After Man: The Thanksgiving Leftovers

Posted by Krepta on December 5th, 2008 filed in Picture Books, Reference

Thanksgiving has come and gone. It’s a week later, and if your family is anything like mine, you made too much food for a small number of people and you’ve still got tons of leftovers that you’re trying to get rid of before it all goes bad. If you’re NOT like my family, you probably had your whole extended family over for Thanksgiving and there was lots of beery yelling over football and the bird was all dry and the kids had to eat at a card table and someone got food poisoning from the cornbread stuffing and your mom had a crying fit because you don’t appreciate what she does for this family. (addendum: this is not the only way for your family to be unlike mine)

Anyway, we’ve got way too much food. We also have way too many cookbooks. My mom was part of a cookbooks-by-mail club for years and only recently has their flow begun to stem. We have cookbooks for all sorts of awesome things; Spanish food, African food, one-pot meals, three-ingredient meals, homemade versions of restaurant favorites, and quite a few books about appreciating garlic. Oddly enough, while scouring our bookcases, I only found one book that seemed to deal with leftovers:

After Man: A Zoology of the Future is a rather cryptic title for a cookbook… I’m guessing that it’s short for “After Man Leaves The Table,” or else it might be a sequel to To Serve Man.

This book has a very interesting variety of meat dishes; it doesn’t seem to have much of a vegetarian bent, although there’s a lot of mention of the eventual ‘decline of the carnivore’. Perhaps it’s an eat-meat-drink-milk-and-be-merry sort of sentiment? Here are the dishes that looked the most appealing to me.

Red Meat

Rabbuck

I’m sure we’ve all seen that classic Warner Bros. cartoon, “Louis Pasteur Meets The Tasmanian Devil”. Some of us can even recite the famous “breed a bigger rabbit” exchange from memory… *coughcoughloser* I’m sure the director of that cartoon would be happy to see the progress we have made in that department. The common rabbuck is the size, shape, and flavor of the deer that game hunters and certain farmers enjoyed as venison, with a new pork-like tenderness borne of its rabbit heritage.

Serving Suggestion: If you’re new to the rabbuck experience, I’d suggest starting with some of the delicious Ontario rabbuck sausage, which is equally delicious for breakfast or dinner. Their sinewy haunches are best enjoyed in soups and stews, but rabbuck ribs and chops are personal favorites of mine.

Hornhead

We owe so much to the hornhead, which serves us in as many ways as the extinct plains buffalo (or “bison” as it was called then) served the early American Indians. Every part of these magnificent animals can be harvested for our use; millions of the opulent horn structures are consumed by the Jell-O company alone, for example. Of course, families who raise them at home pay tribute to the animal by keeping each horned skull on display after butchering. I myself spent last Thanksgiving in a mountain hotel whose light fixtures and pillars were decorated with hundreds of such skulls, each with the individual animal’s name engraved on a plaque between the horns.

Serving Suggestion: Hornhead flesh, like that of the extinct hog, has several names. Seto is the finest cuts from the belly, best eaten “blue” and cold in the center. The legs are typically spiral-cut and sold as lunch meat, often called ’seto’ to trumpet its quality, but the culinary name of those cuts is murfreesboro. Some gourmets will tell you that to grind hornhead meat is tantamount to wasting good food, but my mother makes an terrific hornhead meatloaf using just fresno, which is minced offal and neck meat, and Raisin Bran with the raisins picked out. (Picking out the raisins was always my responsibility as a kid.)

White Meat

Flightless Guinea Fowl

Could there ever be a Thanksgiving again if not for the flightless fowl? This meaty and economical Australian import sells well all year, but in November their sales more than quintuple– which means that one-third of American homes have a whole 200-pound guinea fowl to themselves. This can be trouble for farmers, who frequently suffer lacerations from the flightless fowl’s frequent challenges of dominance in the barnyard; this gave rise to using “Thanksgivings” as a slang term for a noticeable scar.

Serving suggestion: Let’s get this out of the way right now: no, the inflatable wattle has no miraculous health benefits, and will not cure your impotence, purge your body thetans, or increase your midichlorian count. And it doesn’t make a difference whether the wattle was intact or punctured when the bird was butchered, either. Get with the times, people! What do you think this is, 2009?

