finland as well.
The meat is gamey and indeed very lean, but when you slow cook it to the point where it falls off the bone... yum. Tends to work better with roasted potatoes than mash.
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".
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.
It used to be more common in the U.K. but it’s pretty rare now. Stews and braising were the traditional way to cook it as older ones are kind of tough.
You can coat the rabbit meat with Dijon mustard and cook it to make "Lapin à la moutarde" too!
It's not a knock-your-socks-off dish, I don't think the meat has enough qualities for such a dish (not enough of a distinct taste or texture or quantity), but it's always nice to have!
Brunswick stew is hearty[0], usually rabbit or squirrel traditionally, but these days with chicken. The Maltese variety as mentioned elsewhere is called Stuffat Tal Fenek as is very nice, having tried it in Malta.
Around Lisbon, it's usually stewed with red wine and tomato and spices (coelho à caçador). It can also be fried or grilled but I rarely see it cooked that way.
It's the kind of meat that is, generally speaking, better prepared in more rustic versions as you move inland, though -- see e.g. [1], where it's cooked in clay, together with kidneys, heart, liver, and the head.
My mother made rabbit stew once or twice that I can remember. I remember liking it OK, but it was nothing spectacular.
With the price of meat I've given some thought to keeping rabbits and/or chickens but it's likely not worth the effort unless you truly cannot afford meat any other way.
I used to get it at Cafe Brussels in Houston. They used to have a dish with braised rabbit leg called Le Lapin aux Pruneaux. Instead of a beer stew they made it sweet and savory with prunes, raisins, onions, and carrots. Sooooo goooood.
There's the traditional German rabbit/hare stew Hasenpfeffer (literally "hare pepper" as hare or rabbit and pepper are the main ingrediants). You may remember it as the dish at least one of Bugs Bunny's foes wanted to make from him.
Lapin à la moutarde (Rabbit in a mustard sauce - Burgundian dish) - not sure you can say the rabbit is as front and center as you’d like - but my favorite preparation served with a starch - get the boneless loin.
Honestly fried rabbit legs (southern style fried chicken but rabbit essentially) is also pretty good.
Interesting: I had it one time in San Francisco and cannot remember what it tasted like, but I remember the dish was a dark red. I'd really like to try it again, but I've never seen it on a menu since.
(I ordered it because of my rule: If I see an animal on a menu that I haven't eaten before, I order it.)
My favorite is mustard rabbit (Lapin à la moutarde). It's basically rabbit stewed in white wine, cream or butter and mustard. Mustards helps make a really thick sauce and you can use a copious amount since its flavor mellows down when you cook it.
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.
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.
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.
Price of chicken dropped steeply (and consumption exploded) in the second half of the 20th century after the introduction of broiler breeds and what’s essentially muscle tissue factories. Before that chicken was neither particularly cheap nor eaten that much.
Rabbit used to be the meat of the poor where I grew up. If you could not afford meat (beef/pork), you could always raise 5 to 10 rabbits in boxes in your garden and feed them with the grass from the road sides.
In the rural UK area where I live farmers will often be happy to have you shoot them with an airgun, if you seek permission. Nice (if stewed) cheap meat.
> (2)The occupier of any land in a rabbit clearance area shall take such steps as may from time to time be necessary for the killing or taking of wild rabbits living on or resorting to the land
IIRC all of England and Wales is designated a Rabbit Clearance Area.
You have to shoot them in the head, just aft of the eyes. About a 1 inch diameter target. That always kills them.
But if you miss, either by poor shooting or because they bob their head just as you shoot, then they often run off and you never find them. I reckon I get >> 90% kill rate, but that still means a few get away and suffer from the wound.
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.
Sounds very french-like in origin. Do all in Switzerland use that though? Even the exclusively german-speaking part? In Austria there is a West-East difference, some words spoken by the Vorarlbergers (most western part) we don't too easily understand in the east (it's quite similar to swiss-german in some ways in the western area, but not identical either).
