Muskrat
Muskrat feasts are usually held in the fall when the musk is least active. But even then all easily located glands are removed when cutting the animals up, including the kernels under the front legs. Since muskrats are good enough to be passed off commercially as terrapin in some unscrupulous eating places, according to often repeated rumors, no one should hesitate to eat them if he has a chance.
Here is one recipe recommended by a game warden; and frequently quoted:
Cut up the muskrat, and soak over night in cold water. Take out, drain thoroughly, and place in a pot with a good sized piece of fat bacon. Cook slowly. Season according to taste with salt, pepper, and sage. Cook until tender. The meat may be browned in the pot in which it was cooked, or it may be taken out, placed in a skillet with plenty of bacon, browned to a turn, and served while hot.
A plain braise that depends almost entirely on the butchering. Muskrat is dark, lean and close-grained, and every off flavor it has comes from fat and glandular tissue that should have been cut away before the pot.
- The glands come firstRemove the musk glands at the base of the tail and belly, the kernels (lymph nodes) under the forelegs, and every scrap of yellowish surface fat. Poor cleaning is a common reason people say they dislike muskrat.
- Handle with glovesMuskrat and beaver are among the classic carriers of tularemia, which is contracted through cuts and mucous membranes during skinning rather than from eating cooked meat. Wear disposable gloves for dressing, wash tools and surfaces afterward, and discard any animal that looked sick or had spotted internal organs.
- The overnight soakCold water overnight draws blood and mellows the flavor, but do it in the refrigerator, not on a counter or in a spring house. Some cooks add a tablespoon of salt or a splash of vinegar per quart and change the water once.
- "Fat bacon"This means fatty salt pork or old-style slab bacon, valued here chiefly for the fat it renders. The original gives no quantity; four to six ounces of unsliced slab bacon or salt pork per animal is a reasonable modern equivalent, as thin-sliced supermarket bacon will not render enough to keep the lean meat from drying.
- Cook slowly, with liquidThe original says only to pot the meat with fat bacon and "cook slowly," but slow moist heat is the obvious reading. Cover the pot, add water or stock to come partway up the meat and hold it just below a boil; expect an hour or more, longer for an old animal, until the meat tests tender as the recipe directs.
- Sage is doing real workSage is a traditional partner to strong marsh meat and is the herb this recipe names. A teaspoon of dried leaf sage per animal is plenty; more can turn bitter over a long braise.
- Browning at the endBecause the meat is simmered first, the final browning is for color and crust only. Drain and pat the pieces dry before they hit the hot fat or they will steam instead of brown.
- YieldA dressed muskrat is a small animal, yielding roughly a pound to a pound and a half of bone-in meat, so figure about one animal per person for a "feast."
- Season and licenceMuskrat is a regulated furbearer nearly everywhere in North America, with trapping seasons and licence requirements set by the state or province; check the local dates. The autumn timing in the original is about musk, though it may fall within the open season as well.
Muskrat has been eaten along the Atlantic marshes and the Great Lakes for as long as it has been trapped for fur, usually under a more genteel name: "marsh rabbit" on the Chesapeake, "marsh hare" in Maryland market stalls, and simply "muskrat dinner" in the Detroit River towns of Michigan and southwestern Ontario, where church and fire-hall muskrat suppers are still held in late winter and where the animal is traditionally said to have been allowed as a Lenten fish substitute. Fall trapping did double duty: the pelts were prime and, as the author notes, the musk glands were least active. The terrapin rumor repeated here belongs to a whole genre of American food gossip from the era when diamondback terrapin was a luxury priced out of reach and cheaper marsh meat was widely suspected of standing in for it; it is a story often repeated and rarely documented, but it tells you how respectable a well-cleaned muskrat could taste.