chelydra

Typo corrections...
in step 2:
...a rabbit and a couple...
step 3:
...pierce any guts...

Baldur

chelydra, if you ever publish a cookbook Baldur will immediately buy a copy.
I thoroughly enjoyed this porcupine entry of yours.

chelydra

I guess the rest can wait until someone has successfully obtained, skun, gutted, liver-gifted and hung a porcupine. Anyone who does should write in as soon as it's hanging in the barn so as to have time to write up the actual recipe. In case I forget to keep checking back here, someone should let me when that great day comes.

As for my cookbook, I have only a porcupine stew recipe — not because that's the only dish I've ever made, but because it's only one I can remember that I've never made twice. (This isn't because I didn't like it, but because I haven't been passing through Vermont any of the other times my friends there have a porcupine hanging in the barn.)

As soon as I make a dish more than one it slips into the general all-purpose recipe:

Using the freshest and best ingredients around, through together whatever you feel like throwing together, in whatever proportions feel right, chop whatever needs chopping, mix it all up nicely if it needs mixing, and then cook it for a while by whatever method seems to make most sense.

This is because I've never managed to make anything the same way twice, and I can never remember what I did that worked out well (or badly). So as soon as I've made something twice I have two different recipes, neither of which I can remember.

I remember the porcupine stew recipe vividly because I've had only one opportunity to make it, and you don't forget the one porcupine you get to cook in your life. Actually it was a collaboration, but I think I was the one who realized it needed fresh fresh green birch leaves, a bottle (or some of a bottle if you only have one) of Old Wilson whiskey, and about a third of a cup of good maple syrup from down the road (Grade B, C, or D, thick and dark, would be best). That's really the recipe right there, since everyone else we used was what you put in any proper stew (carrots, potatoes, water, etc.). But the water you use does need to come from a spring, flowing brightly out of good clean rocks.
One other thing is crucially important.
Porcupine musculature is like the steel cables used to suspend the Brooklyn Bridge. I guess spending every hour of every day climbing trees will have that effect. We cooked the damn thing for hours, but not enough hours. My teeth and jaw were still recovering months later, no exaggeration. Maybe smaller chunks of meat would cook at lot faster. Another possibility is to hang it longer than two weeks (hanging tenderizes), but even two weeks in the barn in the summer is long enough to leave the carcass coated with a thick blanket of maggots. This is nowhere near as horrifying as it sounds, because you just wash them off in the stream and the meat itself is perfectly fine. (If you miss a few, you'll never notice them in the stew anyway once they blend in.) But at some point I guess they actually eat the whole thing (which presumably is their purpose in being there, to eat it) and if they're multiplying exponentially, maybe a few extra days hanging would make the difference between fifteen pounds of delicious organic stew meat and a clean white skeleton. But then, washing them off every day would solve it, wouldn't it? (I vaguely recall hearing that you want a few maggots to help with the tenderizing, so do it less than every day.)

So, here's the recipe:

Hang skun, gutted porcupine in barn for a bit longer than two weeks, occasionally rinsing off most of the accumulated maggots.
Chop meat into smallish chunks. (leave some meat on the bones. Put the bones in the stew too.)
Half fill a huge iron cauldron with water from the spring, and put it over an open fire.
After that, do whatever you'd normally do to make a lamb or beef stew, plus add a handful or two of tender birch leaves, three to six ounces of dark local maple syrup, and whatever you haven't drunk from any size bottle of Old Wilson whiskey (or another brand if you can afford it, preferably Canadian so as to be from porcupine habitat and blend in with the character of the stew).
Cook it as long as you'd cook any other mammalian stew, then see if your teeth ache when you try a bit of porcupine, and if they do cook it another few hours.

There you have it! So if I get hit by a bus before you get your porcupine ready to cook, that won't be a problem, not a relevant one anyway.

Bon appetit.

chelydra

[grown] lots more typos, but too sleepy for corrections. You can figure out what I meant to say, and if not, it won't make that much difference to the end result anyway.

Hazer

Well I must say that when I woke up at 1:30 AM and decided to take a quick peek in at TD to see if anyone else was up, I wasn't expecting to find a porcupine stew recipe. And in so much detail...although I've heard that a half cup of molasses thrown into the mix is to die for. What about salt, chelydra? Do you add any when cooking or leave it to each one to add to taste at the table?

Now it is 3 AM, and I'd better get back to bed if I want to be bright eyed at work tomorrow. Hopefully a dreamless sleep will come quickly as I don't think to hard on what to make for lunch.

Good night.

Dragon

Maggots will only eat dead, rotton flesh so they're probably doing you a favour. If came back to find the carcass skeleonized by the maggots then it was completly rotton anyway and you wouldn't have wanted to eat it. You would, however, have a large pile of well fed maggots that you could perhaps work out a stew for. I hear they're a good source of protein.

chelydra

Thanks for the tip, Dragon. Although I didn't exactly make up anything here, I did resort to some speculations and fudging to cover up my ignorance. My fellow cook added salt along with all the standard stew ingredients I think.

