The holiday season is upon us and that means great time spent with family and friends and amazing food. Many families have holiday traditions and a lot of those are centered around food. Our house is no different. One of the most important holiday food traditions for me is Rabbit Pie. This is a tradition that was started long before I even existed. My father’s family were hunters and one of the game they enjoyed the most was rabbit. Every year my dad would make rabbit pies and it was tradition to eat them for breakfast on Christmas Day.
When I moved to Ottawa, it became very difficult to continue the tradition of making rabbit pies for Christmas breakfast. The big issue was accessing wild rabbit. Hunting rabbit here in the area is not as prominent as in Nova Scotia and the farm-raised rabbit tastes completely different. Farm-raised rabbit tastes very much like chicken. In fact, it actually looks like chicken once it is cooked. Wild rabbit has a gamey flavour to it and a distinct dark colour to the meat.
I had gone years without making our traditional rabbit pies until a few years ago my sister and I looked into the possibility of shipping the rabbits to Ottawa. There is a store in Halifax that sells wild rabbits. We looked into several different shipping options but the best was flying them up using Air Canada Cargo. This reduces the shipping time and they are able to keep the package refrigerated. Since then, my sister has been sending us rabbits for Christmas and the day I go pick them up is always an exciting day.
My sister packages the rabbits up in a cooler and they are still frozen solid when they arrive here in Ottawa. This year, they were dropped off at the airport in Halifax at 6 AM my time and I picked them up at the airport at 4 PM and they were perfectly frozen. A huge thank you to my sister who does this for us every year. It is the best Christmas present ever.
Stay tuned for the next installment where I will be making the pies.
