Best Food Writing 2013 (31 page)

Like Elmer Fudd confronting Bugs Bunny—“you know this means war”—feature writer and restaurant reviewer Mike Sula launched a campaign against garden-ravaging squirrels, a tale ideally suited for the pages of this offbeat alternative weekly. In the end, what Sula really bagged was a James Beard award.

I
t starts every summer with the first ripening tomato. Maybe it's the early blush on a squat Cherokee Purple, or the lighter stripes of a Green Zebra turning pale yellow, or a lime Bush Beefsteak going gradually olive, then pink, then red. The effects of the sun on this single fruit carry the promise of summer, and the subtle message of whether it will be a good season for tomatoes, or even whether it will be a good summer overall. I watch the weather forecasts and gently squeeze with my fingertips to calculate the precise day I'll pluck it.

But without fail—sometimes the very day before I plan for this auspicious moment—I'm foiled. I'll climb to the roof to find the fruit's smooth surface violated, chiseled and gnawed by a honed set of incisors. The marauder is insolent and indiscriminate. Sometimes the fruit is discarded, half eaten, on the roof. Other times it remains hanging on the vine. Now this tomato becomes a sign of war. And the hostilities will have begun in my annual jihad with
Sciurus carolinensis,
aka the eastern gray squirrel. It's a war I've never won.

Last year the skirmishing started over a prolific yellow cherry plant. In late July I began to find the sweet mutilated marbles discarded
two stories down on the front step. Others were cached in the soil of my cilantro bed. I found corpses every day until the escalation on August 1, 2011, when a low-hanging, pleated-red Brandywine was punctured and left hanging for the flies.

But the assault on my orange Roman Candle paste-tomato plant was Pearl Harbor.

For years I'd grown my tomatoes in buckets on the rooftop. It wasn't the best way to grow them, and my landlord didn't like it, but it's what I could do with the space. It worked if the conditions were right—just not for paste tomatoes. The restricted environment of the bucket isn't good for these varieties, and by late spring the tips of the new green fruit would be withered by blossom-end rot, a calcium deficiency that took most of them out. I don't bother with paste tomatoes anymore, but I'd mistakenly purchased the Roman Candle seedling.

By midsummer, against all expectations, healthy green fingers began lengthening off the vines and I began to entertain impossible hopes of a novel, thick, yellow sauce tossed with freshly cut noodles. The most promising of these specimens turned a vibrant shade of banana by August 8—when near dawn it was attacked, ripped from the vine, savaged in its lower quarter, and mounted on the parapet of the roof like a severed head.

I stood staring at the enemy's trophy, the familiar impotent rage rising. But the impulse to fall to my knees, gnash my teeth, and howl at the gods was stayed this time by a resolution I'd made earlier that spring. The squirrels may take my tomatoes and spit them back, but they would not go unanswered. The time had come to close the circle of life.

At some point we stopped eating squirrels in this country. Certainly the very first Americans ate them in abundance, as did the first European settlers, who cleared the ancient forests and issued bounties on the rodent plagues that ravaged their crops; in colonial Pennsylvania authorities offered hunters three pence per squirrel killed. It was the colonists' skill in bagging them with their long-barreled rifles that gave them an edge on the Redcoats during the Revolution.

In the mid-1800s mass squirrel cullings occurred in Indiana, Ohio, New York, and Kentucky. They often took the form of hunting contests
in which thousands of animals were killed. Surely those squirrels wound up in the pots of community feeds. Different regions have different names for the massive stews simmered for harvest celebrations, some of which are still held today: the Brunswick stews of Virginia, the burgoos of Kentucky, the booyahs of Wisconsin, and chowders of southern Illinois. The recipes were similar, a thick, slow-cooked mishmash of meats and vegetables, more often than not featuring squirrel as the most important protein source. A well-circulated formula for Kentucky Burgoo Stew in the 1939 cookbook
Fine Old Dixie Recipes
calls for an astonishing 600 pounds of squirrel meat, “1 doz. to each 100 gals.”

