Important: Safety Warning
This page gives first-aid or emergency advice that predates modern medicine and can make an emergency worse. Do not follow it. In any medical emergency, call emergency services and follow current first-aid guidance.
This page describes collecting wild birds' eggs, shooting birds for specimens, or similar practices. These activities are now illegal under wildlife-protection laws, including the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and they contributed to the decline of the very species described.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Hedgehog
FAMILIAR in country districts throughout England is the Hedgehog, Hedgepig, or Urchin, a small animal armed with prickly spines, being of nocturnal habits, feeding by night on insects, and such prey, and sleeping by day under dead leaves , or similar herbage. When captured, and domesticated, the Hedgehog will clear the kitchen of beetles, cockroaches, mice, and even rats. In the London Pharmacopeia (1696) it was stated: " The flesh roasted makes pleasant meat; its ashes cure dropsies, as well as the bed-wetting, or not holding the water ." Gypsies have an excellent way of roasting the delicate little "Hotchi-witchi" in a ball of clay, which is a slow conductor of the fire, and defends the small creature's body from unsavoury products of charring, whilst the fat, and the gravy which ooze out assist, the cooking within the clay. Hedgehog pie is a dish which is much relished on the continent. For deafness in the head, several old medical authors advise to take the drippings from a roast Hedgehog, and put the same to the patient's ears so grieved, and stop them with black wool. Quite recently the Tramp's Handbook (1903) instructs that "from September to January is the season for Hedgehogs, when nice and fat, especially at Michaelmas when they have been eating the crab-apples which fall from the hedges. Some have yellow fat, and some have white fat, so that we calls 'em mutton, and beef Hedgehogs; and very good eating they be, sir, when the fat is on 'em." A second recipe for cooking these small creatures of the hedgerow, or plantation, is thus explained: "You cut the bristles off 'em (after they have been fust killed) with a sharp knife; then you sweals 'em (burn them with straw like a bacon pig), and makes the rind brown; then you cuts 'em down the back, and spits 'em on a bit of stick pointed at both ends, and then you roasts 'em with a strong flare." The little animal should first be despatched by a blow on the head, and then roasted just as caught; when it is done the bristles, and skin, will come off en bloc, and he is found to be juicy, and full of most delicate flavour. In France the Marquis de Cherville tells how the foresters on his estate are given to concoct a delicious stew made of the Hedgehog, and the Morille (Fungus meruleus), a choice mushroom gathered in the woods. In ancient times the Greeks ate Hedgehogs' flesh (Erinaceus Europæus).
This page collects several methods of killing and roasting a wild hedgehog, together with folk-medical uses of its ashes and dripping. It cannot be followed today, and the reasons are worth setting out plainly.
- The animal is protectedErinaceus europaeus is listed on Schedule 6 of the UK Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, which restricts the methods by which it may be killed or taken, and it is further protected from cruel treatment by the Wild Mammals (Protection) Act 1996; it is listed under the Bern Convention across much of Europe. It is also a species of conservation concern, with steep declines recorded in Britain over recent decades.
- The medical claims are not medicineAshes for dropsy and bed-wetting, and roast dripping poured into the ear for deafness, belong to the pharmacopoeia of 1696 and to nothing later. Pouring warm fat into an ear risks burns and infection and is dangerous where the eardrum is perforated. Deafness, oedema and incontinence all need current clinical assessment.
- Pathogens carried by the living animalWild hedgehogs are a recognised reservoir of Salmonella enterica serovar Enteritidis phage type 11, of the ringworm fungus Trichophyton erinacei, and of ticks carrying Lyme borreliae. Handling, skinning and singeing an animal taken from a hedgerow exposes the cook before the meat ever reaches heat.
- No temperature, no time, no doneness test"Roasts 'em with a strong flare" and a ball of clay in the embers give the cook nothing to work with. Neither method offers any way of confirming that the interior of the carcass has reached a safe temperature, which matters a great deal with wild-caught meat.
- The mushroom is a second hazardThe Marquis de Cherville's forest stew pairs the animal with the morel. Morels are toxic raw or undercooked, and they are readily confused by the inexpert with false morels (Gyromitra species), which contain gyromitrin and have caused fatalities.
- Vocabulary, for reading rather than doingTo sweal is to singe the bristles off with burning straw, the same treatment given to a bacon pig. Hotchi-witchi is the Anglo-Romani word for hedgehog. Michaelmas is 29 September, the point at which the Tramp's Handbook reckoned the animals fattest on fallen crab-apples.
- If you want the dishThere is no safe or lawful modern version of this. Read it as a record of hedgerow cookery and cook something else.
This entry comes from W. T. Fernie's Meals Medicinal, a book that treated every foodstuff as a potential remedy and quoted freely from older authorities to prove it — here the London Pharmacopoeia of 1696, which promised that hedgehog ashes cured dropsy and incontinence, and the Tramp's Handbook of 1903, which is the source of the "mutton and beef hedgehogs" distinction between yellow-fatted and white-fatted animals. Hedgehog roasted in a clay ball is the single best-known dish of Romani cookery in Britain, though how routine the dish actually was, as opposed to how often outsiders wrote about it, is harder to establish. That the hedgehog was also valued alive as a kitchen ratter, and that Fernie can cite Greek antiquity for eating it, tells you something about the period's appetite for the picturesque wild food — an appetite recorded at exactly the moment when British wildlife was beginning the decline that later protective legislation was written to arrest.