As a foreigner, “Pouletschenkel und Pommes” makes me smile. A German word sandwiched between two French words - one pronounced the French way (“poolay”) and the other nativized (“pommez”).
Is chicken really German though? A hen is called "Huhn" (Das Huhn), and chicken may be more appropriately translated as "Geflügel" (or rather, the latter would be poultry; chicken would be "Huhn" or "Hähnchen"). I don't see the germanic origin insinuated here for the word "chicken", whereas I do so it for "hen" <- "Huhn" quite easily. (And "Geflügel" has "Flügel" which relates more easily to flight/to fly, or better Flügel=wing).
In the same family of languages (proto-germanic), you'll have Swedish for which the word for the meat is "kyckling" which more pronounced like "chickling".
Modern German might have changed along the way, but if you go back far enough, there should be something. I'm not a linguist or a native speaker of a Proto-Germanic language, so I don't know enough to pinpoint this better.
Wiktionary [0] seems pretty confident ("Germanic" includes all of the languages below, not just modern German).
[0] From Middle English chiken (also as chike > English chick), from Old English ċicen, ċycen (“chicken”), of uncertain origin. Possibly from Proto-West Germanic kiukīn (“chicken”), or alternatively from Proto-West Germanic kukkīn, equivalent to cock + -en.
Compare North Frisian schückling (“chicken”), Saterland Frisian Sjuuken (“chicken”), Dutch kuiken (“chick, chicken”), German Low German Küken (“chick”), whence German Küken (“chick”), (elevated, obsolete) German Küchlein (“chick”) and Old Norse kjúklingr (“chicken”).
"Poultry" includes all domesticated birds, including ducks and geese. So it is a different type of word than "chicken" which refers to a specific species.
> the similarity to cunt (and particularly homophony with cunny) led through taboo avoidance both to the word's displacement in the main by rabbit and bunny
Look at the spelling: it would have rhymed with 'honey'. It's a pretty common phenomenon: we (Americans anyway) don't talk about 'cocks' and 'asses' anymore, we have roosters and donkeys.
The OED has a pronunciation history:
The usual current pronunciation with long ō ( /əʊ/ ) seems to have become established during the course of the 19th cent., and may in part be a spelling pronunciation reflecting the rarity of the word in general use in standard English at this date, when it may have been most familiar to many from use in the Bible (and especially in the Psalms) as the name of a foreign animal. However, this pronunciation is likely to have been reinforced by the desire to avoid association with 'cunt' and related words (compare 'cunny'), especially in a religious context.
Shakespeare played with this intentionally, and repeatedly. He uses conies and cony in multiple plays. One example, Henry VI, Part III, act 1 (beginning of play) he stages a battle and the capture of one noble in the civil war in the scene where famously later he calls the queen dowager "she-wolf of France"... widow of his hero Henry V of Agincourt fame. Reading the play today it seems just a dry history and bunch of pompous nobles prattling on an on with allusions to ancient Greece and Rome etc. But on stage with raunchy actors, the word cony (meaning: coney, rabbit) is surrounded in this scene by about ten different sex and genitalia words. And in the middle of the scene -- where somebody is about to die -- they stop the historical military action and have a sex-word raunchy poetry slam:
"Lord Clifford. I will not bandy with thee word for word,
But buckle with thee blows, twice two for one"
Here it may be helpful to imagine peak Tupac vs Biggie, throwing shade.
On the one hand, Shakespeare has to get the play text as written approved by humorless puritanical, literally Puritan censors and the actual Archbishop. So he can't say the c-word or make jokes about giant dongs. But, on the other hand, he does. By leaving it to the innate intelligence of the audience to grok the double entendres even in the middle of a civil war. (There are many other examples in other plays that are less subtle, but this particular one is clearly written for the actors to ham it up on stage).
