"From 1980 to 1983, I worked in the kitchen of a small restaurant
near Catskill, New York, on a patch of the Hudson River Valley so remote
it didn’t have an address. The sixty-seat restaurant was owned by René
and Paulette Macary (she remains its proprietor today). La Rive, named
thus because it sat on a wide running creek, was a fruitful training
ground, and New York State had extraordinary livestock. Beautiful veal
came down from Utica. I found a man who raised spectacular pigeons. I
began to ask these farmers for unusual items to experiment with, things
like pigs’ ears, cockscombs, duck testicles.
One day, I asked my rabbit purveyor to show me how to kill, skin, and
eviscerate a rabbit. I had never done this, and I figured if I was
going to cook rabbit, I should know it from its live state through the
slaughtering, skinning and butchering, and then the cooking. The guy
showed up with twelve live rabbits. He hit one over the head with a
club, knocked it out, slit its throat, pinned it to a board, skinned it -
the whole bit. Then he left.
I don’t know what else I expected, but there I was out in the grass
behind the restaurant, just me and eleven cute bunnies, all of which
were on the menu that week and had to find their way into a braising
pan. I clutched at the first rabbit. I had a hard time killing it. It
screamed. Rabbits scream and this one screamed loudly. Then it broke
its leg trying to get away. It was terrible.
The next ten rabbits didn’t scream and I was quick with the kill, but
that first screaming rabbit not only gave me a lesson in butchering, it
also taught me about waste. Because killing those rabbits had been
such an awful experience, I would not squander them. I would use all my
powers as chef to ensure that those rabbits were beautiful. It’s very
easy to go to a grocery store and buy meat, then accidentally overcook
it and throw it away. A cook sautéing a rabbit loin, working the line
on a Saturday night, a million pans going, plates going out the door,
who took that loin a little too far, doesn’t hesitate, just dumps it in
the garbage and fires another. Would that cook, I wonder, have let his
attention stray from that loin had he killed the rabbit himself? No.
Should a cook squander anything ever?
It was a simple lesson.”
- Thomas Keller, from the French Laundry Cookbook
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