Strange Foods. Jerry Hopkins

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СКАЧАТЬ 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, the ship’s rat catcher became a man whose low station was elevated, and whose pay was raised when rodents— usually thought to be pests-became a valued protein source. In nineteenth-century France, many in Bordeaux traditionally feasted on grilled or broiled rat with shallots. Thomas Genin, a noted cook and organizer of that country’s first culinary competitions in the 1880s, considered rat meat to be of excellent quality. Henry David Thoreau is reported to have said he enjoyed fried rats, served with relish, although some insist he was talking about muskrats, which probably lived around Walden Pond. During Vietnam’s war with America, the Viet Cong considered rats an important food group. More recently, G. Gordon Liddy, one of the engineers of U.S. President Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal, boasted that he ate rat in the all-American way, fried, although it’s generally believed that he did so to prove his courage, and not to expand his culinary experience.

      In much of Latin America, Asia, and in parts of Africa and Oceania, rat remains a common hors d’oeuvre or entree today. In parts of China, it still is prepared in more than a dozen ways in popular restaurants. Even in America, there are commercial sources for rats and mice. One outfit, called the Gourmet Rodent, will deliver the critters dressed and frozen by UPS, Express Mail, or alive, C.O.D., via Delta Air Freight. (In 1998, mice cost between US$0.47-0.67 apiece, rats from $0.62-$2.17 for the 10-14 ounce “jumbos.” Discounts were offered on orders of more than five hundred units.) It should be noted that such companies advertised in magazines for people who kept snakes and that, according to the editors, it was known that some of the buyers were recent immigrants to the United States who did not keep snakes.

      Deep Fried Field Rat

      4 mature rats or 8 small rats

      10-15 garlic cloves, crushed

      2 tbs. salt

      ½ tsp. pepper

      Skin and gut the rats, removing the head and toes. Mix garlic, salt, and pepper into a paste, spread on the meat, then place in direct sunlight for 6 to 8 hours, until dry. Fry in deep vegetable oil for about 6-7 minutes, until crispy and yellow in color. Serve with sticky rice, sweet-sour sauce, fish sauce, or a hot chili paste, and raw vegetables.

      Traditional Isan recipe, courtesy Samniang Changsena

      Sources

      Frozen or live rats and mice by mail from Bill and Marcia Brant, The Gourmet Rodent, 6115 SW 137th Ave., Archer, FL 32618, phone (352) 495-9024, tax (352) 495-9781, email <[email protected]>; SAS Corporation, 273 Hover Ave., Germantown, NY 12526, phone (518) 537-2000; Kevin Bryant Reptiles & Feeder Rodents Inc., P.O. Box 4424, Evansville, IN 47724, phone (812) 867-7598, tax (812) 8676058.

      Also (frozen) from J&J Enterprise, P.O. Box 141, Grandfalls, TX 79742, phone (915) 5531, Kelly Haller, 4236 SE 25th, Topeka, KS 66605, phone (913) 234-3358; Ray Queen, The Mouse Factory, P.O. Box 85, Alpine, TX 79831, phone (915) 837-7100.

      Grilled whole baby mice, served with a Vietnamese dipping sauce of finely chopped ginger, garlic, chillies, and coriander in fish sauce and rice vinegar.

      At the end of a day’s work hunting under rice fields near Madras, a group of rat catchers grill a small part of the day’s bounty around an open fire.

      The СКАЧАТЬ