City swells didn't turn their nose up at squirrel either, even though it's a member of the order
Rodentia
and cousin to
Rattus norvegicus,
the reviled plague bringer and urban menace otherwise known as the Norway rat. In Chicago in 1879, among the broiled sandpipers and black bear hams on the multispecies menu of the Grand Pacific Hotel's 24th annual Great Game Dinner, there were four preparations of squirrel, including black, gray, and an ornamental “Fox Squirrel in Arbor.” On the eve of the Great Depression, the
Chicago Daily Tribune's
Jane Eddington offered a recipe for Brunswick stew, which called for three cleaned, washed, and jointed squirrels. She acknowledged the difficulty the average urbanite might encounter sourcing the rodent, suggesting chicken, lamb, or veal as substitutes, though coyly noting, “I know of people who shoot squirrels almost in the boundaries of some of our cities, even the largest ones.”

Even after the advent of processed and frozen foods, and disarticulated plastic-wrapped meat parts chilling under fluorescent lights, Americans kept eating squirrel, though you'd have to know a hunter to get any. A 1967 collection titled
Game Cookery
claimed that “each year well over 25 million pounds of this delicate meat appear on the tables of American households.” That same year the Illinois Department of Natural Resources reported that hunters in the state had picked off over 2.5 million.

Even the venerable godfather of American cuisine approved. “Squirrel has been written about rapturously for years,” he wrote in his
James Beard's American Cookery.
“And it has long been associated with elegant dining as well as with the simple food of the trapper and the nomad. Fortunately it is plentiful.” Beard's recipe for Brunswick stew called for two to three squirrels, veal stock, and a half cup of Madeira.

But somewhere along the way, squirrel declined in popularity as a game animal, replaced by bigger quarry, such as deer and turkey, whose numbers had grown in the countryside as the number of humans dwindled. Mainstream views on squirrel eating began to drift toward disdainful—it became something hillbillies and rednecks did. In the late 90s a pair of Kentucky neurologists posited a link between eaters of squirrel brains—a time-honored delicacy among hunters—and the occurrence of a variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a theoretical but terrifying new mad squirrel disease. (Peer review later deemed this connection unlikely.) And though noted woodsman and Motor City Madman Ted Nugent devoted a few pages of his wild game cookbook
Kill It and Grill It
to “Limbrat Etouffee” in 2002—written with a vengeance he typically reserves for sitting Democratic presidents—when the 75th-anniversary edition of
Joy of Cooking
was published four years later, for the first time in the book's history it didn't include an illustrated how-to for pulling the skin from a squirrel.

Squirrel eating may be making a comeback, however, at least among those with au courant appetites for sustainable, healthy, and locally sourced meats.
CNN.com's
food blog Eatocracy has encouraged readers to seek out sources of squirrel meat—“more earthy and sumptuous than the darkest turkey.” Hunting and foraging authority Hank Shaw has spilled plenty of ink on this “gateway” prey, an abundant animal that hones the hunter's skill for bigger game. It's delicious too, he argues, its pink flesh more dense than a rabbit's, which takes on the nutty flavor of whatever it's been eating.

But think of Squirrel Nutkin, Rocket J. Squirrel, and Princess Sally Acorn. How could one eat such an adorable, puckish animal, so easily anthropomorphized? Ask British food writer and broadcaster Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: “I do not argue that we have an inalienable right to eat meat,” he writes in
The River Cottage Cookbook
. “I do say however that, if we are going to make meat part of our diet, then wild meat is, for me, the least morally problematic of all. All meat is the product of a killing, and those of us who kill for the pot are merely taking responsibility for the manner of that killing. A squirrel may have a cuteness factor that makes some people shudder at the sight of its back legs crackling on a grill. But if those people have ever seen young calves and lambs playing in the fields, then
why have they not applied the cuteness argument to their own carnivorous habits? For I have found that most of the people who seem to be upset by the eating of rabbits, squirrels, and the like are not vegetarians but town dwelling carnivores.”

One early Saturday morning last August I was sitting at the bottom of a dry creek bed in southern Indiana with a small shotgun staring straight up into the trees, listening to a squirrel I couldn't see cutting on a nut. The branch on which it ate was almost directly above me some 30 yards. In the forest's otherwise echoing silence it sounded like two quarters rubbing together on the edges.

