Posted on 04/17/2004 11:29:57 PM PDT by Russian Sage
First, skin your squirrel...
Philosopher and farmer Roger Scruton explains why the best way to dispose of many country pests is simply to eat them
Wednesday April 14, 2004
The Guardian
The best answer to a pest is to encourage the predator that will eat it. And the most efficient predator is man. The way to re-establish ecological balance, therefore, is to acquire the habit of eating your competitors. There was a time when the government offered a shilling for every grey squirrel pelt. Now the business of controlling the invader is left to private enterprise. The endangered red squirrel has a foul gland next to the kidney which ruins its taste. The greys, however, are sweet and succulent. You need four per person - not because they are particularly small, but because they are surpassingly delicious, redder and more gamey than rabbit, but less pungent than muntjac or hare.
The squirrel should be skinned and eviscerated. You should leave the head on, not only because the cheeks are a special delicacy, but also because it serves the same ornamental function as the head of a sea bass or a woodcock. Don't take out the eyes, but leave them to cloud over like opals in the heat of the fire. Marinate the squirrel for a few hours in olive oil, with salt, pepper and a squeeze of lemon juice; then skewer the length of its body and grill on both sides.
As troublesome as the squirrel, and sharing its habitat, is the rook - a nest-robber and scavenger whose population is constantly on the verge of explosion. Like other corvids, the rook is a rapid learner, and a confident exploiter of its dominant niche. Once a year, around the middle of May, the local people gather on an evening for the shoot, assembling beneath the "rooky wood" in their camouflage, and opening fire with shotguns when the young birds come home to roost.
After the barrage, the carcasses are gathered up, and the feast prepared. Only young rooks will do for a pie: beyond their first year, the birds are as wiry and rasping as their name, and should be left for the foxes. You don't pluck the rook but skin it, detaching the breasts, which are plump, red and flavoursome like the breasts of pigeons, and placing them in a pie dish. When the dish is three-quarters full, cover with a thick layer of sliced hard-boiled eggs, anoint with stock, add a pinch of nutmeg and bake in a pie-crust for an hour and a half.
As much a pest as the rook and the squirrel is the deer. During my first years of settling in the country, I took Wallace Stevens's view that these delicate creatures, arising from the grass like a sudden visitations, are part of earth's glory: "Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail/Whistle about us their spontaneous cries."
However, our mountains are merely the top of a hill, and the copse that we planted there is being steadily consumed. One day, when we had discovered a whole spinney vandalised and were at our wits' end for a remedy, Mervyn presented himself.
Dressed in baggy camouflage, with a large knife at his waist and an assortment of guns across his shoulder, Mervyn is the one you turn to for the gruesome jobs - skinning, gutting, or the coup de grâce. A man of few words but fierce loyalties, Mervyn is typical of the new countryman. He commutes in his battered Subaru from Swindon. He does not respond to your call; like the weather and the wildlife, he occurs. And there he was, just when we needed him.
Our problem, I told him, was the roe deer. He shook his head sagely. "Roe's no harm," he said. "Not here. It's the muntjacs. I seen they done for them willows you planted."
The real nuisances in our countryside are animals that are too small to see, too cunning to shoot, or too prolific to cull. Often they are imports from foreign parts, like the grey squirrel, the mink or the muntjac. Of Asian origin (the name is from Javanese mindjangan) muntjacs escaped a century ago from Woburn Abbey park, and, like the mink, found a disused ecological niche and entered it with all the force of a drug-pusher in a children's playground. You need a rifle to kill them, but they run through the long grass or the undergrowth, and are seldom a visible target. Only a calm, patient countryman of the old school can provide the time, the steady hand and the immovable depth of silence that will eventually spell their death.
Mervyn came back that evening with one of the culprits, and hung it in the barn. Next day, he returned with his knife; the muntjac was skinned and jointed, and the forequarters put into a marinade of red wine, onions, herbs, juniper and garlic. Living muntjac is deer at its worst - verminous, sneaky and in ruthless competition with our native species. But dead muntjac is friendly to man, with the flavour and the texture of hare - strong, dark, but also tender and gelatinous.
