Le Cordon Bleurgh

There are some things that most people just won’t eat. If you have a terror of rats, as most Europeans do – because they live in cities and towns where aggressive, incontinent rats invade their homes – then a reluctance to eat that meat is understandable. But for a lot of wildlife, this makes no sense. There’s not much difference in flavour between various types of bird, just as there isn’t between different mammals. And, with the exception of pets, most people don’t come into close contact with either.

At a guess, once we turned from hunters to farmers, we lost our appetite for wild creatures because they were harder to catch and kill. The advent of the motor car could have reintroduced more primitive food through cooking roadkill, but cars appeared around the same time that food hygiene and refrigeration began to make their mark, so the squished remains of birds, bunnies and badgers were left to the crows.

It seems a waste, particularly if you don’t like the thought of mass-reared, artificially-fattened, drug and hormone-fed zombie meats at the supermarket. That’s why I fill a few freezers with the stuff most other people shrink from in disgust. (Except rats.) Eating sustainable wildlife, particularly invasive creatures like grey squirrels, is good for the planet and may help us from burning to a crisp, if you believe we’re heading that way. For the authentic experience, we should impale such creatures on sticks and rotate them above a campfire until they
are cooked-through and charred. But to enjoy them, less Palaeolithic cooking techniques are advised.

I taught myself how to cook vermin and roadkill out of curiosity, and there are plenty of websites and recipe books to help the uninitiated, such as Ernest Matthew Mickler’s White Trash Cooking and BR Peterson’s Original Roadkill Cookbook.

For my last such dinner, I served an interesting array of food: game bird hearts and livers; roe deer heart and liver; one jay; two magpies; two squirrels and a roadkill badger. We started with pumpkin and pheasant-stock soup: I simmered the one in the other, added seasoning, then blended and considered adding some chopped mouse meat for texture, but on searching the traps only one was found and it was a bit smelly. A shame, as it would have been nice to present an a-mouse bouche.

The deer and game-bird offal dishes were also dead easy. To make two patés, I chopped the meat coarsely, fried it in butter and sweated onions, added herbs and a splash of brandy, then put everything into the food processor, leaving enough time to cool before serving.

Now came the jay, and given its small size, croquettes seemed the perfect vehicle, as well as being simple. First, I sweated some finely-chopped onions in butter in a pan, then added finely-diced jay breast with a little salt and pepper, stirring for even cooking. Next I boiled a medium-sized potato and mashed it with the jay, onions, butter, grated parmesan and half a beaten egg. Divided into six pieces and moulded into croquettes, I chilled them in the fridge. Shortly before serving, I rolled them in flour, dipped them in the other half of the beaten egg (with a teaspoon of milk whisked in) and finally in breadcrumbs, flattening the croquettes slightly and frying in a shallow mixture of butter and light olive oil until both sides were golden brown.