Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Food, Cooking, and Game Preparation Jack Rabbit (NO, I'm NOT kidding)

Anyone eat them?

Preparation suggestions?

Ate my share of cottontails back in the day, fry them up like pheasants. Never ate Jack Rabbits...word on the prairie is that you could get tularimea (sp) from Jacks but not cottontails. Also always got the cooking rabbits in the autumn, not the spring.

The mink ranchers used to buy jack rabbits...guess a thousand mink can't be all wrong....try it and fry it...if it's too tough, stew it or pressure cook it.

I like them in a stew

Stew is pretty good for jacks. Unless it is very young it is tough as boot leather. You can pressure cook them a bit and then fry or fricesse and they are edible.

BCR

My gramps always told of a kid in his one room school house that brought a jackrabbit salad sandwich everyday for lunch, as they were too poor to afford much else. The poor kid later grew into one of the larger farmers in our area.

We don't have jacks in SE KS or SW MO anymore, but go a couple hours west and there are quite a few.

When I prepare rabbit or even squirrels, I roll the pieces in seasoned flour. Brown it in bacon fat in a cast iron dutch oven. Remove rabbit from pan, add a chopped onion and sliced mushrooms and cook until tender and light brown. Add the bunny back in on top of the onions and mushrooms; then blend a can of cream of mushroom soup with a half to 3/4 a soup can of milk, salt& pepper to taste and pour it over the rabbit, cover it with an oven proof lid or foil and oven braise it until the gravy is thick and the bunny is tender. If the gravy gets too thick while it is cooking I thin it with a little beef or chicken stock, whichever I have on hand. Great in the kitchen and even better prepared on a campfire.

I've always heard they taste like a fencepost.

I've always carried some spices in my trucks in case I got stuck and had to make a meal out of one.

I don't know if snowshoe hares are anything like jack rabbit, but I have canned the snowshoes. Not bad, and the pressure canning tenderizes it beautifully.

M

Here in KS jackrabbits were numerous years ago. They used to have jackrabbit drives in western KS. All the neighboring families would get together and set up catch pens/corrals with snow fence. They would make lines and drive them in. My dad said that he could remember hay racks piled high with them. I think that they mostly mixed them with pork and made sausage.