Oh, yeah, servings. Roast guinea fowl breast and drumsticks are an absolute must for the holidays, but if you insist on roasting a whole one, be sure to marinate it for 24 hours in a citrus brine first, and never rent a cut-rate guinea fowl oven without air convection. Your bird’s limbs will be charred to a crisp, while its breast and thighs will be so raw they’ll practically crow when you poke them. Alternately, you can use a professional pizza oven if you butterfly the fowl first: it’s a tremendous effort but I’ve had wonderfully tender and flaky results with this technique.

Fatsnake

I can hear all the kids in the audience cheering at the appearance of the fatsnake– and a lot of parents groaning, “Again?” Truly the macaroni and cheese of our time, fatsnake’s mild (some might even say bland) flavor has made it one of the favorites of the younger set.  Though gourmets may turn up their noses, this inobtrusive flavor is one of the meat’s best strengths. One of its great disadvantages, though, is the debilitating poison it carries to make up for its comically slow slither; about 10 unwary farm employees are poisoned a year. In previous decades fatsnakes were defanged for farming, but these snakes didn’t fatten very well and the process was abandoned. So when you sit down to dinner, remember the farmers– many of them are losing limbs, and sometimes their lives, for your favorite treat!

Serving Suggestion: Of course kids across the country practically live on fatsnake, enjoying ’snake fingers’ cut from the meaty abdomen in the school cafeteria, then hitting the deli after school for fatsnake jerky– and you know how fierce the rivalries can be between Southern US communities over who makes the best and hottest fatsnake riblets. If you’d like a less ‘fast food’ approach to this common meat next time you bring a fatsnake home from CostCo, try fatsnake sashimi in a California roll– as many assert, it tastes even better cold.

Wild Game

Desert Leaper

When the desert leaper was reported as a species, the ghosts of thousands of decadent pre-millennial Romans must have slapped their ethereal heads in disappointment. Ancient Rome took great care in fattening dormice for their most hedonistic parties– and now, some million years later, they’ve become a race of man-sized, slow-moving beasts that intentionally fatten themselves as a matter of survival. Looks like you really missed the party, huh Cassius? I’ll bet knowing we’re eating these is even worse torture than having Satan chew on you forever. Of course, you probably wish you’d had the rifles we shoot these with, too.

Serving suggestion: For one thing, you can’t eat a leaper “on the cob”. Being wild game, the desert leaper tastes best when it’s gamey, so you’ll want to let it hang a while until it’s just starting to turn. The most desired part is naturally the rich, marbled tail, but the thighs and belly shouldn’t be discounted either. In a seaside lodge in Arizona, I was once served leaper tri-tip, seasoned with Santa Maria. That, and the light cerveza I enjoyed with it, was one of the most delightful dining experiences I’ve ever had.

Meaching

I babble a lot about my Danish heritage, but the idea of living where meaching are plentiful makes me wish I were Norwegian. These little fjord-dwelling bonbons are always the first thing I head to at a Lutheran plate lunch. One of Norway’s most beloved Christmas traditions is the ‘meachygge,’ which is a sort of naturally occurring advent calendar– when a developing meaching nest is spotted, they watch it grow until Christmas Eve, whereupon the head of the family will break into it with an axe, his whole family standing in a circle with baskets to catch the fleeing meachings and lesser ptarmigans. I would love to be a part of this someday.

Serving suggestion: I hate to talk about this because it’s so bad for you, but one of my guilty pleasures is the meach fry– whole deboned meaching, buckwheat battered and deep-fried. If you’re not trying to declare war on your heart, the traditional Scandinavian recipes for braised, stewed, and boiled meaching are much healthier. A favorite fusion cuisine in Denmark is to serve spaghetti and quartered boneless meaching, or “meachballs”.

One more thing, have you ever heard of a ‘guineabuckfatching’? Some enterprising chef in Louisiana came up with the idea of stuffing a fatsnake with braised meachings, then stuffing that into a young boneless rabbuck, then stuffing that into a boneless guinea fowl. Apparently it takes nearly 24 consecutive hours to prepare, but when you’re done you can just slice it like pie and serve it up! I’m debating whether to just order one online, or attempt to make one myself when I next have a free week and more meat on my hands than I know what to do with.

Man, I really need to stop watching Food Network. In The Future.

Had enough of me being cruel to nonexistent animals?
If not, check out my Youtube review of Cooking Mama: Mama Kills Animals!

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