Girl Hunter Part 32

1 pound fat = 1 cup rendered fat Rendered hog fat makes the best, flakiest piecrusts (page 99), and duck fat is a nice alternative to b.u.t.ter. A meat's distinctive meat flavors reside in the fat, and so with wild animals, it is important to think about what they have been eating, and the environment that they came from. Ducks that have had a strong diet of fish, for example, do not produce good-tasting skin, whereas hogs that have been feasting on a forest of acorns will be slightly sweet and nutty. The best way to find out about an animal's fat qualities is to render a piece of its fat slowly in a pan and then taste the fat. Simply trim off the fat of any animal you don't like the taste of and the meat will always be good. The fat is what carries the flavor. The fat of wild animals is less saturated than that of domestic animals because their diet is varied; you can tell by how quickly wild animal fat becomes liquid at slightly warm temperatures. It is also full of vitamins A and E, and in some cases omega-3 fatty acids. There is rarely a lot of fat on a wild animal, but what you find should often be preserved.

1 pound hog or duck fat, cut into 2-inch pieces Water 1. Place the fat in a skillet or pot.

2. Add enough water to come about halfway up the sides of the fat.

3. Put the burner on its lowest setting and let the liquid simmer for 60 to 90 minutes, turning the fat pieces every so often.

4. When it starts to look as though the simmer is dying down, watch the fat carefully. It should be a warm golden color, with smaller bubbles. As the water evaporates, those bubbles will come closer to a boil and the remaining liquid will turn a darker golden. Eventually, the boiling bubbles will suddenly become much smaller, just back to a bare simmer, which means all the water is gone.

5. Remove the pan from the heat immediately and pour the fat through a fine-mesh strainer into a gla.s.s bowl. Placing a layer of cheesecloth in the strainer first is even better. Let the fat cool to room temperature, transfer to a gla.s.s jar, and place in the refrigerator. The rendered fat will keep for 1 month in the refrigerator or in the freezer for 6 months.

Apple Juice Smoked Ribs

Serves 6 to 8 My friends in the Village taught me that the secret to good ribs is maintaining the temperature of the grill between 225 and 275F, and cooking with indirect heat. A rotisserie cooker with a fire box in the back works well. And placing a chunk of mesquite in the box adds good flavor.

2 hog racks

2 batches Everyday Dry Rub (page 222), or 1 cup of your favorite rub

2 cups apple juice

Barbecue sauce (page 227) (optional)

1. Remove the skin from the bone side of the slab, leaving a bit of fat.

2. Season with the dry rub all over, rubbing it in. Wearing latex gloves as you do; this will help the mixture adhere best.

3. Place the ribs, bone side up, on the grill and cook for 2 hours, maintaining the heat at 250F. You may need to add more wood coals along the way.

4. Remove the ribs from the grill and place them on a sheet of tinfoil with the sides turned up to prevent the juices from escaping.

5. Pour 1 cup of apple juice over each rack and seal the foil tightly. Let the racks rest for an hour or two before serving. Serve with barbecue sauce or simply as they are.

Like a small grey coffee-pot, sits the squirrel -HUMBERT WOLFE

11.

Seeing the Forest for the Squirrel It was summer at our home in the Hudson Valley when my grandmother told me about Squirrel Brunswick. She stood above the stone steps, in the skewed rectangle of her kitchen doorway, her gnarled toes jutting out from her cotton skirt. It was an old-fashioned stew, and she remembered her mother making it in this same house after they purchased it from the Smith family. My great-grandmother used a coal stove, and made supper by kerosene light when the days grew dark, until finally giving in to the modern adventure of electricity in 1949, twenty years after everyone else in the neighborhood had. She was a steadfast Puritan and the fact that her kitchen flooded with sunlight in the daylight hours seemed enough.

Eating what was available was a given. So she stirred a pot of Squirrel Brunswick from time to time, while my great-grandfather wrote books in the upstairs study on a Remington typewriter and an old wooden desk-books on the marvels of science, and articles on things like the great underground cable that served as the artery of communication once upon a time, between Chicago and London. If working at night, of course, he did all of this by kerosene light.

The Smith family had kept a refuse dump on this land that my great-grandfather named Tulipwood. Once, after a windstorm knocked down several tulip trees like dominoes, I found the remains of the old Smith family dump in the roots of an old tree trunk. There were gla.s.s medicine bottles in every color, the kind of thick blown gla.s.s children covet on beaches, and broken china, and once in a while even a single unbroken piece. When I brought a pile of dump materials to my grandmother's door, her eyes widened almost as widely as her mouth, and that is when she told me about the Smith family and their dump.

