Eating a Snowshoe Hare is all strings and sticks—like I imagine it would be to try and eat a banjo. We tried and failed to eat a hare when we worked in the Brooks Range, sadly consigning the remains directly back to nature. But this rabbit is a gift so we have to eat it.
Yes I know it is a hare and not a rabbit. But it has big ears and big feet. And the word “rabbit,” as Trisha Bruss once pointed out, just sounds more edible.
This creature, whatever you call it, is a very Alaska thing. It lives right here; it dies right here. Prolific enough to be brilliant as a species, it is dumb enough as an individual to be eaten by me.
This “Christmas Hare” was gifted to us by wonderful Swedish people for whom this is a tradition—bringing a dead hare to your friend’s house during the Christmas season and hanging it festively on a nail outside the door. The animal is long and white and furry. After the turkey and the cookies and even the lutefisk have all vanished into feasting guests, it still hangs—waiting.
I pulled it down on the thirteenth day of Christmas to skin it. We soaked its spare frame in salt water for several days until yesterday, when we boiled it to loosen the meat from the bones. Minus the use of pressure cooker, tenderizing the rabbit took about eight hours. Without extracting it from the water, we carried the pot down to the water room to cool the hare overnight.
When we lived in other places in Alaska, we learned we could enjoy very plain food with our neighbors—just boiled moose, just boiled whitefish, just berries with a little sugar and seal oil.
I kind of get the Swedish thing. Christmas with all of its rich food and generous handing about of hurriedly-bought and sometimes unwanted stuff can make a person tired of excess, even full of regret by the time the credit card bill arrives. Cooking and eating plain food is an antidote. ’Tis a gift to be simple, ’tis a gift to be free.
But the contrast-providing hare was tough and lean. It had the feeling of looming starvation around it. I peeled the scant meat from the bones and put the pieces back in the broth. The taste was pleasant but thin as January wind. Still trying to honor the austerity of the little beast, I looked around for something to give the soup local interest.
Remember the macrobiotic idea, that people of a certain latitude should eat food from the same latitude? Close as I could get on a winter day, I grabbed garden potatoes and carrots from the water room. A can of diced tomatoes wasn’t really cheating, although my own greenhouse tomatoes were long gone.
Looking for frozen peppers, I found the frozen celery. Now we were getting somewhere, but it wasn’t anywhere this hare had ever been.
At this point I gave up the plain-food theme altogether and went back to Christmas. I grabbed a carton of chicken broth, a jar of Indian red curry paste, some lime juice and garlic and ginger, basil, and a little cardamom for good measure. A quarter cup of butter left over from the lutefisk feast put a good sheen on the soup. It was delicious—another extravagant gift of the season. I don’t remember if the rabbit went in there or not.