low station was elevated, and whose pay was raised when rodents— usually thought to be pests-became a valued protein source. In nineteenth-century France, many in Bordeaux traditionally feasted on grilled or broiled rat with shallots. Thomas Genin, a noted cook and organizer of that country’s first culinary competitions in the 1880s, considered rat meat to be of excellent quality. Henry David Thoreau is reported to have said he enjoyed fried rats, served with relish, although some insist he was talking about muskrats, which probably lived around Walden Pond. During Vietnam’s war with America, the Viet Cong considered rats an important food group. More recently, G. Gordon Liddy, one of the engineers of U.S. President Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal, boasted that he ate rat in the all-American way, fried, although it’s generally believed that he did so to prove his courage, and not to expand his culinary experience.
In much of Latin America, Asia, and in parts of Africa and Oceania, rat remains a common hors d’oeuvre or entree today. In parts of China, it still is prepared in more than a dozen ways in popular restaurants. Even in America, there are commercial sources for rats and mice. One outfit, called the Gourmet Rodent, will deliver the critters dressed and frozen by UPS, Express Mail, or alive, C.O.D., via Delta Air Freight. (In 1998, mice cost between US$0.47-0.67 apiece, rats from $0.62-$2.17 for the 10-14 ounce “jumbos.” Discounts were offered on orders of more than five hundred units.) It should be noted that such companies advertised in magazines for people who kept snakes and that, according to the editors, it was known that some of the buyers were recent immigrants to the United States who did not keep snakes.
Deep Fried Field Rat
4 mature rats or 8 small rats
10-15 garlic cloves, crushed
2 tbs. salt
½ tsp. pepper
Skin and gut the rats, removing the head and toes. Mix garlic, salt, and pepper into a paste, spread on the meat, then place in direct sunlight for 6 to 8 hours, until dry. Fry in deep vegetable oil for about 6-7 minutes, until crispy and yellow in color. Serve with sticky rice, sweet-sour sauce, fish sauce, or a hot chili paste, and raw vegetables.
Traditional Isan recipe, courtesy Samniang Changsena
Sources
Frozen or live rats and mice by mail from Bill and Marcia Brant, The Gourmet Rodent, 6115 SW 137th Ave., Archer, FL 32618, phone (352) 495-9024, tax (352) 495-9781, email <[email protected]>; SAS Corporation, 273 Hover Ave., Germantown, NY 12526, phone (518) 537-2000; Kevin Bryant Reptiles & Feeder Rodents Inc., P.O. Box 4424, Evansville, IN 47724, phone (812) 867-7598, tax (812) 8676058.
Also (frozen) from J&J Enterprise, P.O. Box 141, Grandfalls, TX 79742, phone (915) 5531, Kelly Haller, 4236 SE 25th, Topeka, KS 66605, phone (913) 234-3358; Ray Queen, The Mouse Factory, P.O. Box 85, Alpine, TX 79831, phone (915) 837-7100.
Grilled whole baby mice, served with a Vietnamese dipping sauce of finely chopped ginger, garlic, chillies, and coriander in fish sauce and rice vinegar.
At the end of a day’s work hunting under rice fields near Madras, a group of rat catchers grill a small part of the day’s bounty around an open fire.
The Rat Catchers of India
The greatest consumption of rats may be in India, where every year, swarms of mole rats, rice rats and field mice steal enough grain to feed the country’s nine hundred million people for three months. Many are killed by chemicals that also poison the water and earth, at the same time rendering the animals hazardous to eat. Meet the nomadic Irula tribe, India’s master rat catchers.
Not so long ago, the twenty-eight thousand Irulas, from the Chingleput District, earned a living as snake catchers, selling the serpents to the snake-skin industry. In the mid-1970s, when the government banned the trade, they offered their services as rat catchers and in the late 1980s, they proved their worth when a study conducted by the international aid organization Oxfam Trust showed that in fifty audited hunts, the Irula captured several thousand rats at a cost of about five cents (U.S.) per pest, where in parallel trials, the per-rat price using pesticides cost ten times as much.
The hunt is so simple it mocks modern eradication techniques. The men go into the fields and when they find a burrow they build fires in clay pots using grass and leaves to create a lot of smoke. The pots are then placed over all the exits of the underground tunnels and the smoke is blown into the burrows. After a while, the Irula dig into the earth to harvest the rats and mice, asphyxiated by the smoke. Some of the catch is sold to crocodile farms in Madras. The rest is taken to the market for human consumption, or taken home, where the small animals are prepared in a curry or grilled.
One of the techniques used by the Irula is to smoke the rats out from their tunnels, having first identified all the numerous exits. A clay pot with a small hole drilled in the base and filled with smouldering rice stalks makes an effective smoke machine. Strategically placed, the smoke will drive the rats towards the exit where the rat catchers will be waiting.
Working along the bund—the raised dike separating the rice fields—a group of Irula dig for a nest of rats that they have located by listening for movement close to the ground. Typically they will also recover a hoard of rice stolen by the rats, and this will be an additional bonus for dinner.
Chockalingam, the most experienced of this group of Irula trappers, digs for a nest, helped by his wife and son.
Two handfuls of rats that will either be eaten, or sold for one-and-a-half rupees each under a program set up by the Oxfam Trust and India’s Department of Science and Technology.
A hazy morning heralds a hot day at the end of the rice harvest, the preferred season for trapping rats, once the fields are clear of their crop.
bats
The Tri Ky Restaurant doesn’t exist in Saigon any more, having been replaced by a high-rise office building not long after the city was renamed for the country’s founder, Ho Chi Minh. A pity, too, because it had one of Southeast Asia’s preeminent “strange food” menus, offering dog, bat, turtle, and a variety of wild game, as well as a selection of blood cocktails for the end of the difficult workday. The restaurant was in a fair-sized, ground-floor room in a building near the Saigon River. I discovered it in 1993, during its last days, when such drinks were supposed to gird your loins-so to speak—for what came later in the evening, probably in Cholon, the city’s notorious Chinatown.
Stir-Fried Bat
6-8 bats
2 medium onions, sliced
2 turnips or similar vegetable, cut into small pieces
1 red chili pepper, de-seeded and finely chopped
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
Salt and pepper to taste
Cooking oil
Singe hair over open flame, remove wings and heads, and cut bat meat into bite-sized chunks. Fry meat in a wok with a minimum amount of oil over a medium flame until tender. Vegetables and other ingredients are added only for the final two or three minutes.
Collected personally in Thailand and Indonesia, 1997
I entered, taking a seat by the large windows in the front near the door, looking