Are You Game?
If you want to know if someone really likes you, invite them over for lunch and tell them you're serving squirrel.
I had been floating the invitation for months to family, friends, and the occasional acquaintance whose faces would twist into tortured poses, but I didn't expect to have every seat at the table filled. Six of us partook of the wild game feast. It would have been a bigger crowd if I'd had more squirrel.
The menu was simple: squirrel étouffée over white rice for an appetizer, a main course of Brunswick stew made with venison, rabbit and squirrel, and lots of Biltmore Pinot Noir.
We made two key discoveries: First, squirrel does not taste like chicken. The meat is darker, and the texture is smoother. It's tasty. Second, to enjoy eating squirrel you must let go of the widespread cultural stigma attached to the practice and open your mind to the possibilities of small game.
SMALL GAME FED AMERICA
Squirrel étouffée is nothing new. Not too long ago squirrel served as a staple of the American diet. Plenty of meats that were once culturally palatable are now taboo, in part because most of us haven't had the opportunity to eat them for a couple of generations. Eddie Nickens, an editor-at-large for Field & Stream who lives in Raleigh, shared the squirrel étouffée recipe with me. He became acquainted with the dish while reporting in Cajun country. Nickens likes the taste of squirrel, and respects the small mammal's role in American history.
For a while, eating small game like squirrel is what kept folks alive. When the first wave of European frontiersmen arrived, they feasted on the New World's abundant supply of game like bear and deer.
"They had all kinds of big critters to eat," Nickens said.
By the late 1700s and early 1800s much of that bounty had disappeared. What remained was small game, and a good shot with a .32- caliber muzzleloader could feed a family. The rise of modern transportation systems in the early 20th century led to the growth of a small-market food economy, and hunters brought their bounty into town to sell at central locations. For example, Nickens explains, a shopper could buy all manners of game – robins, quails, ducks, even cardinals – from the old City Market in downtown Raleigh. Only those with money shopped at the market; subsistence hunting became the province of the backward and the rural poor. Eating squirrel became a punch line for jokes about hillbillies, shorthand for hick.
Today, the sustainable food movement has us rethinking every aspect of our food systems as we reject the mass-produced, factory-farmed status quo. Keeping chickens and growing collards now carry social caché. Not too long ago, the mainstream viewed those pursuits as déclassé.
The popularity of hunting is on the rise among hipsters. Recipes for wild game have gained more champions, including Jesse Griffith, whose Afield: A Chef's Guide to Preparing and Cooking Wild Game and Fish earned a James Beard nomination this year. And millions watch Duck Dynasty, where they see wild game prepared for the table, even if it doesn't always look palatable.
So, has the time to come to rethink our attitudes toward eating small mammals? Can eating squirrel become cool?
Nickens is skeptical.
"Squirrel will be the last holdout of the modern farmer," he said.
IT STARTED WITH STEW
I began contemplating the role of small game in the locavore revolution this spring after I judged a Brunswick stew contest at Ray Price Harley-Davidson. Before the contest, I posted a query on my Facebook page, asking people to weigh-in on the qualities of a good Brunswick stew. Respondents fell into two camps: Those who wanted to see wild game in the stew, particularly squirrel or rabbit, and those revolted by the thought.
"Ewwww," one friend responded to the squirrel suggestion.
To which my friend Mike Zlotnicki, an avid hunter, asked, "Why? It's a good sustainable protein."
"Just ewww," was her response.
The exchange focused my thinking on the arbitrary contradictions we cling to when it comes to what's fit for the table and what's not, and how spoiled we are by the availability of easy meat.
This was not long after the scandal in Europe arose over horse meat surreptitiously making its way into the Irish food supply chain. At its core, that scandal is about oversight and accountability, but on this side of the pond it played out as, "Ewww. They ate horse."
According to Bloomberg Businessweek, which has followed the food supply scandal closely, Europeans eat about 80,000 metric tons of horse meat every year. But they like to know when it's horse they're eating and where it came from.
I almost ate horse of my own volition once while traveling in Italy, north of Venice. It was on the menu at a small restaurant in the foothills of the Alps. When the waiter came, I choked, so to speak. I knew I wouldn't be able to get the horse down if asked for it. I had beef instead. I think.
I was certain the squirrel would go down more easily.
HOW TO GET A SQUIRREL
Squirrels eat nuts and berries and vegetables from our gardens. This is high-quality feed. And you want to talk about "happy meat" that's led a good life roaming wild as nature intended? I've never seen a free-range chicken chatter gleefully as it hung upside down from a bird feeder, mocking the humans whose birdseed he just ate for breakfast. In my next life, I want to be as happy as a squirrel.
They are also pretty healthy. According to Benjamin Hess, Collections Manager for Mammalogy at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, squirrels in North Carolina have a very low documented rate of disease. The occurrence of rabies in rodents like a squirrel is nearly zero, and they are poor carriers of Lyme disease.
As with eating any meat, preparation is key, Hess says. Improperly cooked meat of any kind can cause problems. He adds that there is "cautionary discussion" about eating squirrel brains, though the sources for this information are questionable.