Robindcr8l

Chelydra, you are not only a fantastic artist, but clearly a culinary magician! This is by far the most entertaining recipe on the thread. Surely you have more to share??

chelydra

Instead of recipes, I have narratives tracing the evolution or devolution of things. Since pancakes would fill the next ten pages (and I've taken up too much space lately), here's the old family fudge sauce recipe (with blasphemous variations). The right way involves 4 (?) square chunks of unsweetened chocolate, 2 (?) cups of white sugar, one teaspoon of vanilla extract, and about an inch or two of milk in the saucepan. There's also about a tablespoon of butter at the beginning, and a smallish pinch of salt at the end. Melt butter and chocolate carefully on a low heat in the saucepan (preferably enamel to avoid metallic taint). Then add milk and sugar and keep melting, keeping heat pretty low. Let it cook (not quite boiling, at least not too vigorously boiling) for a good while, then turn off the heat and let it sit during main course of dinner. (Important: Too much stirring for some reason will turn it into incredibly tough, iron-like strands of black goo, but too little stirring means it burns on the bottom.) Allow about fifteen minutes between main course and dessert, during which you fire it up again, and (gently) stir in the vanilla and (not too much) salt. Serve over vanilla ice cream. Scraping/licking the fudge saucepan is the climax of the whole ritual. Traditionally, the man of the house makes the fudge and the lady of the house scrapes/licks the saucepan.
Partly because I can never remember the exact proportions (not sure the above are right but they'll probably work okay), and partly because that much white sugar seems unnecessary to me, I started substituting brown sugar in smaller amounts, sometimes substituting honey, and finally I found I was happiest just putting melted unsweetened chocolate over vanilla ice cream. Better yet is to pour generous amounts of brandy or whiskey onto vanilla ice cream and forget the fudge altogether. But if you want to do the old family recipe, bear in mind that TIMING IS EVERYTHING. And this cannot be taught; you just have to keep making it until you get the hang of it. Too high a heat and too much stirring produces steely-chewy sauce that quickly hardens to a glassy, impenetrable solid crystal. Too little heat and stirring, and you don't get it right either. But the fact is, if no elder members of the clan are looking over your shoulder, you can do whatever you want, and whatever you get, right or not, will taste delicious and make everyone happy. Someone else's turn now. Maybe I'll do the pancake stories after a few more entries arrive here.

Baldur

Time to bump this thread up to the top of the list.....

ferretkiss

Thank you Chelydra, for your writing! Enjoyed muchly.

polenta

Does anyone like fish?
Here, people don't eat much fish.
90% CHILDREN WILL SAY NO TO FISH HERE.
Most people -if the eat it- fry the filets covered with bread crumbs and egg or a pancake batter.
Do you eat fish with bones? Aren't you afraid a bone will get stuck in your throat?
Some easy, tasty, recipe?

polenta

yes, I know fish is healthy and we need 400 grams a week, especailly blue fish with omega 3..... but......

mdawrcn

I love salmon and eat it regularly. Is loaded with omega 3 and no bones (usually). I just put it under the broiler with just about anything - lime, lemon or orange or sometimes a teriyaki sauce and onion flakes. Or you can grill it. Remove the skin. Yummy.

Dragon

My fella loves fish, especially salmon. I am not a fan. We do regularly have sushi (had some for dinner tonight actually) but we usually get the kind with pollock (fake crab) or shrimp in it rather than the kind with fish in it. Most of the rest of our families do like fish though, my fella's dad fishes year round and they eat fish regularly, especially in the winter when he does a lot of ice fishing.

ferretkiss

Yes, I eat fish just about every day. Salmon mostly. (I don't eat meat so this is my only animal protein.) As mdawrcn said, just put a piece in a pan, under the broiler or bake it. I usually put only salt and pepper on it. Then make some potatoes and spinach, for example, and there is dinner. Then you eat the rest for lunch and snack the next day. The other type I eat a lot is mahi mahi (known as dorado possibly to you).

I forget exactly where you are polenta, but when I was in S.A. (Argentina) for business, it was very difficult to get fish, and the only kind available was a little river fish that was not very meaty and I did not enjoy it at all. Finally, one night we went to a fancy restaurant - the only one in the little town - where I ordered salmon in a blue cheese sauce. Delicious, and it was the only decent meal I had on that trip! So I had a similar experience as what you seem to have, regarding not much good fish to eat in your region. Don't know if it is the lack of supply or lack of demand that is driving it.

belladonnis

Hey polenta!
I like to take a salmon steak and rub it in oil and place in tin foil I then cover it in a thick sauce I make with soy sauce, brown sugar, minced garlic, salt and a dash of lemon pepper. I then seal it in the tin foil and bake it untill the fish flakes really well. It is sooooo good and really easy to make!

polenta

All these answers are VERY INTERESTING to me. Incredibly, everybody mentioned SALMON. Well, salmon (the orange one) is delicious and almost inexistent here except if imported from Chile I think and extremely expensive. Even so, there could be people who wouldn't like it... maybe because they haven't ever even tasted it or they hate fish.
I meant all the other fish, the ones that are white and not so tasty inthemselves and full of dangerous and annoying bones. Well, it could be the boneless filet too.
Do children like fish where you live?

polenta

sorry I think it's FILLET and not FILET.

mdawrcn

Where I live, the younger ones will eat fish sticks, which is a breaded, frozen, processed food product that I am not really sure actually contains any fish, but they love it.

My older nephews (teens) love to fish in ponds or larger lakes, where they catch bass, catfish and other fish and if the fish are large enough, they will filet, cook and eat them, usually breaded and fried.

For a real treat b/c it is very expensive, they will go out offshore in the gulf stream where they may catch tuna or dolphin (bullnose, not bottleneck) or other fish and yes they (and I) will definitely eat it. It is eating well here.

I think it can be either fillet or filet according to dictionary.