The reason I mention the dump is that I am sitting now in the snow-covered woods of Upstate New York, an hour north of Tulipwood, against a young conifer, next to a mint green toilet. As it turns out, it is still common practice to have a refuse dump on your land. I don't know precisely whose land this is, or whose mint green toilet this was. But I am sitting near it; sitting covered in a white bedsheet, my seat damp from the snow I am trying to blend into. My friend Wyatt, who got permission to hunt this land, is stalking rabbits 40 yards away, just beyond a pile of rubber tires. I feel the chemical pebbles of the feet warmers in my shoes begin to cool inside their cotton casing, the left one more than the right. I can feel my biggest left toe begin to tingle and grow numb. I wiggle it while I wait for squirrels.

The fields beyond are covered in knee-high snow. There is a crust of ice on the top, and fault lines that cut through it all and branch off like the stencil of a tree-sometimes, thanks to the ice crust, you can walk on the surface of the snow. Sometimes you sink suddenly and the snow tips over the top of your rubber boots and soaks into your socks.

Squirrel nests speckle the sky high underneath a veil of gray branches. There is a hawk up there, too, waiting for the same thing we are. He plans to use his talons; I plan to use a number six load from my over-under. But we are here for the same thing, this hawk and Wyatt and I, except I imagine I have a more interesting recipe in mind than does the raptor.

The air is broken by the explosion of a semi blowing from the highway and through the conifers, and the tinkling sound of snow melting into the thickening stream. But mostly, things are still. I wait for the squirrels to come out and cavort in the drizzle, and feel the chemical pellets in my right shoe begin to extinguish. Soon my right toe begins to tingle and the left toe graduates to a gentle throb. I adjust my position against the base of the young conifer and slide down farther underneath my white sheet. I unzip my green sack and rustle for snacks inside.

More than any other kind of hunting, squirrel hunting says something about a person. It may seem from the outside that there isn't much to a squirrel. But in pursuit of a squirrel, you learn things, such as how to follow the patterns of the woods just as you do with a deer.

Some consider squirrel to be the best meat in the woods, and while squirrel is a desirable little beast, time spent in the woods may lead to other animals as well. You meet racc.o.o.ns while pursuing squirrel, and sometimes you see a hare or a cottontail. All are legal to hunt, and the end of a squirrel hunt may leave you with a mixed bag and to dishes you thought impossible but turn out to be enchanting.

Once, while I prepared squirrel in the Village, Betty the housekeeper was cleaning in the same kitchen. She stopped and watched and told me how she prepares 'c.o.o.n, her lips tucked into her mouth as she talked. She pushed her hands into her armpits and inside of her leg to show me where she takes out the 'c.o.o.n glands, and described how she parboils it and then bakes it with sweet potatoes until it is all golden. Then she sat down to watch me; her back was hurting, she said. Ten children and a lifetime of chopping cotton can do that to a woman.

That day she sat humming while I chopped onions and told me about gar gravy made from the flesh of a fish, and about Mr. Mancini's fried venison. "I don't have teeth, but he make it so tender that you can eat it with your tongue," she said, continuing to hum. As my eyes wept from the onions, she said, "If you put a toothpick in your mouth, you won't feel nothin'." And I did, and soon felt nothing in my eyes, save for the pure romance of cooking squirrel to the sound of Betty humming through tucked lips.

My seat grows ever more damp against the young conifer as I fetch peanuts from my green sack. There is a haze at the lip of the horizon and there are buzzards...o...b..ting around us-me and the young conifer-eyeing our flesh.

The phrase, "You are what you eat," befits a squirrel as it does a Spanish acorn-fed pig. Squirrels are h.o.a.rders, and after having feasted on a grove of pecans or acorns, their meat is nutty and sweet, b.u.t.tery and tender. A fat, nut-fed squirrel is better tasting than any meat in the woods, perhaps better tasting than that Spanish pig that sells for seventy euros per kilo. But if you were to tell that to a group of my stiletto-heeled pals on a warm Manhattan evening-which I have done-you would be met with textbook female gasps and sideways glances. Those squirrels linger around the soot-covered fire escapes of their studio apartments. Aren't they really tree rats?

No. The squirrels I speak of have never been anywhere near a studio apartment. The best-tasting squirrel is the one you find in the woods-the kind of woods I sit in now, beside a mint green toilet and a thickening stream. It has been a long journey to know such a thing, to appreciate squirrel.

Squirrel hunting is more American than apple pie, than Babe Ruth, than a twenty-dollar Manhattan. Whole traditions have formed around these squirrels; guns have been crafted in their honor. Few things are more intertwined with American history and tradition. Squirrel is one of the most popular game animals in the eastern United States.

This surprises me still, perhaps because I have never understood squirrel, or have never cared to until now. But there are towns, tucked away, linked by the spines of narrow roads, where microwaved catfish sandwiches are eaten on porches, where undiscovered men make guitar music, tapping their hands on the strings until the notes swell and glow like fireflies. Towns where children skip school on the opening day of squirrel season.

