Home › Poultry and Game Recipes › Squirrels En Casserole
Squirrels En Casserole
½ lb. chopped salt pork 1 cupful chopped onions 1½ cupfuls sliced parboiled potatoes 1 cupful green corn 1 cupful lima beans 4 quarts (16 cups) boiling water I quart (4 cups) peeled, cut tomatoes 1 tablespoonful sugar 1 tablespoonful salt 4 heaping tablespoonfuls (4 ozs.) butter 2 heaping tablespoonfuls (2 ozs.) flour Black and red pepper to taste Clean, wash, and joint the squirrels. Lay them in salted water for thirty minutes. Put the ingredients into a large casserole in the following order: First a layer of the pork, then one of the onions; next, of potatoes; then follow with successive layers of corn cut from the cob, the beans, and the squirrels. Season each layer with black and red pepper. Pour in the water, put on the cover, and seal with a paste made of flour and water. Cook gently for three hours, then add the tomatoes, sugar, and salt. Cook for one hour longer; stir in the flour and butter mixed together, boil for five minutes, and serve in the casserole.
This is Brunswick stew under a French name, and it behaves like one: a long, gentle braise that turns tough game and starchy vegetables into a thick pot of everything. The ingredient list omits the squirrels themselves, so read the method first.
- How many squirrelsThe headnote list never states a quantity. For this volume of liquid and vegetables, two to three dressed squirrels is the sensible reading. Rabbit or a stewing hen substitutes directly.
- "Casserole" hereA casserole in this sense is a lidded earthenware or enamelled pot used on the stove or in the oven, not a shallow baking dish. You need one that holds at least 8 quarts; four quarts of water plus meat and vegetables will overwhelm anything smaller.
- Sealing the lidThe flour-and-water paste is luting — a stiff dough rope pressed around the lid rim to trap steam over a long cook. A tight-fitting lid does the same job. If you lute it, remember you must break the seal at the three-hour mark to add the tomatoes.
- Heat level"Cook gently" means a bare simmer, barely breaking the surface. The recipe does not specify stove or oven; if you use an oven, a low setting will hold it steadily without scorching the pork at the bottom of the pot. Four hours at a rolling boil will shred the meat into threads and catch the flour paste on the base.
- Green corn and red pepperGreen corn is fresh sweet corn at the milk stage, cut from the cob; frozen kernels work, added in the last hour rather than at the start. Red pepper is cayenne, not paprika or a fresh chilli.
- Parboiled potatoesThe recipe wants them sliced and parboiled before they go in, as the third layer above the pork and onions. Waxy potatoes hold their shape better than floury ones and can go in raw if you cut them large.
- The thickeningFour ounces of butter kneaded with two ounces of flour is a beurre manié, stirred in raw at the end. It must boil for those five minutes or the stew tastes of uncooked flour. Add it in small lumps so it disperses.
- YieldThis makes something over a gallon of finished stew — ten to twelve generous servings. It reheats better than it eats on the first day.
Squirrel is generally said to have been the original meat of Brunswick stew, and this recipe is that dish dressed in the fashionable French vocabulary of a period when American cookbooks were full of things served en casserole. The stew's origin is traditionally traced to Brunswick County, Virginia, though Brunswick, Georgia, and Braunschweig in Germany have all been offered as rivals, and none of the claims rests on firm early documentation. What is documented is the pattern: a hunter's one-pot supper of small game simmered for hours with corn, beans, potatoes and tomatoes until the meat falls off the bone and the whole thing thickens on its own. Squirrel was ordinary market and woodlot meat across much of the United States well into the twentieth century; chicken displaced it gradually, and most modern Brunswick stew recipes no longer mention game at all.