I got off track yesterday when starting to talk about various wild critters that added protein to our diets. If you remember, I spent a great deal of time with my grandparents who had been born in the late 19th century. It meant I absorbed a great deal of their worldview and protein sources did not always come from the grocery store. Common sources of protein were rabbits and deer. It was supplemented with squirrels and various waterfowl. As a youngster, I caught snapping turtles but not for us to eat – at least not very often. We would take the snapping turtles to a local buyer, and I understood they went by train to Chicago. Snapping turtle is very good to eat and as chickens and turkeys have dark and light meat snapping turtles have five different colored types of meat. We could occasionally get bear, but they are shy so they are a bit harder to add to the table and the cost of ammunition for a rifle capable of taking a bear was expensive. Fish was also a good important protein source. The cost of getting them was minimal – just the cost of some fishing line, a hook, and some sort of fishing pole. The bait could be earthworms, grasshoppers, and so on in the summer. In the winter, the most common bait came from galls. They are swellings in plants and many of them contain the larvae of insects which can be used for bait.
I think I’ll end with a little story. All us kids knew an old man who lived in a shack at the edge of town. He’d always have a Mulligan Stew on a woodstove that he also used for heating. A Mulligan Stew is an ongoing piece of culinary art as each day you add something new to the pot. It might be a rutabaga one day and another vegetable on another day. This old man only had wild sources of protein, so it might be a rabbit until you couldn’t find any more of it in the pot and that might be replaced by a Whistle Pig, a groundhog, and so on. We had gone to see him one day and he fed us as usual and then asked if we enjoyed it. We said yes and then he told us what he had added to the pot – a skunk. We all promptly got sick. End of story.