In one scene we get:
"And full as oft came Edward to my side,
With purple falchion painted to the hilt"
"I am your butt, and I abide your shot"
(Note here Shakespear is actually mocking queen Elizabeth's hunchback minister IRL, Robert Cecil, who was hunchbacked, by making this hunchbacked character Richard of Gloucester ie the later super-ugly evil king Richard III... who is so ugly women cross the street and dogs bark at him... ahem, prefer the company of men and abide their shot as the literal butt of the butt joke. Simultaneously, Cecil's IRL first cousin Sir Francis Bacon also preferred the company of his male servants and is perhaps the actual crown prosecutor responsible for everything from slander or libel to state executions. Another writer, the perfectly-named John Stubbs, recently had his right hand amputated for slut shaming the queen herself ("a gaping gulf"). So this is not dull. It's high stakes!
"made an evening at the noontide prick"
"My ashes, as the phoenix, may bring forth
A bird that will revenge"
(this is played straight these days but in Elizabethan times and in her actual presence, this is a triple double entendre where ashes is enunciated as 'asses' ; Phoenix is one of the queen's personal metaphors for herself, sewn into her clothes, printed in her designs, worn as a jewel etc ; and bringing forth the revenge bird is yes vanilla the mythical phoenix coming back from the dead... but bird in this era allows the actors/company to play this scene with bird=cock or bird=woman, which still exists in slang today. Here noted in passing when the bird is a Quail, that's always a prostitute joke, which then you want to look for dunks nearby about somebody Burning with crotch-Pox which is STD jokes again about Robert Cecil among others who have sexually transmitted diseases which are serious in era of no antibiotics... in the public theater with randos in the audience this is played for laughs, but in a private court performance with the queen or later king James present this is mocking specific courtiers whom everybody at court already knows have one or more super gross STDs)
"I will not bandy with thee word for word,
But buckle with thee blows, twice two for one."
Bandy from the French bander, 'to stretch/erect/thrust' & buckle, colloquially to couple and mate. This works because it's plausibly d...
> Coney Island gets its name most likely from the Dutch settlers who called it Conijnen Eylandt or Konijn Eylandt, meaning "Rabbit Island", because the area once had a large population of wild rabbits
I find it hard to believe that the romans didn't bring rabbits with them. Also, given the fullness of time, it is hard to believe that rabbits didn't ever catch a ride with any number of pre-roman visitors.
This is false actually. The article OP linked in wrong or incomplete. The Romans brought and bred huge numbers of rabbits to Britain, for eating.
We know people are them because when the Romans left ("dark ages") they were eaten to extinction:
"Butchered hare and chicken bones appear in the archaeological record hundreds of years later, among Roman-period food waste. At this time, Sykes said, hares were farmed for food, and the Romans introduced rabbits to the island, although hares and chickens continued to hold religious associations for Britons. After the Romans withdrew from Britain in A.D. 410, the populations of hares and chickens crashed, Sykes said, and rabbits went extinct."
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.
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".
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
Seems Merram-Webster dates the ”lede” coming to dictionaries around 2008, so I would still contest lead being at least as acceptable - and makes more sense imho. English is full of strange spellings which make no sense, so reader is expected to know that we are not talking about Pb, but slinging old newshack lingo. It makes more sense if you know this saying, attributed to William Hearst: ”if it bleeds it leads”, which means yes, sensationalism and gore sells, but as more universal writerly advice that you sould not waste time and start with the most important thing you have to say (ever read those Atlantic/New Yorker -type articles that ramble on for ten paragraphs before you even know what it is about).
Rabbit giving justice to hunters being the lead(ing thought, ie. most important idea in the piece that should go first) is of course me being sarco.
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!!
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?
I am curious if anyone here has experience with the best breeds of rabbit for meat that's are also the most easily self sufficient. (Reliable litters, surviving mostly on grass in rabbit tractors)
Essentially the best for self sufficient homesteading.
