Cut the squirrels into pieces at the joints; sprinkle well with salt; let lay one hour; then sprinkle with pepper and lemon-juice. Put 2 large tablespoonfuls of dripping in a pan; when hot, lay in a squirrel with 1 sliced onion; cover and let brown. Then add 1 cup of tomato-sauce, some celery seed and chopped parsley and 1 cup of hot water. Let simmer until tender. Add ½ glass of sherry wine. Let get very hot and serve with French peas.
A plain braise that depends almost entirely on the age of the animal. Everything else here is straightforward once the period shorthand is translated.
- The hinge: young or oldA young grey squirrel is tender in 45 to 60 minutes of gentle simmering. An older one needs two hours or more, and no amount of sherry will rescue it if you stop early. Test with a fork at the thigh; the meat should pull from the bone.
- Quantity is unclearThe recipe begins with "the squirrels" plural but then browns "a squirrel" with one onion and a cup each of sauce and water. Read it as one squirrel per batch, roughly one animal per person, and scale the aromatics with the pan.
- DrippingRendered beef or bacon fat saved from roasting. Lard, bacon fat, or a neutral oil with a spoonful of butter all work; the fat needs to take a hard brown without smoking.
- Tomato-sauce, 1900 senseTomato-sauce, period sense -- Probably cooked, sieved tomato rather than a seasoned Italian-style sauce, though American recipes of the era often carried onion, spice or a flour thickening. Modern passata or plain tomato purée thinned slightly is the closest stand-in; canned crushed tomatoes are fine; skip anything already carrying garlic and basil.
- Half a glass of sherryA period wineglassful was usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, which would put half a glass nearer 1 fl oz, though 'glass' here may mean an ordinary drinking glass. Add it at the end as written and let it come up to a hard simmer for a minute or two so some of the raw alcohol cooks off.
- The salting hourAn hour under salt seasons the surface and draws out a little moisture and blood, which is often wanted with game. Pat the pieces dry before they meet the fat or they will steam instead of brown.
- French peasPetits pois braised with butter, a little shredded lettuce or a few scallions, and barely any water. Frozen petits pois finished this way take five minutes.
- SourcingGrey squirrel is legal small game in much of the United States in season, though seasons and rules vary by state, and the sale of wild-caught game is restricted in most of them, so it is a hunter's item rather than a supermarket one. Handle it as you would any wild game, and cook it through.
Squirrel was ordinary American meat well into the twentieth century — the backbone of Brunswick stew, a staple of rural fall tables, and common enough that nineteenth-century cookbooks treated it alongside rabbit and chicken without comment. What makes this entry interesting is the label: a book organised as one dish per day, each tagged to a nation, files squirrel under "French" purely on the strength of its method — the salt-and-lemon rest, the browning in dripping, the tomato and sherry finish, the garnish of peas in the French manner. That is fricassee as American cookbooks of the period understood it, a braise dressed up with a wine at the end. The dish tells you less about France than about how a hunted animal could be made to look like a course at a good table.