by Holly Hughes
The gray squirrel is remarkably prolific, Sullivan pointed out, sometimes breeding twice in a year with litters ranging in size from two to four pups. And it’s resilient. “Squirrel populations can withstand relatively high levels of harvest without a significant decrease in abundance because of compensatory reproduction,” biologists Michael A. Steele and John L. Koprowski write in North American Tree Squirrels, the authoritative work on the subject.
There are lots of complicating variables, but “one of the rules of thumb,” says Sullivan, “is you can harvest something less than 80 percent of the squirrel population every year and have it bounce back.” Roughly 80 percent of all squirrels don’t make it past their first year, with most dying from predators and starvation. “They’re selected for reproduction rather than longevity, unlike, say, elephants,” he points out.
There’s even a possibility, though purely hypothetical, that reducing the eastern gray squirrel’s numbers in the city would improve biodiversity by encouraging the fox squirrel—which tends to get pushed around by the gray—to move in.
Sullivan is, in theory at least, a dauntless omnivore. There are plenty of invasive and overpopulated plant and animal species in and around the city for which persuasive arguments could be made for promoting them in our diets: Asian carp, Louisiana crayfish, and garlic mustard greens, to name a few. “The fact of the matter is that we have made a cultural decision to self-limit protein,” he says. “That’s a very arbitrary decision, and it’s silly, ultimately. We have all these other options. Let’s use ‘em!”
Sullivan doesn’t suggest this without caution. He points to the familiar case of the passenger pigeon, once so populous that its flocks blotted out the sky. The species was driven to extinction by habitat loss and hunting, and the last one died in captivity in 1914.
“We as humans have an amazing ability to destroy everything in our path,” he says. “As a preindustrial and then industrial society we had a strong need for regulation of firearms and hunting and things like this within our cities. As cities have evolved, as species have adapted, as landscapes have stabilized, we’ve come to see that there are certain species that do really well amongst us: deer, Canada geese, squirrels, rabbits, raccoons, and opossums. If we could really get over the cultural hang-ups, darn it, we should be eating rats too. And I’m excited about the idea of changing regulations and helping people realize that consumption of wild-born, wild-grown meats is OK, and harvesting of said meats in an urban environment is something we can do in a regulated way, safe for humans and humane for the harvested animal. We can’t just have an anarchical harvesting of any game, under any circumstances, in any place. But I don’t see why we can’t have a regulated harvesting regime of all game of all species in all places, with the understanding that some species will be taken off the list.”
The state Department of Natural Resources could regulate the harvesting of urban squirrels for food much in the way it does rural ones: issue licenses and set a daily bag limit (currently five) and seasonal possession limit (ten).
But even if it did, a squirrel is not a deer or a turkey, and though it may taste somewhat similar, it isn’t a chicken either. Adult gray squirrels rarely grow over two pounds. Is there enough meat on a squirrel to satisfy any appetite? “A lot of people in the world would look at that carcass and say, ‘Hey, that’s a bonanza,’” Sullivan suggests.
My job as a food writer takes me to a lot of restaurants that serve rich foods that are hardly necessary, let alone healthy if eaten in excess. And that includes lots of meat. Two years ago I made a concerted effort to change my diet when I was off duty. I mastered portion control, and when not on the job I started eating mostly vegetarian. In that time I lost 35 pounds and I can once again touch my toes without losing my breath. I still love it, but don’t crave meat as much anymore. I’m satisfied with less when I do eat it, and I appreciate it more. I’m not even close to endorsing a vegan diet. But collectively Americans, whose per capita meat consumption in 2011 was 216 pounds, could stand to eat a bit less.
But if I were to lose this swell gig, I’d need to replace the meat. If it came to that, why couldn’t city squirrel be a plentiful, healthy, and nondestructive option?
Well, there are laws standing in the way. In Illinois the eastern gray squirrel is a protected species, along with domestic pigeons, striped skunks, bats, and dozens of other mammals and birds. It is illegal to hunt squirrels with a gun outside of the state-mandated season from August 1 to February 15, and it’s illegal to trap them anytime for hunting purposes. And obviously it’s illegal to hunt at all within the Chicago city limits—even if it’s an animal that’s gnawing through your power lines, chewing into your attic, and scrabbling above your head at five in the morning.