I wouldn't want the cornish cross equivalent that strugles to propagate without care, needs bags of feed or dies if you look at it funny.
We've raised meat rabbits for years, among other overstock.
Depending on where you live, a New Zealand/California mix is about as good as you can get for meat rabbits. They grow well and aren't overly delicate.
If you live somewhere with wild heat waves, just straight Californias, or some of the custom breeds from Texas A&M would be better to avoid heat deaths.
Also, you can just feed them grass in rabbit tractors, but they won't thrive like if they had access to a more varied diet. That's for all rabbits, not just meat rabbits
(I have no experience with livestock, there was a story about this on NPR a while back... I wonder what breeds that was... oh, there's another large meat focused bread in the US to consider)
Are you referring to the Allotments Act 1950? If so, that doesn't necessarily extend to private gardens. Plenty of places will have byelaws or covenants that prevent the keeping of animals in garden.
Yes. The Allotments Act 1950 covers everything and is designed to override any covenants or tenancy terms preventing you from keeping rabbits and hens (with obviously a caveat about welfare, H&S, and nuisance).
IANAL, but my understanding is that a byelaw may not overrule or contradict statute law, either.
12 Abolition of contractual restrictions on keeping hens and rabbits.
(1) Notwithstanding any provision to the contrary in any lease or tenancy or in any covenant, contract or undertaking relating to the use to be made of any land, it shall be lawful for the occupier of any land to keep, otherwise than by way of trade or business, hens or rabbits in any place on the land and to erect or place and maintain such buildings or structures on the land as reasonably necessary for that purpose:
Provided that nothing in this subsection shall authorise any hens or rabbits to be kept in such a place or in such a manner as to be prejudicial to health or a nuisance or affect the operation of any enactment.
They were a common protein source when I was growing up in Ukraine, I'd venture to say similar in neighboring countries.
I remember the taste to be nothing spectacular, it's not venison, if anything I prefer poultry. Anything can taste well enough with butter and garlic. Rabbit is commonly available in my local LatAm and Eastern European stores in Miami, but I don't crave it. Lamb on the other hand...
123 comments
[ 0.96 ms ] story [ 46.2 ms ] threadSouth 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.
The film itself might well have taught you a great deal more, specifically about the colonial practices of forced assimilation of "assumed to be dying off" indigenous people and attitudes towards miscegenation.
It's a retelling in film of the biography of sisters who escaped "white capture" to return home across more than a thousand miles of desert.
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_Generations
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.
The meat is gamey and indeed very lean, but when you slow cook it to the point where it falls off the bone... yum. Tends to work better with roasted potatoes than mash.
The guys from Fallow made a video on YouTube about attempting to make a really good one.
Only recipe I've seen was indeed a stew where the ingredients were almost "one rabbit, unholy amounts of garlic".
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.
It's not a knock-your-socks-off dish, I don't think the meat has enough qualities for such a dish (not enough of a distinct taste or texture or quantity), but it's always nice to have!
https://bordeauxkitchen.com/rabbit-with-prunes-lapin-aux-pru...
Like this https://streetkitchen.hu/receptek/nyulhusleves
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brunswick_stew
It's the kind of meat that is, generally speaking, better prepared in more rustic versions as you move inland, though -- see e.g. [1], where it's cooked in clay, together with kidneys, heart, liver, and the head.
[1]: https://maps.app.goo.gl/imK78soKt6ruLNZH6
With the price of meat I've given some thought to keeping rabbits and/or chickens but it's likely not worth the effort unless you truly cannot afford meat any other way.
Honestly fried rabbit legs (southern style fried chicken but rabbit essentially) is also pretty good.
(I ordered it because of my rule: If I see an animal on a menu that I haven't eaten before, I order it.)
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.
That seems a reasonable estimate to me even today.
Does this phenomenon have a name?
https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/dictionaries-thesauruse...
