Here we are, our weekly Friday weird recipes series. The first episode was very soft with the deep fried Mars bar recipe, last week was really weird with the road kill cook book. But this week, it’s honestly between weird and a bit disgusting: cooking rat like chicken.

Disclaimer:

I would like to apologize, in advance, for our mice and rat lovers readers. This is not my recipe, and I’m not sure I would like to try cooking it. Eating it is another question.
You’ll find a link with the recipe in photos at the end of the article. Please, if you have children in the room, make sure they are not looking at the screen before clicking the link.

A few facts & figures about rats as food

Calvin W. Schwabe, in his book Unmentionable Cuisine (about food prejudices, including some recipes), says that North Americans should use many forms of protein which are routinely consumed in other parts of the world.

Brown rats and roof rats were eaten openly on a large scale in Paris when the city was under siege during the Franco-Prussian War. Observers likened their taste to both partridges and pork. And, according to the Larousse Gastronomique, rats are still eaten in some parts of France. In fact, this recipe appears in that famous tome.

Grilled Rats Bordeaux Style (Entrecote à la bordelaise)
Alcoholic rats inhabiting wine cellars are skinned and eviscerated, brushed with a thick sauce of olive oil and crushed shallots, and grilled over a fire of broken wine barrels.

In West Africa, however, rats are a major item of diet. The giant rat (Cricetomys), the cane rat (Thryonomys), the common house mouse, and other species of rats and mice are all eaten. According to a United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization report, they now comprise of over 50 percent of the locally produced meat eaten in some parts of Ghana. Between December 1968 and June 1970, 258,206 pounds of cane-rat meat alone were sold in one market in Accra! This is a local recipe that shows the South American influence on West African cuisine.

How to cook rats?

Why not trying to cook them like chicken?

Ingredients

• Fresh rats
• Fresh herbs
• Peanuts oil (see our post on the differences between cooking oils)
• Chilli peppers
• Butter
• Peanuts

Preparation

• First you’ll have to blown the rat skin with a blowtorch.
• Then leave them cool down.
• When it cool enough, clean the rest of the skin with a steel wool.
• Eviscerate the rat and split it.
• Put all the good rat parts in a jar, with the fresh peppers and the herbs and the oil.
  
• Leave for it for half an hour to the fridge.
• Deep-fry until brown in a mixture of butter and peanut oil.
• Serve till hot with some crunchy peanuts.

Yummi, bon appetit :$

If you want to see all the steps, you can have a look at the pictures on how to cook rat as chicken. Please don’t show this to children.

Would you like more rats recipes?

I’ve found some recipes collected by Bert Christensen.

Stuffed Dormice - Ancient Rome
Prepare a stuffing of dormouse meat or pork, pepper, pine nuts, broth, asafoetida, and some garum (substitute anchovy paste.) Stuff the mice and sew them up. Bake them in an oven on a tile.

Roasted Field Mice (Raton de campo asado) - Mexico
Skin and eviscerate field mice. Skewer them and roast over an open fire or coals. These are probably great as hors d’oeuvres with margaritas or “salty dogs.”

Mice in Cream (Souris à la crème)
Skin, gut and wash some fat mice without removing their heads. Cover them in a pot with ethyl alcohol and marinate 2 hours. Cut a piece of salt pork or sowbelly into small dice and cook it slowly to extract the fat. Drain the mice, dredge them thoroughly in a mixture of flour, pepper, and salt, and fry slowly in the rendered fat for about 5 minutes. Add a cup of alcohol and 6 to 8 cloves, cover and simmer for 15 minutes. Prepare a cream sauce, transfer the sautéed mice to it, and warm them in it for about 10 minutes before serving.

Have you ever eaten rat? Would you like to try? Or maybe you know about other rat recipes! Just drop us a comment to share your experience with rats…

Related posts

• Friday Weird Food: Semen-Based Cooking
• Friday Weird Food & World Nutella Day
• Friday Weird Food: Deep-fried Pizza
• Friday Weird Food: Road-Kill Recipes
• Friday Weird Food: Deep-Fried Mars Bar

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