Here’s how Sichuan diners use their brains
Print Edition
CHINESE diners crack open rabbit skulls and slurp down the contents, tucking into a delicacy so popular in one province that it has to import supplies from France.
Sichuan is renowned for its spicy, peppery local dishes, and among its favorites are bunny brains, often eaten as a late night treat on the streets of capital Chengdu.
At Shuangliu Laoma Tutou, a restaurant in the heart of the city, dozens of customers use their gloved hands to prise open skulls covered in sauce, suck out the brain and nibble on the cheeks.
“If Sichuan people don’t eat spicy dishes every day, they’re unhappy,” said one. “I eat them at least once a week.”
Westerners often avoid animal parts — for example, duck beaks and chicken feet — that Chinese gourmets treat as delicacies.
But even in China there is little appetite for rabbit meat, much less their heads, except in Sichuan.
The dish is a speciality of the region and rarely found outside of a few restaurants in Beijing and some other major cities.
“Two out of three rabbit heads consumed in China are eaten in Sichuan,” said Wang Min, 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.
“My friends in Guangxi and elsewhere don’t understand why we eat them,” she said, adding: “They can’t stand the heat.”
In Wang’s restaurant, head chef Yin Dingjun said the rabbit head recipe seems simple but requires 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 (a jade rabbit lives on the moon) and are regarded as cute by many young people rather than as a delicacy, although in Sichuan dialect eating rabbit head is slang for French kissing.
Although sucking on a rabbit head might seem odd to some diners even in China, it is par for the course in Sichuanese cuisine, Fuchsia Dunlop, a London-based expert in Chinese gastronomy told reporters.
“There are lots of spicy dishes, such as spicy duck heads, covered in chili and pepper,” she said.
For people in Sichuan, playing with your food is part of the fun, she said, adding they like “the grapple factor.”
“Using your fingers and teeth to get a little bit of meat, it’s part of the pleasure.”
According to China’s rabbit industry association, the country consumes around half a billion rabbit heads a year.
As night falls in Chengdu, innumerable stalls sell rabbit heads to locals who wash the tasty treat down with beer.
“Night markets are part of our culture in Sichuan,” said Rong Lipeng, assistant to the chairman of Hage, China’s leading supplier of rabbit meat and products.
He sells more than 8 million rabbit heads each year. But faced with colossal local demand Chinese farms are struggling to supply enough.
As a result, nearly 20 percent of rabbit heads marketed by the company are sourced from Europe, mainly from Italy and France.
France exported 166 tons of meat and edible offal from rabbits to China in 2014, according to French government figures.
Rong, who says the heads are healthy since they contain little flesh, 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.”
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