So what recourse do you have if squirrels are tormenting you? The city’s Animal Care and Control department will remove nuisance wildlife from homes, but only if an officer actually sees it on the premises, which typically precludes removal of the squirrels and raccoons lurking in your attic or walls. In extreme circumstances department officials will leave a trap, and if they catch anything they’ll take the animal to a wildlife rehabilitator, says Officer Carey Logan. “But we don’t have the manpower to monitor those traps.”
A private company with the proper state-issued permits to trap and remove wildlife can take care of that, but it’s going to cost you. Brad Reiter of Critter Control of Chicago, the local franchise of the country’s largest wildlife removal firm, says he traps more squirrels than any other animal, about 2,000 a year. But that can be expensive. Armando Martinez of Pest Control Chicagoland says if there’s more than one squirrel involved, a typical job including house repairs can cost anywhere from $500 to $2,000.
For anyone who doesn’t take the killing of animals lightly, it should be pointed out that squirrels (and raccoons and skunks and bats and birds) trapped by removal specialists aren’t typically relocated to some paradisiacal nature preserve. They’re euthanized. And unlike the squirrels that were ravaging colonial cornfields, nobody’s making burgoo out of them.
Popular culture is awash in dystopian survivalist fiction and film—World War Z, Contagion, The Road, to name a few recent examples. For the kids there’s The Hunger Games. This appetite for apocalyptic anxiety in our diversions is curious, because these are scenarios that with some imagination don’t seem any less frightening than those discussed in the documentary Collapse, in which former LAPD cop and prominent chain-smoking doomer Michael Ruppert asserts that the earth’s resources have reached their peak ability to sustain industrial society. Grow a garden, he counsels. Save your seeds. The shit is coming down.
Why shouldn’t we be at least a little bit paranoid? Last fall the Greater Chicago Food Depository released a report stating that 20.6 percent of Chicagoans are food insecure, meaning over half a million people in the city are unsure where their next meal is coming from, or they’re not getting enough to eat every day, or they don’t have any place to get it. Not long after, Wall Street reported its worst quarter since the 2008 meltdown, Tyson recalled 131,300 pounds of ground beef in 14 states, and a Listeria outbreak ensued after Colorado-grown cantaloupes were shipped to 25 states, sickening 146 people and killing at least 30. Last month an Associated Press survey of economists, think tanks, and academics reported the U.S. poverty rate is at its highest since 1965—and thanks to this summer of drought, the US Agriculture Department says food prices will rise 3 to 4 percent. Right now, we’re unable to pay our mortgages, find jobs, or fill the gas tank. How much longer until we’re unable to feed ourselves?
Meanwhile, Alderman Lona Lane wanted to ban chickens in the 18th Ward, collective-food-production incubator Logan Square Kitchen closed in May after enduring 19 inspections over the prior two years from city inspectors who couldn’t or wouldn’t understand its business model, and police routinely harass pushcart vendors who support their families by cutting up fresh fruit and sprinkling it with lime juice and chili powder. The city remains
hostile and uncomprehending toward small-scale private and commercial food producers precisely at a time when the economy needs them the most.
What if a real catastrophe occurred and trucks stopped delivering cases of pink-dyed farmed salmon fillets and barrels of ketchup-flavored corn syrup to Costco? Could you feed your family in the middle of a teeming, hungry metropolis? What would you do? What could you do? Would you turn away a meal of squirrel or pigeon or rat if you could catch it? Could you catch it?
Last December the Seattle Times reported that a local woman had begun regularly trapping and eating the squirrels that had been invading her home. In Washington it’s legal for homeowners to trap and euthanize animals that are causing property damage (though the American Veterinary Medical Association considers her method of dispatching them—drowning—to be inhumane).