> (2)The occupier of any land in a rabbit clearance area shall take such steps as may from time to time be necessary for the killing or taking of wild rabbits living on or resorting to the land
IIRC all of England and Wales is designated a Rabbit Clearance Area.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/rabbits-how-to-control-numbers
We used to use a tight .410 which I think humanely dispatched them but I think an air gun would be much better for the meat.
But if you miss, either by poor shooting or because they bob their head just as you shoot, then they often run off and you never find them. I reckon I get >> 90% kill rate, but that still means a few get away and suffer from the wound.
But you're right it's most likely a much more recent import from French, just like "velo", "merci" and others.
Modern German might have changed along the way, but if you go back far enough, there should be something. I'm not a linguist or a native speaker of a Proto-Germanic language, so I don't know enough to pinpoint this better.
[0] From Middle English chiken (also as chike > English chick), from Old English ċicen, ċycen (“chicken”), of uncertain origin. Possibly from Proto-West Germanic kiukīn (“chicken”), or alternatively from Proto-West Germanic kukkīn, equivalent to cock + -en.
Compare North Frisian schückling (“chicken”), Saterland Frisian Sjuuken (“chicken”), Dutch kuiken (“chick, chicken”), German Low German Küken (“chick”), whence German Küken (“chick”), (elevated, obsolete) German Küchlein (“chick”) and Old Norse kjúklingr (“chicken”).
Know this song? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6Yce3AxF9c
Also bonus one: https://youtu.be/miomuSGoPzI?is=IpXvzjGRIswRjUsv
Here is Die Sauerkrauts, presenting the Chicken Dance: https://youtu.be/jJcCwbV5kp8?is=Ug4EqlKjN2o9xjBe
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."
> the similarity to cunt (and particularly homophony with cunny) led through taboo avoidance both to the word's displacement in the main by rabbit and bunny
The OED has a pronunciation history:
The usual current pronunciation with long ō ( /əʊ/ ) seems to have become established during the course of the 19th cent., and may in part be a spelling pronunciation reflecting the rarity of the word in general use in standard English at this date, when it may have been most familiar to many from use in the Bible (and especially in the Psalms) as the name of a foreign animal. However, this pronunciation is likely to have been reinforced by the desire to avoid association with 'cunt' and related words (compare 'cunny'), especially in a religious context.
"Lord Clifford. I will not bandy with thee word for word, But buckle with thee blows, twice two for one"
Here it may be helpful to imagine peak Tupac vs Biggie, throwing shade.
On the one hand, Shakespeare has to get the play text as written approved by humorless puritanical, literally Puritan censors and the actual Archbishop. So he can't say the c-word or make jokes about giant dongs. But, on the other hand, he does. By leaving it to the innate intelligence of the audience to grok the double entendres even in the middle of a civil war. (There are many other examples in other plays that are less subtle, but this particular one is clearly written for the actors to ham it up on stage).
In one scene we get:
"And full as oft came Edward to my side, With purple falchion painted to the hilt"
"I am your butt, and I abide your shot"
(Note here Shakespear is actually mocking queen Elizabeth's hunchback minister IRL, Robert Cecil, who was hunchbacked, by making this hunchbacked character Richard of Gloucester ie the later super-ugly evil king Richard III... who is so ugly women cross the street and dogs bark at him... ahem, prefer the company of men and abide their shot as the literal butt of the butt joke. Simultaneously, Cecil's IRL first cousin Sir Francis Bacon also preferred the company of his male servants and is perhaps the actual crown prosecutor responsible for everything from slander or libel to state executions. Another writer, the perfectly-named John Stubbs, recently had his right hand amputated for slut shaming the queen herself ("a gaping gulf"). So this is not dull. It's high stakes!