The night after I made squirrel with Betty one year ago, a man named Toomey came over. He was driving his truck home along the levee when Roger Mancini called and asked him to teach a girl how to make a real putach. Toomey paused at first. He doesn't let many people be his friend. But Roger Mancini was his friend, and he figured if he couldn't do that for Roger Mancini, then he couldn't call him a friend. So Toomey showed me how to make a true putach. I watched his small, fat hands move like magic among the pots and silver bowls, the vinegars and the squirrel meat. I smelled the fumes of rosemary vapors rise from the pot, and watched his round leather eyes glitter.

In the Village, the Italian immigrants go squirrel hunting together after the pecan trees drop. This was a bad year because there was no pecan crop. The squirrels that Toomey and I cooked were from the dwindling supply of one of the Italians who, with his squirrel dogs, normally gathered seven hundred squirrels in a single year. He loved the squirrel dogs; it was probably them that drove him to hunt squirrels. But Toomey had the best hunting dog, a dog named Bear, which was perhaps the best in all of Arkansas.

But now I sit far away from there, against the young conifer, my over-under split open, the primer of my sh.e.l.ls glinting in the breach like the tips of golden knitting needles. I remember a trick I once read about to help call in squirrels and decide to try it. I feel around the bottom of my green sack and pull out two quarters. I rub the edge of one against the side of the other and emulate the chatter of a squirrel. And sure enough, after some time, the squirrels come and cavort in the drizzle at last, just two. They start and stop across the brown leaves. Sometimes they sit, just like a small gray coffeepot. I close my split-open shotgun and hold it against my shoulder, trembling just slightly under the white bedsheet, and squint into the woods where a squirrel sits. When I pull the trigger, the woods reverberates and the hawk flies closer. But then things are silent again. I walk over and retrieve my gray squirrel in the brown leaves and think about that Brunswick.

Then I hear two more shots fire in the distance, and not long after my friend Wyatt appears with two cottontail rabbits dangling from his left hand. For some reason, America has never been a land of rabbit eaters the way that we have been squirrel eaters-or chicken and beef eaters. We leave that to China, Italy, Spain, and France, and are instead content with our squirrel. There is something about the squirrel that resonates with us, that propels us to craft special guns and seek keen dogs. Once, in the early 1700s, gunsmiths in Pennsylvania developed the superbly accurate Kentucky long rifle, which soon earned the name squirrel rifle by early pioneers. The gun made today just for a squirrel hunter is the combination .22/.410 or .22/20 gauge, an over-and-under combo with a selector b.u.t.ton giving said hunter a choice of rifle or shotgun barrel. We go into detail for squirrel.

A squirrel lives for six to seven years, whereas a cottontail lives for only one. The texture of squirrel meat is denser, the color grayer, and the flavor more complex because of this. Squirrels are wanderers, sometimes ground dwelling and social, living in well-developed colonies; or sometimes tree dwelling and solitary. Squirrels persevere, h.o.a.rd, and make dietary sacrifices to survive. Maybe the early pioneers saw a bit of themselves in squirrels. Or maybe these animals just tasted better. Either way, this meat has somehow never reached our elite dinner tables. It has never gained favor with the palates of kings abroad, the way it has here among certain Americans.

I think I have crossed over and become one of those Americans. It is true I have spent evenings sipping nouveau martinis, but as I sit and close my eyes, I recall the sound of lips smacking, and remember my dabbing with crusty bread at the rosemary vapors of squirrel putach, that night one year ago in the Village. I can hear the rumble of distant thunder past the lake, and smell the whiskey steaming from the ice, and recall the sight of men tapping tenderly on the pearl notes of a five-string, clenching their teeth and grimacing into their music making. Yes, I have crossed over.

Squirrel Brunswick Stew with Acorns

Serves 8 to 10 Young squirrel is good simply quartered and fried. Old squirrel is good stewed. When in doubt, it is safest to braise or stew a squirrel. Sometimes, for flavor and for whimsy, I like to add acorns to this recipe. Native Americans used to eat acorns, usually by grinding them and then boiling them. They are sometimes bitter because of their tannins, but this can be improved by grinding them and running them under cold water. Acorns from the white oak, the chestnut oak, the swamp white oak, and the Garry oak are all ideal.

4 squirrels, cleaned and quartered, plus rib cage and loin

1 lemon, cut in half

1 sprig fresh rosemary

1 bay leaf

1 teaspoon cayenne

Sea salt

3 strips bacon, diced

1 medium-size onion, chopped

6 garlic cloves

1 cup beer

3 cups crushed tomatoes

2 cups red potatoes, skin on, which have been cut into bite-size pieces

2 cups okra that has been cut into bite-size pieces