Thinking on the fringe: if things got really bad, could I feed my family on city squirrel? Build up a stash? Maybe make cross-rooftop trades with the neighbors—squirrel meat for matches, flour, and cooking oil?
The chef led me through the kitchen and onto the sun-dappled patio behind his restaurant. A meticulous student of southern food history, he took a dead squirrel by the tail and nailed it to a wooden railroad tie braced against the brick wall.
“Americans have gotten really, really weird about food in a very short period of time,” he said. “Obviously, working in restaurants I work with a lot of immigrants, and they’re not afraid of bones or weird animal parts.”
He’s not afraid of them either. He grew up hunting and eating squirrels. After a hunt it was nothing to cook up the squirrel heads along with the legs and saddle, crack open the skull, and eat the brain. When I asked if he would show me how to clean a squirrel he readily agreed.
He got started by cutting through the base of the tail, above the anus just until he hit skin, then cutting around the haunches of the hind legs and pulling on them hard until the hide peeled off, down to the forelegs and head. After working the “britches” off the hind legs he laid the squirrel on a table on its back, cut off its tiny penis and testes, and made an incision from its crotch to its neck.
“These organs are good stuff,” he said, isolating the heart, liver, and kidneys from the rest of the respiratory and digestive tract. I hadn’t planned on that. But after his demonstration I felt obligated to keep them. And the head too, though I knew it was going to take some fortitude to get over that hurdle.
At home I washed the carcass, clipped off the paws, and tried to singe the stray hairs that remained on the flesh. They were persistent, but I got most of them and put it all in a bag in the back of the refrigerator. Pink in plastic, except for its head, the squirrel had made the aesthetic and psychological metamorphosis from animal to meat. But maybe not completely. Later I was startled by what sounded like the rustling of the bag, as if the squirrel had come back to life. But it was only the coffee I’d left boiling on the stove. A not-unappetizing musky, meaty smell clung to my hands and cutting board.
A few nights later I took the meat out of the freezer and cut it into pieces, which I dusted in salt-and-pepper-seasoned flour. I seared it off and braised it in beer for an hour. It tasted like chicken thigh, lean and not at all tough after the long, slow cook. The eyes had turned a milky zombielike white, but still I pulled off a morsel of cheek meat as the cat watched, licking her lips.
I wasn’t yet ready for the brain, but I did sauté the heart, liver, and lungs. I burned them, so they were bitter, but the heart was the most palatable, with an almost beefy flavor.
Suffering no apparent ill effects, I saw no reason not to make a case for squirrel meat among my friends and colleagues. And I felt confident I could skin enough squirrels for a dinner party.
For an animal nobody is supposedly cooking anymore, its culinary versatility is well documented online and in the stacks of the Harold Washington Library Center. If you’re hankering for smothered squirrel in pan gravy, homesteader’s squirrel with cream gravy, crock-pot squirrel, Hmong-style squirrel stew with eggplant, squirrel pie, squirrel dumplings, squirrel and broccoli casserole, squirrel curried, fricasseed, or barbecued, squirrel cakes, squirrel purloo, or the infamous squirrel melts, the recipes are at your fingertips. But of all those I found—apart from simple panfrying—burgoos and Brunswick stews seem the most common application. Maybe that’s because the squirrel’s relatively low meat yield demands a one-pot dish that can be extended with a variety of other meats and vegetables.
I was able to source a steady, humanely killed supply of city squirrels—I won’t say where. I was just under the possession limit for squirrels in Illinois. It was time to make burgoo.
“The favor of your company is requested,” read the invitation, “for the most local of harvest meals.” I sent this to a healthy mix of 30 eaters both adventurous and particular, and set a date. On the menu: juleps made with the mint growing from my compost pile, coconut curry simmered with the mysterious squash that had taken over the backyard, dinosaur kale, cornbread, and the main event: a thick burgoo, featuring “heirloom tomato, tree nut, and alley-fattened wild caught game.”