"made an evening at the noontide prick"
"My ashes, as the phoenix, may bring forth A bird that will revenge" (this is played straight these days but in Elizabethan times and in her actual presence, this is a triple double entendre where ashes is enunciated as 'asses' ; Phoenix is one of the queen's personal metaphors for herself, sewn into her clothes, printed in her designs, worn as a jewel etc ; and bringing forth the revenge bird is yes vanilla the mythical phoenix coming back from the dead... but bird in this era allows the actors/company to play this scene with bird=cock or bird=woman, which still exists in slang today. Here noted in passing when the bird is a Quail, that's always a prostitute joke, which then you want to look for dunks nearby about somebody Burning with crotch-Pox which is STD jokes again about Robert Cecil among others who have sexually transmitted diseases which are serious in era of no antibiotics... in the public theater with randos in the audience this is played for laughs, but in a private court performance with the queen or later king James present this is mocking specific courtiers whom everybody at court already knows have one or more super gross STDs)
"I will not bandy with thee word for word, But buckle with thee blows, twice two for one."
Bandy from the French bander, 'to stretch/erect/thrust' & buckle, colloquially to couple and mate. This works because it's plausibly d...
Sequels include bun alert: https://m.xkcd.com/1871/
And bun trend: https://m.xkcd.com/1903/
"rarebit is a later folk-etymological variant"
> Coney Island gets its name most likely from the Dutch settlers who called it Conijnen Eylandt or Konijn Eylandt, meaning "Rabbit Island", because the area once had a large population of wild rabbits
We know people are them because when the Romans left ("dark ages") they were eaten to extinction:
"Butchered hare and chicken bones appear in the archaeological record hundreds of years later, among Roman-period food waste. At this time, Sykes said, hares were farmed for food, and the Romans introduced rabbits to the island, although hares and chickens continued to hold religious associations for Britons. After the Romans withdrew from Britain in A.D. 410, the populations of hares and chickens crashed, Sykes said, and rabbits went extinct."
https://archaeology.org/news/2020/04/10/200413-britain-hares...
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.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/bury-the-lede-versu...
Rabbit giving justice to hunters being the lead(ing thought, ie. most important idea in the piece that should go first) is of course me being sarco.
> 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.
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=...
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F8JN1tlXHo
Essentially the best for self sufficient homesteading. I wouldn't want the cornish cross equivalent that strugles to propagate without care, needs bags of feed or dies if you look at it funny.
Depending on where you live, a New Zealand/California mix is about as good as you can get for meat rabbits. They grow well and aren't overly delicate.
If you live somewhere with wild heat waves, just straight Californias, or some of the custom breeds from Texas A&M would be better to avoid heat deaths.
Also, you can just feed them grass in rabbit tractors, but they won't thrive like if they had access to a more varied diet. That's for all rabbits, not just meat rabbits
The ones in the story might be be Flemish or Continental https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flemish_Giant_rabbit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Giant_rabbit
Though, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altex_rabbit might be the choice if you're after "grow quick for meat".
(I have no experience with livestock, there was a story about this on NPR a while back... I wonder what breeds that was... oh, there's another large meat focused bread in the US to consider)
12 Abolition of contractual restrictions on keeping hens and rabbits.
(1) Notwithstanding any provision to the contrary in any lease or tenancy or in any covenant, contract or undertaking relating to the use to be made of any land, it shall be lawful for the occupier of any land to keep, otherwise than by way of trade or business, hens or rabbits in any place on the land and to erect or place and maintain such buildings or structures on the land as reasonably necessary for that purpose:
Provided that nothing in this subsection shall authorise any hens or rabbits to be kept in such a place or in such a manner as to be prejudicial to health or a nuisance or affect the operation of any enactment.
I remember the taste to be nothing spectacular, it's not venison, if anything I prefer poultry. Anything can taste well enough with butter and garlic. Rabbit is commonly available in my local LatAm and Eastern European stores in Miami, but I don't crave it. Lamb on the other hand...
Most winter hats were made from their fur - Ушанка - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ushanka
These were disposable items, the fur wore out very quickly. One per winter if memory serves.