Strange Foods - Jerry Hopkins

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Europe,” says Pascal Derde, proprietor of the Cavel West, a packing house in Redmond, Oregon. “Tuesday eaten.”

      However popular that horse may be today, it is unlikely there ever will be an event to top one held during the mid-nineteenth century, not long after Napoleon’s pharmacist, Cadet de Gassicourt, and others publicly testified that horse meat had sustained a number of lives during the general’s military campaigns. Larousse Gastronomique, the famed cookery encyclopedia, reported that on February 6, 1856, a number of butchers and chefs organized a banquet at one of Paris’s grand hotels, offering horse-broth vermicelli, horse sausage, boiled horse, horse stew, fillet of horse with mushrooms, potatoes sautéed in horse fat, salad in horse oil, and a rum pastry with horse marrow. Guests at the feast included the novelists Alexandre Dumas, who not only wrote The Three Musketeers, but also the 1,152-page Grand Dictionaire de Cuisine, and Gustave Flaubert, author of Madame Bovary.

      Horse may be substituted for beef in many recipes—the animals are related, after all—and it is particularly suited for raw dishes, the lean flank sliced thinly and presented with a hot sauce (horseradish is not inappropriate) or as “horse tartare,” mixed with chopped onions and herbs and spices and served with Worcestershire sauce. In Japan, umasashi, horsemeat sashimi, is widely prized; in the south of France, the local sausage is based on ground horse meat, and is grilled, baked, or fried.

      Other members of the horse family also are eaten, notably the zebra in Africa, where their extraordinary number have made them an inexpensive and readily available protein source for centuries. Laurens van der Post, a South African writer whose book First Catch Your Eland (1977) recalled his gastronomic adventures as a child and maturing adult, said zebra fillets and steaks provided “the tenderest and tastiest meat of all.”

      Today, zebra meat finds its way to open markets scattered across eastern and southern Africa, where the herds are most numerous. It is also, more or less, a staple in specialty restaurants and is usually spit-roasted, delivered for carving at the table.

      Saucisson d’ane—donkey meat dried sausage—is one of the specialties of the town of Arles in the south of France, seen on sale at the Saturday market and served with olive bread and a glass of Côte du Rhone.

      rat Et mouse

      The first time I heard about the rodent as a comestible was when I was told about a restaurant in London where a French couple reportedly served a savory rat stew. The way the story went, the couple immigrated to England following the Second World War, bringing with them a recipe developed during the German occupation of Paris, a time of severe shortages. Meat was particularly scarce and of necessity, the couple caught rats in traps in the alleys and cooked them with whatever vegetables and herbs they could find, creating a distinctive and delicious dish. “Unfortunately,” my friend told me, “the rats were as stringy and tough as the Parisians, so it was pretty chewy. Not to worry about that today, my lovely. The day of the alley rat is done. Today, they raise their own rats, feed them grain until they’re plump and juicy.”

      My friend said the dish was listed on the menu in French for “rat stew,” and next to it were the words “when available.” That permitted the waiter to make sure it was understood just what kind of meat the customer was ordering. The only surprise the owners wanted to offer their patrons was how good it tasted. They did not want to hear anyone cry, “I ate WHAT!?!”

      Sadly, the elderly owners of the restaurant had died and the establishment had closed, so it was many years before I actually got to eat a rodent. It finally happened the first time I stayed with my friend Samniang Changsena’s parents, who are rice farmers in northeastern Thailand. There, field mice are not only savored as a gastronomical treat, but also are considered a superb way of disposing of agricultural pests, hated for their damage to the rice crop. Samniang told me that the rats and mice they eat are healthy, because they live in burrows in the mud dikes between the paddy ponds. Because they lived mainly on a diet of rice, they are fattest at harvest time, from November to January, which was when I took my trip.

      My friend said she and her sister would pour water into a hole and when the small, furry residents ran out, they hit them on the head with a stick, and if they didn’t come out, they dug for them. They then took them home and placed them directly on the coals of the outdoor wood fire that served as the family stove, turning them over with a stick until crisp. She said the babies were the tenderest, popped into the mouth and eaten bones and all, with or without a spicy dipping sauce.

      And so it was when I visited my friend’s family. On one of her visits home, she had brought an electric wok, but they still cooked nearly everything they ate over a wood fire outside their home. It was there that I watched several mice turned over coals until they were crispy, then ate them, bones and all, with a chili pepper and fish sauce dip.

      When I returned to my home in Hawaii and told my friends, they said, “You ate WHAT!?!”

      Rodents, after all, have an unfortunate reputation worldwide. For all the good Mickey and Minnie Mouse and other cartoon characters may have offered the rodent population’s reputation, the rat and mouse are still creepy creatures that not many people seem to love and few might welcome to the dinner table.

      In fact, in recent years the rat has been a detestable epithet, usually applied to someone who betrayed (“ratted on”) his or her friends. Who can forget James Cagney calling some movie enemy, “You dirty rat!” (Or was it Edward G. Robinson?) When you joined the nine-to-five work routine, you were in the “rat race,” from which escape was deemed desirable. With their twitchy pointed noses and whiskers, ominous yellow buck teeth, and hairless tails, rats aren’t considered pretty to look at, either.

      Worse, rats bit children in their cribs and spread a host of awful diseases, and newspaper stories appear all the time explaining how health departments in modem cities from Bombay to Berlin to Beverly Hills, struggle to stay a step ahead of rat infestation. A report in 1997 said one in twenty homes in Britain is infested—and that there are about sixty million rats in that country compared to a human population of fifty eight million.

      Having said this, rats, mice, and other members of the rodent family have a long, palatable history, based in part on their vast numbers and variety. This is an order, after all, whose members constitute nearly forty percent of all mammals on earth, all of which are edible, among them the rabbit, squirrel, marmot, beaver, chinchilla, guinea pig, porcupine, gerbil, hamster, and in Latin America the agouti, coypu, and capybara—a large, tailless creature cooked in the same way as a suckling pig. In some areas, some of these rodents are considered common dinnertime fare. Between one and a half and two million squirrels are killed by hunters each year in the American state of Illinois alone. But most are eaten less frequently. And some are anathema to the prevailing Euro-American taste, most remarkably the mouse and rat.

      The common black rat, sometimes brown in color, most likely came from Asia, reaching Europe on trading ships by the thirteenth century. Not long after, fleas on the rats were blamed for spreading bubonic plague and killing twenty-five million people, a quarter of the population at the time. Around the world today, rats and their parasites spread at least twenty kinds of disease, from typhus to trichinosis to Lassa fever. It is no surprise that The Guinness Book of Records calls this species “the most dangerous rodent in the world.”

      Yet, there are rats and mice that are easy to catch and not only safe to eat, but commonly eaten, both in times of hardship and as a staple or delicacy. And so it has been for millennia. In ancient Rome, caged dormice were fed nuts until they were plump enough for an emperor’s demanding appétite. These animals, which reached a length of eight inches (not counting the tail), were so popular, they also were farmed in large pens and exported to satisfy the appétites of Roman soldiers then occupying Britain.

      In imperial China, the rat was called a “household deer” and considered a special treat, and Marco Polo wrote that the Tartars ate rat in the summer months, when they were plentiful. In Columbus’ time, when a ship’s food store ran low during oceanic crossing,

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