I'd been awake since before dawn, creeping around the woods with 19-year-old Forrest Turner, a horse trainer and aspiring agriculture student who'd grown up hunting squirrels, turkey, and deer in these woods. He'd already shot about 15 to 20 squirrels since the season started. We'd stepped as lightly as possible, staring up at the canopy slowly coming to light, looking for motion in the branches, and watching for acorn and hickory shells as they dropped from the sky. Much earlier we stood under a tall oak, and with a small shotgun I took my first and only shot on a squirrel directly above me. I missed. Over the course of the morning we'd stalked close to 15 gray and fox squirrels, and while Turner got a few shots off himself, we had no luck. Near midmorning, we were ready to call it a day, until we heard the telltale sound above us and gave it one more try.

I'd never hunted anything in my life, and Turner, an enthusiastic guide, wanted me to get my first squirrel. He left me in the creek bed and went off to pursue others. But as the sun rose higher it became apparent my prey wasn't going to offer me a shot. Turner returned and moved up the bank beyond the tree to flush it out. Taking aim with his scoped .22, he fired off two rounds in quick succession. The second connected, and the squirrel tumbled off the branch and fell to the bank, rolling down the slope almost to my boots. He'd shot it diagonally through the abdomen and the small eastern gray attempted to drag itself away through the leaves with its forelegs. I tried to put it out of its pain with a heel to the head but it wouldn't go easily. Turner finished the job, picked it up, and handed it to me in time to feel its pounding heart slow to a stop.

You can see why it's preferable to shoot a squirrel in the head,
both for the sake of the animal and its meat. If that's a challenge for Turner, and a near impossibility for me, imagine what it's like to compete in the Great Washington County Shootout, an annual friends-and-family contest for which hunters are required to use long, heavy, single-sighted flintlock muzzle loaders, working reproductions of the same cumbersome rifles the American colonists used.

I shot one of these guns that afternoon at the home of Zen Caudill, a retired Seymour, Indiana, firefighter and the Shootout's host. He'd built his log-walled house and almost everything in it from the trees and stones surrounding the land at the bottom of the sylvan hollow where it sat. When Caudill hunted squirrels as a boy in Kentucky it wasn't for sport. It was to put food on the table. But he'd done well for himself—and he'd done it all by himself—a rigorously independent badass if there ever was one.

He packed the rifle with powder and shot and handed it to me. It was nearly as tall as I am, ridiculously heavy, with a hair trigger. As I took aim at a small hillock it went off before I could steady it. The chances of me hitting a nimble, camouflaged squirrel at any distance with this thing were almost nonexistent.

Caudill fabricated most of the guns used in the contest himself, and the hunters and their family members gathered at his spread at noon to count their kill, busting each other's chops as they arrived. “I see that one's got tire prints on him,” one fellow shouted to another who'd brought in a single fox squirrel. The rules are simple: gray squirrels, which are craftier and tougher to get than foxes, carry a higher score, as do head shots over body shots. A head shot to a gray trumps all. Some dozen hunters took 17 squirrels that day, a mix of grays and the larger, slower foxes. As the men sat around eating fried chicken and potato salad, many complained that, so far, it had been a bad year for squirrel hunting in southern Indiana. Squirrels stay put in hickory trees, and the older ones chase the younger ones down to the lower branches. But hickories hadn't been producing so well last year. Walnuts were doing OK, but squirrels take the tougher nut to higher branches of satellite trees to eat, making them harder targets. In previous years the group had collectively taken as many as 70 squirrels in a single morning.

After lunch, they gradually rose and gathered around 69-year-old
Jay Mellencamp—the uncle of the rock star—who took out his hunting knife and began skinning squirrels to confirm the head shots. No one's won more of these competitions than Mellencamp. His name has been engraved on the wooden winner's plaque eight times since 1987, when the Shootout began. He won the previous year's contest with a single head shot to a gray squirrel, but he didn't bag any that day.