In short, make sure your squirrel is good and done, and skip the brains.
The biggest hurdle to eating squirrel is that you can't buy it. It's illegal to sell game in North Carolina, a prohibition that eliminates the economic incentive to poaching. Other small game, notably rabbit, is available because farmers raise them. Farm-raising squirrel is not a notion anyone has gotten attached to, so if you want to eat one you have to kill it. Or know someone who can.
My brother hunts, mostly deer, so he told me he'd take me squirrel hunting. Before you start thinking this is going to turn into one of those stories about a non-hunter who stares through a rifle's sights and learns to skin her own dinner, it's not. I can scarcely hit the broad side of a corn hole board with a bean bag much less a scampering rodent with a .22 shell. And I know from the few times I've needed to pry raw fish flesh away from the scales that I do not have the stomach to strip a squirrel of its furry hide.
What I do have are connections. My former newspaper colleague, the above-mentioned Mike Zlotnicki, is now the associate editor of Wildlife in North Carolina. I had scarcely told Mike Z that I needed squirrel for a story before we were on our way to see his hunting buddy John Barton. John had some squirrel in the freezer and offered to skin them for me. We pulled up to his comfy, suburban home, knocked back a few beers and they told me hunting stories. An hour or so later I was on my way home with squirrel in the cooler.
AGGRESSIVE EATING
Not everyone who hunts squirrel enjoys eating them. But those who have a taste for it, really do. Nickens likes hunting squirrel because it's low maintenance. You just go out in the woods and shoot them, no stands, no special equipment, no night vision cameras.
Kimberly Burge, an educator with the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, likes hunting squirrel for the same reasons. She has eaten them for as long as she can remember. She grew up in Cary, where she lives today. Her father taught her to hunt, and she eats what she shoots. Burge says her 3-year-old daughter is aware of the fact that a few times a year she has squirrel for dinner.
Burge parboils her squirrel then browns it and serves it in gravy with grits. It has never seemed weird to her.
"I'm not sure what turns people off about it," she said. "Most people in Cary would like to shoot them."
In the United Kingdom, where invasive Eastern Gray Squirrels from the United States are crowding out the native population, eating squirrel has become an act of patriotism. Some of London's better chefs are serving them at white tablecloth restaurants. One supermarket even stocked squirrel meat for a while, a move that enraged animal rights activists. Here, Clemson University is studying ways to control the on-campus population of Eastern Gray Squirrels by feeding them bait laced with a contraceptive. I'll be the first one to order a batch of that feed should it ever make it to the garden supply catalog.
I hate squirrels. They dig up my plants and destroy my bird feeders. It may be genetic. My grandfather hated them, too.
He grew all his own vegetables in the summer. Beans, squash, tomatoes – the squirrels loved all of it. Granddaddy would sit on the back deck with a pellet rifle and kill them off. I never saw him eat one, though. I guess that's because he didn't have to.
My mother's parents grew up poor during the Depression in rural Surry County. They wed just before my grandfather shipped off to fight in World War II and my grandmother left to work as a riveter in the Newport News shipyards. While they were courting, my grandfather had a job for a while tending a farmer's flue-cured tobacco barns overnight. In addition to the money, it gave him a barn to hang out in and a reason to stay up all night, which often made for a party. On one memorable all-nighter in the tobacco barn, Granddaddy nabbed a chicken from a neighbor's hen house and wrung its neck. My grandma plucked it, and they boiled it and ate it while passing around a jar of moonshine.
More than 50 years later Grandma told the story of that night as jubilantly as if it had been a debutante ball.
"Lord, we ate chicken that night and danced," she'd say, her eyes bright with a memory half a century old.
No doubt my grandfather could have shot some squirrel that night, but boiled chicken was party food. Squirrel wasn't.
A FESTIVE FEAST
My squirrel lunch became a party, a celebration of food frontiers.
I had been warned that squirrel needs plenty of time in the pot to become tender, so I started cooking first thing in the morning. Quartering the squirrel for the étouffée was a cinch, much easier than dealing with a whole chicken. The tiny little bones snap like twigs. Smothered in brown sauce and onions in the cast-iron skillet, I thought it looked and smelled pretty appetizing. The meat gave the sauce a rich flavor, heartier than chicken but not as rich as beef. The texture was smooth, not stringy, and toothsome.
But the fact that the bone-in squirrel looked like squirrel threw most of my guests. We nibbled on the tiny pieces but were awkwardly aware that we were eating something at once unfamiliar and too familiar. I don't think the critters scurrying about in the yard outside the dining room helped.
The stew, however, was a bigger hit. The combination of rabbit, deer and squirrel gave it a deep flavor, again lighter than beef, bolder than chicken. Our squirrel-consciousness dissipated, and the conversation flowed. Most everyone's bowl came back empty.
I can't say that I would seek squirrel out again, but if I ever run across someone giving it away, I'll break out that stew recipe and set more places at the table. And if squirrel ever becomes "the other dark meat," I'll take credit for being on the cutting-edge of the small game revolution.
