Best Food Writing 2013 (33 page)

He's not afraid of them either. He grew up hunting and eating squirrels. After a hunt it was nothing to cook up the squirrel heads along with the legs and saddle, crack open the skull, and eat the brain. When I asked if he would show me how to clean a squirrel he readily agreed.

He got started by cutting through the base of the tail, above the anus just until he hit skin, then cutting around the haunches of the hind legs and pulling on them hard until the hide peeled off, down to the forelegs and head. After working the “britches” off the hind legs he laid the squirrel on a table on its back, cut off its tiny penis and testes, and made an incision from its crotch to its neck.

“These organs are good stuff,” he said, isolating the heart, liver, and kidneys from the rest of the respiratory and digestive tract. I hadn't planned on that. But after his demonstration I felt obligated to keep them. And the head too, though I knew it was going to take some fortitude to get over that hurdle.

At home I washed the carcass, clipped off the paws, and tried to singe the stray hairs that remained on the flesh. They were persistent, but I got most of them and put it all in a bag in the back of the refrigerator. Pink in plastic, except for its head, the squirrel had made the aesthetic and psychological metamorphosis from animal to meat. But maybe not completely. Later I was startled by what sounded like the rustling of the bag, as if the squirrel had come back to life. But it was only the coffee I'd left boiling on the stove. A not-unappetizing musky, meaty smell clung to my hands and cutting board.

A few nights later I took the meat out of the freezer and cut it into pieces, which I dusted in salt-and-pepper-seasoned flour. I seared it off and braised it in beer for an hour. It tasted like chicken thigh, lean and not at all tough after the long, slow cook. The eyes had turned a milky zombielike white, but still I pulled off a morsel of cheek meat as the cat watched, licking her lips.

I wasn't yet ready for the brain, but I did sauté the heart, liver, and
lungs. I burned them, so they were bitter, but the heart was the most palatable, with an almost beefy flavor.

Suffering no apparent ill effects, I saw no reason not to make a case for squirrel meat among my friends and colleagues. And I felt confident I could skin enough squirrels for a dinner party.

For an animal nobody is supposedly cooking anymore, its culinary versatility is well documented online and in the stacks of the Harold Washington Library Center. If you're hankering for smothered squirrel in pan gravy, homesteader's squirrel with cream gravy, crock-pot squirrel, Hmong-style squirrel stew with eggplant, squirrel pie, squirrel dumplings, squirrel and broccoli casserole, squirrel curried, fricasseed, or barbecued, squirrel cakes, squirrel purloo, or the infamous squirrel melts, the recipes are at your fingertips. But of all those I found—apart from simple panfrying—burgoos and Brunswick stews seem the most common application. Maybe that's because the squirrel's relatively low meat yield demands a one-pot dish that can be extended with a variety of other meats and vegetables.

I was able to source a steady, humanely killed supply of city squirrels—I won't say where. I was just under the possession limit for squirrels in Illinois. It was time to make burgoo.

“The favor of your company is requested,” read the invitation, “for the most local of harvest meals.” I sent this to a healthy mix of 30 eaters both adventurous and particular, and set a date. On the menu: juleps made with the mint growing from my compost pile, coconut curry simmered with the mysterious squash that had taken over the backyard, dinosaur kale, cornbread, and the main event: a thick burgoo, featuring “heirloom tomato, tree nut, and alley-fattened wild caught game.”

I didn't expect nearly all of the invitees to accept, but evidently curiosity about urban squirrel's viability as a protein source isn't merely a weird, solitary obsession. A few days before the event I defrosted and cut up the legs and saddles, seared them off in a pot, and deglazed it with Madeira, à la James Beard. I sauteed diced bacon, onions, and garlic, added homemade chicken stock and the squirrel pieces, and braised them slowly.

After three hours or so, the squirrel meat was falling off the bone, so I carefully removed the carcasses, let them cool, and then meticulously
separated the meat from its tiny skeletal remains. It was painstaking work, and I was certain a few small fragments remained behind, but in the end I had nearly three-and-a-half pounds of shredded, mostly boneless squirrel flesh. I added it back to the pot along with vegetables and herbs from my garden and the Green City Market—the last of my tomatoes, thyme, corn, potatoes, lima beans, and a few small hot chilies—and let it simmer until the vegetables began to break down. Then I cooled it. (Many recipes advise that a night in the refrigerator and then a slow reheating the following day helps the flavors harmonize.)

Acting on the advice of my butcher I made a paté with the offal, searing the diced hearts, livers, and kidneys, flambéing them briefly in bourbon, and mixing them into a pork and bread crumb matrix before pressing it into a terrine.

When the day arrived my guests brought their own contributions—garage-cured Serrano-style ham from a Slagel Farms pig, a classic midwestern relish tray with chopped liver, olives, pickles, and crudités, Michigan apple pies, and, just in time for Rosh Hashanah, a honey cake from a pastry chef. There was Chicago beer and Indiana bourbon, and I smoked a massive lamb shoulder, mutton barbecue being the traditional accompaniment to burgoo.

Low and slow cooking had deepened the stew into a roasty reddish brown, all the vegetables softening but for sweet, crunchy corn. Conventional burgoo wisdom says that when it's thick enough for the spoon to stand up in the pot by itself, it's ready. And with that, most of my guests dove in.

After the heads braised in mirepoix and sherry, a friend demonstrated with a nutcracker the proper technique for extracting a squirrel brain from its cranial cavity, and a half dozen of us popped them into our mouths. They looked like oversize walnuts and tasted slightly creamy, almost like a soft, roasted chestnut. We pulled out the tongues and cheeks, which contained the most concentrated expression of squirreliness. One guest described the meat from the head as “nutty”; others compared it to pork, duck, or lamb. To me this seemed like the very essence of the rodent. If squirrels grew to the size of pigs, you'd really have something.