Jugged muntjac is the perfect dish to set before Bambi-lovers, a dish that reeks of the wild and of the life that teems in it. It reminds us that we can make a truce with deer, but no lasting settlement.
Nearby is a shooting estate, run by Malcolm the gamekeeper. Malcolm keeps his neighbours supplied throughout the season with partridge, teal, widgeon, mallard and pheasant. Unlike supermarket chickens, his pheasants have run wild and free and died in a sudden plunge to earth of which they knew little or nothing. If you are worried, as you ought to be, about the sufferings of the animals you eat, then eat wild duck, partridge or pheasant, and you will be on the side of the angels.
However, you must hang a pheasant for 10 days before plucking it. You must remove the feathers carefully, without breaking the skin. And you must snap the shanks of the legs and tear off the feet, so pulling out the tendons, whose toughness bears witness to a happy life in the woods and hedgerows. All this means that you won't find a proper pheasant at your local butchers - certainly not one with that tempting grass-green tint that signifies the ripe stage of putrefaction.
The hunter-gatherer's way of obtaining food is epitomised by ferreting and falconry, in which people hunt side by side with animals, in the same free spirit and with the same view of territory. The livestock farmer, by contrast, deals with animals who have already been marked out as food, taken into possession, and allotted a temporary tenancy on the farm. These are settled animals, and none epitomises them more effectively than the pig: a species that could not exist were it not for the elaborate process of domestication that has engineered it to our uses.
The pig was created for the table. He is omnivorous, a perfect way of recycling human leftovers, and at the same time a tame and obliging member of the household. He also looks like food: a round, plump offering on sticks.
And, of course, he tastes good, and just about every bit of him is edible. He is the source of charcuterie, the highest of all culinary art-forms. There is surely no tastier morsel than the dried and shrivelled, layered and self-stuffed, re-incombobulated intestine of a porker, spiced with garlic and caraway, smoked over a wood fire and served up as andouillettes.
Alas, Malmesbury slaughterhouse has not survived the Euro-madness, and Snowball and Napoleon, our first experiments in pig-keeping, had to be taken to the slaughterhouse in Calne. Snowball, the first to go, went quietly. Napoleon, however, who had grieved over his companion and deduced his fate, refused to enter the trailer until lassoed and winched in with a rope.
The stress of transportation, to an animal that guesses how the ordeal will end, ought to be a cause of scandal. And the chopping factory likewise, though for different reasons. I petitioned in vain for Snowball's blood, trotters and intestines, and although the head and liver were delivered at last to the factory door, something in the frozen half-smile that looked up at me from the bloody packet suggested that this was not the Snowball with whom I had exchanged so many greetings.
The factory processing of the pig wastes half of him, and the better half, too. We therefore decided to join the criminal classes, and butcher our current charges - Ryder and Singer - at home, recruiting the neighbours to the task.
Pig-killing was once a ceremony, a ritual sacrifice, in which the whole community joined, to create the puddings, pies, hams and jellies that made use of every part.
Sheep are resident also in our neighbourhood, and lambing is one of the most important seasons of the year. One orphan was found by Paul, our next door neighbour's son. The lamb had been caught and worried by a dog. Alive but bleeding, he had been brought into the kitchen, and his wounds sewn up. Each day Paul would feed him with cow's milk from a bottle and, in due course, he recovered. He acquired a name - Herbie - and was the playmate and companion of his rescuer. The children of the neighbourhood were drawn to Herbie, and he would frisk and skip with them quite happily as though they, too, were lambs.
And then, one day, Herbie ceased to dance. He observed the gambols of his former playmates from the zig-zag pupils of his yellowing eye with a cool and cynical disdain. He responded to the small hands that patted with barely concealed impatience. At every opportunity, he sought to melt into the anonymous fleece on the hillside. He had lost his personality, and become a sheep.
A few months later, we ate Herbie, not shedding a tear.
· Extracted from News From Somewhere, by Roger Scruton, published by Continuum. To order for £14.99 plus p&p (RRP £16.99), please call the Guardian Book Service on 0870 066
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