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Broiled Squirrel
Wash and wipe a squirrel dry, brush it over with warm butter or bacon-fat and broil it over a clear fire for ten minutes. When cooked, place the squirrel on a hot dish, set some slices of broiled salt pork on top of it and pour some rich brown gravy, garnish round with boiled potatoes, and serve.
A game recipe stripped to its essentials, on the assumption that the cook already knows what a squirrel looks like split for the grill. Two things decide whether it works: the age of the animal and the internal temperature.
- Age is everythingAge matters -- a young squirrel is far likelier to survive ten minutes of dry heat; an older animal has dense, sinewy leg muscle and is better braised or stewed, since broiled it turns to leather. The usual field rules of thumb for judging age (soft ears, unworn claws) are traditional guides rather than dependable tests.
- Split it flatThe recipe does not say so, but a carcass this small was normally split down the back and opened out flat for broiling, the way you would spatchcock a small bird. Left whole and rounded, it will tend to scorch outside before the saddle is cooked.
- Temperature, not the clockTen minutes over live coals is a starting figure from a kitchen that judged by eye. Take the thickest part of the hind leg to 160-165F on an instant-read thermometer; wild rodents can carry parasites and tularemia, and this is not a dish to serve pink.
- Handling raw gameWear gloves while skinning and jointing, and wash boards and knives before they touch anything else. Tularemia is contracted mainly through cuts and mucous membranes during dressing rather than through eating properly cooked meat.
- "A clear fire"Coals burned down to steady grey-red heat with no flame or smoke. Modern equivalent: a hot charcoal bed or a gas grill run high with the lid up, grate oiled.
- Brown gravyIn a kitchen of this kind 'rich brown gravy' would most likely have meant the house brown sauce, a roux-thickened brown stock in the espagnole family, though the recipe does not specify. At home, deglaze the salt-pork pan with a little stock and Madeira and thicken lightly.
- Salt porkBuy unsmoked salt pork or fat streaky bacon, slice thin, and broil it until the fat runs. Squirrel is almost fatless, and the pork is doing structural work here, not decoration.
- Yield and legalityOne squirrel serves one person as a main course. Squirrel is game in most jurisdictions, with licences and seasons; in the United States wild squirrel is generally not sold commercially, so take it lawfully yourself or source it where sale is permitted. Rabbit, jointed and treated the same way, is the obvious substitute.
Oscar Tschirky's book, a large general cookery collection issued under the Waldorf maitre d'hotel's name, belongs to the turn of the twentieth century, when American game still meant American game: canvasback duck, venison, terrapin, and small furred game from the woods. Squirrel had been ordinary eating in the eastern United States since the colonial period and is the traditional base of Brunswick stew, which both Virginia and Georgia claim; a broiled young squirrel with salt pork and brown sauce is the hotel dining-room version of the same country dish, dressed up with an espagnole. Its presence on a New York carte is a reminder that market game was still a normal commercial commodity before the Lacey Act of 1900 and the state laws that followed narrowed the trade to farmed and licensed sources.