Diners greedily crack open delicate rabbit skulls and slurp down their contents, tucking into a delicacy so popular in one province that it has to import its supplies from France.
Sichuan is renowned for its spicy, peppery local dishes: one of its favorites are rabbit brains, often eaten as a late night treat on the streets of its capital, Chengdu.
At the Shuangliu Laoma Tutou, a well-known 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 woman surnamed Ma, as she dined with friends.
“I eat them at least once a week,” she added.
Westerners often avoid animal parts — duck beaks, chicken feet, heads and tripe — that Chinese gourmets treat as delicacies.
However, 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 specialty 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 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 pepper.”
In Wang’s restaurant, head chef Yin Ding-jun said the rabbit head recipe seemed simple, but 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 — a jade rabbit lives on the moon — and are regarded as cute by many young people rather than thought of as a delicacy, although in Sichuanese 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 said.
“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,” she said.
As night falls in Chendgu, innumerable stalls sell rabbit heads to locals who wash the treat down with beer.
“Night markets are part of our culture in Sichuan,” said Rong Li-peng, deputy 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 a colossal local demand Chinese farms are struggling to supply enough.
As a result, nearly 20 percent 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, who said the heads are healthy since they contain little flesh, has now agreed to a partnership with French firm Hycole to provide breeding rabbits to its farms in China, the French company’s manager Fabien Coisne said.
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,” he said.
‘IN A DIFFERENT PLACE’: The envoy first visited Shanghai, where he attended a Chinese basketball playoff match, and is to meet top officials in Beijing tomorrow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday arrived in China on his second visit in a year as the US ramps up pressure on its rival over its support for Russia while also seeking to manage tensions with Beijing. The US diplomat tomorrow is to meet China’s top brass in Beijing, where he is also expected to plead for restraint as Taiwan inaugurates president-elect William Lai (賴清德), and to raise US concerns on Chinese trade practices. However, Blinken is also seeking to stabilize ties, with tensions between the world’s two largest economies easing since his previous visit in June last year. At the
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese