The Decadent Cookbook (20 page)

The following are suggestions for dishes which require animals teetering on the edge of extinction. But first,
verbum sapienti
! Many of these creatures live in dangerous and out-of-the-way places. We strongly advise that you remain at home in the comfort of your own drawing room while others are engaged in the hunting and capture of them.

Let us begin with the aye-aye. This creature is to be found on the island of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. It is a relative of the lemur and only about 20 of them remain in the wild. The following is an adaptation of a recipe for squirrel, which was devised by Viscount Weymouth’s housekeeper.

1
AYE-AYE

2
CARROTS

1
ONION

½
RED
PEPPER

S
ALT
AND
PEPPER

1
CUP
OF
DRY
CIDER

A
SPIC

1
TEASPOON
OF
OIL

2
TEASPOONS
TOMATO
PURÉE

1
TABLE
SPOON
SINGLE
CREAM

S
ALT
AND
PEPPER

½
CUP
OF
DRY
CIDER

Having skinned and gutted the aye-aye, steam it until the meat comes away from the bone. Allow to cool. Slice the carrots and pepper and chop the onion. Grease as many portions of an egg poacher as needed. Put a layer of aye-aye meat, onion, carrot and pepper into the poacher. Place another layer of meat on top. Season with salt and pepper and add a little dry cider. Poach until the vegetables are tender, about half an hour, and leave to cool. Mix the aspic and cider, pour into the poachers and allow to set. Combine all the sauce ingredients and pour over the aye-aye moulds when you turn them out.

Fewer than a dozen Japanese Ibis are thought to have survived the destruction of their breeding grounds. As they are wading birds, the flavour might be a little fishy, but no more so than, say, a heron. The following recipe may well suit the Ibis.

Cut its neck and collect the blood. Skin it, cut off the neck, feet and wings. Roast the bird and baste it with lard.

As an accompaniment, we suggest Chawdron sauce. One J. Russell, writing in 1460, states:
To signet and swann, convenyent is the chawdoun
. Recommendation enough! The method is as follows: Take the innards of the bird and cut them into small pieces. Clean and boil in water. Mix some of the liquid with bread, ginger powder and galingale. (If you have run out of galingale the ginger will suffice). Strain the mixture and add the blood and salt. This in turn is combined with the innards after they have been strained. Bring the sauce to the boil and add vinegar to taste.

The parrot owl of New Zealand, also known as the kapako, has been hunted to the point where it is almost extinct, so presumably it is rather tasty. Mrs Beeton provided the following recipe - originally for parakeets.

Ingredients: 2 kapakos, a few slices of beef (underdone cold beef is the best for this purpose) 4 rashers of bacon, 3 hard-boiled eggs, minced parsley and lemon peel, pepper and salt, stock, puff paste. Mode: Fillet and joint the birds. Line a pie-dish with the beef cut into slices, over them place the breasts and legs of one of the kapakos, dredge with flour, fill up the spaces with the eggs cut into slices and scatter over the seasoning. Next put the bacon, cut in small strips, then kapako and fill up with beef seasoning as well. Pour in the stock and water to nearly fill the dish, cover with puff paste and bake for one hour.

The Tasmanian wolf or thylacine was thought to be extinct, but according to a recent expedition, its footprints have been spotted, so this marsupial may still be around. It provides the best candidate so far for that coveted ‘last of the species’ dish. This recipe is also based on an Eliza Beeton recipe, this time for wallaby. Ingredients: 1 thylacine, forcemeat, milk, butter.

In winter the animal may hang for some days, as a hare, but in summer it must, like all other flesh, be cooked very soon after it is killed. Cut off the hindquarters at the first joints and after skinning and paunching, let it lie in water for a while to draw out the blood. Make a good veal forcemeat, and after well washing the inside of the creature, stuff it and sew it up. Truss as a hare and roast before a bright clear fire from one and a quarter to one and three-quarter hours according to size. It must be kept some distance from the fire when first put down, or the outside will be too dry before the inside is done. Baste well, first with milk and then with butter, and when nearly done, dredge with flour and baste again with butter until nicely frothed.

For centuries, the front feet of the bear have been considered the choicest part of the animal. The Chinese hold them in high esteem, and in Germany, where they particularly enjoy cub meat, the front paws are a great delicacy, for those who can afford them.

This recipe was given by M. Urbain Dubois, chef to their Majesties of Prussia during the last century. We have added a small but important adaptation - our recipe specifies Giant Panda paws. Start by skinning the paws. (There was a time of course when one could buy bear paws already skinned. Alas, no longer.) Then wash them, salt them, put them in a terrine and cover them with a marinade cooked with vinegar, in which they are left to steep for two or three days.

Line a casserole with bacon, ham trimmings and vegetables. Lay the paws on the vegetables, cover them with marinade, some bouillon and some thin slices of bacon. Leave it to cook for seven or eight hours on a very low heat. Add liquid as it reduces. When the paws are cooked, leave them in the liquid until they are almost cold. Then drain and wipe them before cutting them lengthways in four. Sprinkle them with cayenne pepper before rolling them first in lard and then in breadcrumbs. Grill them gently for half an hour. Arrange them in a platter on top of a piquant sauce (reduced, with two spoonfuls of currant jelly added as a finishing touch).

What one does with the rest of the bear is beyond the scope of this particular book.

by Louis de Bernières

I was brought up in the days when there was electric light but no television, and consequently people had to learn how to amuse themselves. It was the great heyday of hobbies. People made entire villages out of matchboxes, and battleships out of matches. They made balsa aeroplanes, embroidered cassocks with coats of arms and scenes of the martyrdom of saints, and pressed flowers. My grandfather knitted his own socks, made wooden toys, cultivated friendships with spiders in his garden shed, cheated at croquet, and learned how to produce his own shot-gun cartridges. My grandmother’s hobby was flower-arranging and social climbing, and my mother played spirituals on the piano in between sewing new covers for the furniture and knitting woolly hats for the deserving poor. My uncle rolled his own cigars from tobacco grown and cured by himself. My other grandmother spent happy hours in the garden collecting slugs that she could drop down the grating outside the kitchen, and below a hoard of portly toads would eat them before hiding themselves once more beneath the accumulation of dead leaves.