{"id":545,"date":"2009-04-20T12:09:38","date_gmt":"2009-04-20T16:09:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/o-matic.com\/blog-archive-2022\/\/?p=545"},"modified":"2009-04-22T21:20:15","modified_gmt":"2009-04-23T01:20:15","slug":"squirrel-and-hazelnut-pate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/o-matic.com\/blog-archive-2022\/blog\/2009\/04\/20\/squirrel-and-hazelnut-pate\/","title":{"rendered":"Squirrel and Hazelnut pat\u00e9"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"07squirrel3_190\"<\/a>
Food Source and Patriotic Duty. Photo from the New York Times.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A few morsels from the New York Times’ January 2009 article on “Saving a Squirrel by Eating One<\/a>” article. If you are so enchanted as to sample the cute critters, the last excerpt certainly puts a dent in the argument for delighting in consumption:<\/p>\n

Enter the \u201cSave Our Squirrels\u201d campaign begun in 2006 to rescue Britain\u2019s red squirrels by piquing the nation\u2019s appetite for their marauding North American cousins. With a rallying motto of \u201cSave a red, eat a gray!\u201d the campaign created a market for culled squirrel meat.<\/p>\n

British bon vivants suddenly couldn\u2019t get enough squirrel. Television chefs were preparing it, cookbooks were extolling it, farmers\u2019 markets were selling out of it and restaurants in many places were offering it on the menu.<\/p>\n

Nichola Fletcher, a food writer and co-owner of a venison farm, held a squirrel tasting for Britain\u2019s Guild of Food Writers, finding \u201ctheir lovely flavor tasted of the nuts they nibbled.\u201d At a later event, however, she found the flavor disappointing, with \u201ca greasy texture and unpleasant taste,\u201d presumably reflecting these squirrels\u2019 diet.<\/p>\n

Fergus Henderson…who cooks with both poetry and passion, sometimes prepares his squirrels \u201cto recreate the bosky woods they come from,\u201d braising them with bacon, \u201cpig\u2019s trotter, porcini and whole peeled shallots to recreate the forest floor.\u201d He serves it with wilted watercress \u201cto evoke the treetops.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other chefs may be less lyrical, but they are no less enthusiastic. The Famous Wild Boar Hotel in Britain\u2019s Lake District serves squirrel Peking-duck style; at Matfen Hall, a grand country house hotel, it is layered with hazelnuts into a terrine; in Cornwall, it can be found baked into the iconic meat pie known as a pasty.<\/p>\n

If you want to grab your shotgun, make sure you have very good aim \u2014 squirrels must be shot in the head; a body shot renders them impossible to skin or eat. (You want to get rid of the head in any event, as squirrel brains have been linked to variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human form of mad cow disease<\/a>.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Not such new news, though. This article from the Telegraph<\/a> in June 2005:<\/p>\n

A restaurant selling squirrel terrine has been forced to withdraw it after death threats from animal rights activists.Protesters threatened to firebomb the Hadley Bowling Green Inn in Droitwich, Worcs, and to smash up the staff’s cars over the \u00a37.95 pat\u00e9 starter.<\/p>\n

A female housekeeper was told: “I’m glad I don’t work here because I wouldn’t want to die in the fire.”<\/p>\n

After the dish was featured on local television the restaurant received about 25 threatening telephone calls and a string of malicious e-mails.<\/p>\n

Its spokesman, Barney Reynolds, said: “The last thing we would want to do is to pander to this sort of intimidation.<\/p>\n

“But the fact is that some of the staff were coming into work fearing for their lives.”<\/p>\n

He added: “We’ve never had to take something off the menu before because of threats from protesters. I don’t know why squirrel meat is so controversial.<\/p>\n

“In the past we’ve sold meat from fluffy little lambs and it’s not been a problem.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"gray-squirrel-pie-photo\"<\/p>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few morsels from the New York Times’ January 2009 article on “Saving a Squirrel by Eating One” article. If you are so enchanted as to sample the cute critters, the last excerpt certainly puts a dent in the argument for delighting in consumption: Enter the \u201cSave Our Squirrels\u201d campaign begun in 2006 to rescue … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Squirrel and Hazelnut pat\u00e9”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,29],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/o-matic.com\/blog-archive-2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/o-matic.com\/blog-archive-2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/o-matic.com\/blog-archive-2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/o-matic.com\/blog-archive-2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/o-matic.com\/blog-archive-2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=545"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/o-matic.com\/blog-archive-2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":591,"href":"https:\/\/o-matic.com\/blog-archive-2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545\/revisions\/591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/o-matic.com\/blog-archive-2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/o-matic.com\/blog-archive-2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/o-matic.com\/blog-archive-2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}