Home › Game › Uncle Tony's Recipe For Cooking 'Possum
Uncle Tony's Recipe For Cooking 'Possum
Go out in de woods and catch a nice fat 'possum and take 'im home, put on a pot o' wattah an heat it jis like you wus gwine to clean a pig, an when it git hot fling in a shovel o' ashes an dip 'im in it an den you scrapes all de ha'r an fur off 'im and fix it jist like a little pig, 'cept you splits 'im open an spreads 'im out flat. Den you hangs 'im in a tree two or three nights an he's reddy fur de oven. When you goes to cook 'im, lay 'im flat on de bottom and fill 'im wid slices o' sweet 'tater and put mo' all round 'is sides. Den you sets 'im over de coles and kivers 'im wid a hot lid and cook's 'im mity slo' till he dun good an tender. De flavor of de 'possum goes inter de 'tater, an de flavor of de 'tater goes inter de 'possum, an it's jis good 'nuff to make you lick yo' fingers.
Compliments
This is a field-to-hearth account of a dish that was real and widely eaten, but the method as printed has no place in a modern kitchen. The points below explain the vocabulary and then the specific reasons the procedure fails.
- The three nights in the treeThe carcass is dressed and then hung outdoors, unwrapped, at whatever the ambient temperature happens to be, for two or three nights. This is uncontrolled holding of raw meat in the range where Salmonella, Clostridium perfringens and staphylococcal toxin multiply, and it is also open to flies and scavengers. No time or temperature is given because none was measured.
- Parasite load in wild opossumOpossums are a documented reservoir for Trypanosoma cruzi, the agent of Chagas disease, and the recipe has the animal scalded and scraped by hand with no mention of protection. Wild game of this kind can also carry Trichinella, leptospirosis and tularemia, none of which the recipe's vague "mity slo'" cooking is guaranteed to address.
- No internal temperature anywhere"Cook's 'im mity slo' till he dun good an tender" is a texture cue, not a doneness cue. Tenderness in a fatty carcass arrives well before the centre of the thickest muscle has been held long enough to be safe, and a covered pot over coals gives no way to know either way.
- The ash scaldWood ash is strongly alkaline (potassium carbonate and lye residues) and was flung into the scalding water to help the hair slip, exactly as for a hog. Ash from an unknown fire is not a food-grade ingredient and may carry treated-wood or trash residues.
- Legal statusOpossum is treated as a game or furbearing animal, regulated by season, licence and method, in many US states, and taking one "out in de woods" outside those rules is illegal. Some jurisdictions also restrict the sale or transport of wild-taken meat.
- What the archaic terms mean"Fix it jist like a little pig" means scald, scrape and gut as for a suckling pig; "splits 'im open an spreads 'im out flat" is butterflying along the backbone. "Sets 'im over de coles" and "kivers 'im wid a hot lid" indicate a lidded pot on the hearth with coals below and heaped on the lid — the covered lid was the oven.
- Sweet potatoesThe one part of the dish worth keeping is the principle the recipe itself states: the flavour of the meat passes into the sweet potatoes and theirs into the meat. The same exchange works with any fatty domestic roast.
- If you want to cook this dishUse a current, tested recipe for farmed or legally taken game with stated internal temperatures and refrigerated handling. Nothing in this entry should be followed as a procedure.
Opossum and sweet potatoes was a real and specific Southern dish, eaten across the rural South by Black and white households alike, and it belonged to the cold months — trappers were often said to wait for a frost, when the animals were fat and the meat kept better on the walk home. The pairing is functional rather than sentimental: opossum is extremely fatty, and sweet potatoes packed around it soak up grease that would otherwise be unpleasant, which is precisely the exchange "Uncle Tony" describes. What dates this page is not the dish but the presentation. Turn-of-the-century American household books routinely printed Southern and game recipes in heavy phonetic dialect attributed to an unnamed "Uncle" or "Aunt," a convention borrowed from minstrelsy and plantation fiction that let a white readership treat Black cooks as local colour rather than as sources. The recipe itself is competent field butchery; the voice it was put in was a costume.