Sichuan Rabbit Head -genuine Chinese snack food
Greetings! Welcome back to Mostly Asian History and the Thursday media drop.
Today I have a selection of strange videos, at least for a Westerner, focusing on eating and preparing Sichuan Rabbit Head.
While I normally try to keep this Thursday offering short, today I am sharing several connected videos.
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Some people think that simply China is a very old nation, everything in China is old and part of something traditional. Alas, it just aint so. China is an old nation that has adapted to many changes over its long centuries, and much in China is surprisingly modern.
And so it goes with Sichuan Rabbit Head, a spicy snake food popular in Chengu, the capital of Sichuan and throughout much of the province. According to Fuchsia Dunlop, British born food writer specializing in Chinese food, “post-liberation,” as they say, when China became a Communist nation and was in need of foreign capital for several reasons, rabbit breeding and the export of Rabbit meat to the Soviet Union became a major industry. Prior to that, while Chinese occasionaly ate rabbit, it was not a major food source in China.
However, while the Soviets (Russians more or less) were quite willing to import rabbit meat from China, they had no real desire or reason to import the heads of all those slaughtered rabbits. And thus China was left with a large quantity of rabbit heads. What do with them? In a cash starved, resource stretched nation, the obvious solution was to turn them into snack foods. 1 In fact, a lot of the exotic-seeming Chinese snack foods were created from the little meaty, chewy, boney parts of animals that many nations would discard but in China were instead cooked with intense flavorings and sauce. 2
And thus we have Sichuan Rabbit Heads, a video extravaganza.
First, the tourist video . . . there are countless others out there.
Actual cooking videos with recipes. Now this used to have actual English subtitles which would enable one to follow step by step. The basic process was something like prepare the heads for cooking, cook them, and then as they cooked in add in pretty much everything available that would make them taste better. I forget the exact list but it included spicy red pepper, soy sauce, sugar, sesame seeds, and more. Like I said, pretty much everything one could find in a well stocked Chinese kitchen in Sichuan. You know the Western “everything bagel”? Well this is the Sichuan “everything” rabbit head. Regardless, this is a fun video watch because this man and his father are obviously having a great time cooking and eating their favorite local snackfood with a few beers.
While it’s a little hard to find actual how to cook a rabbit head videos, there are many recipes shared in written form on the web.
https://chinese-recipe.com/sichuan-chengdu-mala-rabbit-head/
https://www.chinafoodbook.com/8208cd9e24.html
https://windhorsetour.com/blog/chengdu-unusual-dish-rabbit-head
And here’s a recipe for the dish that I have decided to share in its entirety.
SimpleChineseFood -- Chengdu Spicy Rabbit Head
Ingredients
100ml Rapeseed Oil
Several Spices
20g Ginger
10g Sugar
50g (red, sharp, dry) Chili
10ml Cooking Wine
20g Shallot
Chengdu Spicy Rabbit Head
1. Trim fresh rabbit heads. Cut off the roots of the ears, eyelids and throat one by one. 20 minutes
2. Add cooking wine, ginger, green onions, etc. to remove fishy. 30 minutes
3. After removing the fishy, stew to remove the blood remaining on the rabbit's head. 10 minutes
4. After the stew is decontaminated, it is simmered in the brine for color. 50 minutes
5. Put the rapeseed oil in the wok, add the chili noodles, sesame seeds, sugar, salt, etc. after being cooked thoroughly. After the fragrant, add the marinated rabbit head. 10 minutes
6. The rabbit head fully absorbed the spicy and sweet taste in the wok, and finally served on the plate. 30 minutes
7. Freshly baked, spicy and delicious, better with beer or coke!
Tips:
The brine should be Sichuan brine, and the hot pepper should be Chaotian pepper.>
Like any dish, there are many ways and many variations on how to best make it. Please enjoy and as always feel free to like, comment, share, or consider a paid subscription. As stated, i will begin with paid content in April, but if you are here now and find that a problem, please reach out.
Footnotes
Page 116-117, Dunlop, Fuchsia. 2019. “The Food of Sichuan.” New York NY: WW Norton and Company
See this video from the Hong Kong based newspaper The South China Morning Post, for example.