I didn’t expect nearly all of the invitees to accept, but evidently curiosity about urban squirrel’s viability as a protein source isn’t merely a weird, solitary obsession. A few days before the event I defrosted and cut up the legs and saddles, seared them off in a pot, and deglazed it with Madeira, à la James Beard. I sauteed diced bacon, onions, and garlic, added homemade chicken stock and the squirrel pieces, and braised them slowly.
After three hours or so, the squirrel meat was falling off the bone, so I carefully removed the carcasses, let them cool, and then meticulously separated the meat from its tiny skeletal remains. It was painstaking work, and I was certain a few small fragments remained behind, but in the end I had nearly three-and-a-half pounds of shredded, mostly boneless squirrel flesh. I added it back to the pot along with vegetables and herbs from my garden and the Green City Market—the last of my tomatoes, thyme, corn, potatoes, lima beans, and a few small hot chilies—and let it simmer until the vegetables began to break down. Then I cooled it. (Many recipes advise that a night in the refrigerator and then a slow reheating the following day helps the flavors harmonize.)
Acting on the advice of my butcher I made a paté with the offal, searing the diced hearts, livers, and kidneys, flambéing them briefly in bourbon, and mixing them into a pork and bread crumb matrix before pressing it into a terrine.
When the day arrived my guests brought their own contributions—garage-cured Serrano-style ham from a Slagel Farms pig, a classic midwestern relish tray with chopped liver, olives, pickles, and crudités, Michigan apple pies, and, just in time for Rosh Hashanah, a honey cake from a pastry chef. There was Chicago beer and Indiana bourbon, and I smoked a massive lamb shoulder, mutton barbecue being the traditional accompaniment to burgoo.
Low and slow cooking had deepened the stew into a roasty reddish brown, all the vegetables softening but for sweet, crunchy corn. Conventional burgoo wisdom says that when it’s thick enough for the spoon to stand up in the pot by itself, it’s ready. And with that, most of my guests dove in.
After the heads braised in mirepoix and sherry, a friend demonstrated with a nutcracker the proper technique for extracting a squirrel brain from its cranial cavity, and a half dozen of us popped them into our mouths. They looked like oversize walnuts and tasted slightly creamy, almost like a soft, roasted chestnut. We pulled out the tongues and cheeks, which contained the most concentrated expression of squirreliness. One guest described the meat from the head as “nutty”; others compared it to pork, duck, or lamb. To me this seemed like the very essence of the rodent. If squirrels grew to the size of pigs, you’d really have something.
I don’t think folks were being overly kind when they praised the stew. Out of two gallons of burgoo, at the end of the night I was left with only a cup and a half. In short, with the help of a lamb shoulder and some vegetables, squirrel meat can indeed feed a crowd. If
it was just me and my family we could survive on it for a week.
“It was so good that I got kinda depressed,” my neighbor e-mailed later. “There are so many people who don’t get enough protein and here is this menacing squirrel, there for the taking.” She’s a prolific gardener herself, with her own squirrel problem.
Some guests pointed out that the flavor of the squirrel itself was diminished or subsumed by the stew or muted by the spices in the paté. “I was expecting a more gamy flavor like an elk sausage or something,” one reported. “But I thought it was more comparable to a turkey or duck.”
“If I hadn’t known in advance,” said another, “I doubt I would have been able to tell. But I tasted the cheek and even that, while incredibly delicious, tasted like something between pork and lamb. I never would have guessed it was squirrel in a blind tasting.”
Most guests communicated a general surprise that city squirrels didn’t taste like the wild muskiness of bigger wild game. I don’t think that’s an indication that it was overseasoned. I think it’s because squirrel doesn’t have an assertive flavor to begin with, at least not one that corresponds with its brazen behavior.
Proverbially, it tastes like chicken.
TASTING NOTES: HEART
By Steven Rinella
From Meat Eater
In Meat Eater—a sort of prequel to his 2007 book A Scavenger’s Guide to Haute Cuisine–outdoors writer and TV host Steven Rinella describes the roots of his rugged hunting/trapping/fishing lifestyle in his Michigan boyhood. The coming-of-age ritual following his first deer kill was not for the squeamish.