I don't think folks were being overly kind when they praised the stew. Out of two gallons of burgoo, at the end of the night I was left with only a cup and a half. In short, with the help of a lamb shoulder
and some vegetables, squirrel meat can indeed feed a crowd. If it was just me and my family we could survive on it for a week.

“It was so good that I got kinda depressed,” my neighbor e-mailed later. “There are so many people who don't get enough protein and here is this menacing squirrel, there for the taking.” She's a prolific gardener herself, with her own squirrel problem.

Some guests pointed out that the flavor of the squirrel itself was diminished or subsumed by the stew or muted by the spices in the paté. “I was expecting a more gamy flavor like an elk sausage or something,” one reported. “But I thought it was more comparable to a turkey or duck.”

“If I hadn't known in advance,” said another, “I doubt I would have been able to tell. But I tasted the cheek and even that, while incredibly delicious, tasted like something between pork and lamb. I never would have guessed it was squirrel in a blind tasting.”

Most guests communicated a general surprise that city squirrels didn't taste like the wild muskiness of bigger wild game. I don't think that's an indication that it was overseasoned. I think it's because squirrel doesn't have an assertive flavor to begin with, at least not one that corresponds with its brazen behavior.

Proverbially, it tastes like chicken.

 

 

T
ASTING
N
OTES
: H
EART

By Steven Rinella

From
Meat Eater

In
Meat Eater
—a sort of prequel to his 2007 book
A Scavenger's Guide to Haute Cuisine–
outdoors writer and TV host Steven Rinella describes the roots of his rugged hunting/trapping/fishing lifestyle in his Michigan boyhood. The coming-of-age ritual following his first deer kill was not for the squeamish.

F
irst-deer rituals come in many forms, and usually involve some kind of eating or drinking. The movie
Red Dawn
popularized the ritual of downing a cup of blood dredged from the deer's chest cavity. Others say you should bite out a hunk of raw heart. A friend of mine from Montana described being forced to eat a slice of raw liver topped with a sprig of sagebrush. In Scotland it's a ritual to smear the hunter's cheeks with the blood of his first deer. When I hunted there and killed a red deer, the guy I was hunting with smeared his hand with blood and reached toward my face. I explained that I'd killed many deer before. “Not in Scotland,” he said, and then gave me a swipe on each side of my face.

We didn't have any particular ritual in my family, as my dad wasn't big on symbolic acts of bravado. But he was big on eating deer hearts, the fresher the better, and when the heart came from my own first deer the meal was treated with even more respect than usual.

I killed it with a lever-action Winchester rifle, a year before I was old enough to do it legally. (Back then, you had to be twelve to hunt deer with a bow and fourteen to hunt them with a gun.) It was late in the morning, and we were doing something called a drive. Basically,
a bunch of “pushers” head into an area where deer are known to bed during the day, and a “stander” positions himself where he thinks the deer will pass through as they run out. In this case, the bedding area was a deep ravine with a brushy creek bed at the bottom. My two brothers and a buddy of ours were the pushers who had to go down there and bust the deer out. I was the stander, and it was my job to hide on a hemlock-covered ridgeline that angled down into the ravine and provided a good vantage point to see what was going on below.

I saw the deer coming from way off. I expected it to pass below me as it followed the creek, but instead it broke away from the bottom and turned right up my ridgeline. It kept coming and coming, closer and closer. It didn't even know I was there until it was so close that we could have conversed in whispers. It then stopped behind a bent-over tree. All I could see was its head and a bit of its throat. I aimed for the throat but hit the jaw. The deer fell hard and then scrambled down the side of the ridge in a somersaulting flurry of legs. I was right there behind it when it reached the bottom of the ravine. I kept expecting it to die, but suddenly it regained its feet and started to make some progress. I was carrying a Green River beaver skinning knife on my belt like the mountain men did. I pulled the knife and threw an arm around the deer's neck and laid it down on its side like a cowboy in a roping competition. Then I put the tip of the knife into the deer's neck and sliced its jugular. Only later, after my brother pointed it out to me, did I realize that I could have just shot the thing a second time.

I used that same knife to gut the deer, which weighed damn near what I did. When I was done I dug through the entrails to find the sac—it's called a pericardium—that holds the heart. I could feel the warm firmness of the heart inside, about the size of a man's fist. When I sliced through the sac the heart slid out into my hand as though something were being born rather than killed. It wasn't until later that I would read about how some indigenous hunters fed the hearts of their quarry to their young children, so that the children would inherit the strengths and attributes of the animals they relied on. But I did know I was holding the core of a creature, the essence of its life, and that its life was far bigger and more meaningful than any squirrel's. It was impossible not to see just how serious the business of killing was.

I took off my blaze-orange vest and wrapped the heart in it and put that into my day pack. My brothers then helped me drag the deer up out of the ravine and across a bunch of farm fields and through some windrows to where we'd parked that morning. At home my dad showed me how to take a thin-bladed fillet knife and carve out what are known as the great veins at the head of the heart. This left the heart looking deflated and a little hollowed out. I then started slicing the heart crosswise into slices about three-eighths of an inch thick, beginning at the narrow, pointy end. At first the slices were round and solid, like if you sliced a tree limb. But as I got deeper into the heart I began to hit the open pockets of the ventricles. These pockets started out small, just big enough for a pinky to fit through, but deeper into the heart they were so big that the slices looked as hollow as crosscut slices of a bell pepper.