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Squirrel Soup
Make the same as Rabbit Soup or Rabbit Creole Potage, using 2-3 squirrels in place of 1 rabbit.
A variant entry rather than a standalone recipe: it borrows the rabbit soup method and only resets the quantity of meat. What matters is understanding how squirrel differs from rabbit once it hits the pot.
- Why two or threeA dressed squirrel yields well under a pound of meat, against a couple of pounds or so for a dressed rabbit, so two or three are needed to match. Three is the safer count if the animals are small.
- The hinge: long, gentle simmerSquirrel is leaner and more sinewy than rabbit, and older animals in particular are all connective tissue. Keep the pot at a bare tremble for 1 1/2 to 2 hours until the meat pulls from the bone; a hard boil tightens the fibers and leaves them stringy.
- Age the animals separatelySoft ears and paws are the traditional signs of a young squirrel, which will cook considerably faster. If you have a mix, start the old ones first and add the young ones later so nothing turns to threads.
- FatThere is almost none on a squirrel, so a soup built on it can taste thin. A little bacon, salt pork, or butter at the browning stage supplies what the carcass will not.
- Handling wild gameSquirrels and rabbits can carry tularemia, which is contracted through cuts and mucous membranes during skinning rather than from eating cooked meat. Wear gloves when dressing them, wash everything the raw meat touched, and bring the soup fully to a simmer. Do not use an animal that seemed sick or sluggish.
- ShotCheck the meat for pellets before it goes in the pot, and again before serving. A stray piece of shot in a spoonful of soup is a broken tooth.
Squirrel was one of the most common meats on the American frontier table and stayed in country cookbooks long after it left city ones. It is the animal generally credited as the original basis of Brunswick stew, and it appears in nineteenth-century game cookery wherever rabbit does, usually with the same sort of substitution given here. Where seasons and licenses apply, note that squirrel remains a regulated game animal, and the traditional advice to hunt it in cool weather has practical merit, since flesh from a hot-weather animal spoils quickly in the field.