🤢 Frankly Gross 1929

Squirrel Pot Pie

Prepare the squirrels as rabbits, flour and fry them brown, and put a biscuit crust on top.

From: Modernistic Recipe-Menu Book
Published: 1929
Yikes Scale: Iffy

Exactly as printed, 1929

Prepare squirrels as rabbits, cut in pieces, flour and fry brown in tablespoon butter. Cover closely and stew for 1 hour. Make delicate biscuit crust, cut in rounds and lay them on top squirrel, let them boil, covered closely, 15 minutes; pile squirrel in center of hot platter, arrange dumplings along it. Thicken gravy with 1 tablespoon flour browned in 1 tablespoon butter and pour gravy over meat.

Modernistic Recipe-Menu Book, 1929. Public domain; transcription unaltered.

So what happens if I make it?

Sound cooking with one impossible instruction: you cannot stew anything for an hour in a tablespoon of butter. Water or stock has to go in after the browning, and the recipe never says so.

The crust works the way dumplings work — steamed, not boiled. Lifting the lid during those fifteen minutes drops the steam and gives you something dense and grey.

Notes from the 21st century

Liquid halfway up the meat. That is the missing quantity. Enough to braise, not enough to submerge the biscuit rounds when they go on.
“As rabbits” was doing real work. Every reader knew how to dress a rabbit, so the book could skip it. That assumption is why so many period recipes read as incomplete.
It is from the camping chapter. The Modernistic Recipe-Menu Book is a brand cookbook with an outdoor section, which is how squirrel ends up beside the shortening.

Also in this book

Bearnaise Sauce (invalid version) — Béarnaise rebuilt for the sickroom: shortening instead of butter, and no wine reduction at all.
Mineral Oil Mayonnaise — Mayonnaise made with drugstore liquid paraffin, because it has no food value.

Don't take our word for it. The complete book is online, free and searchable.

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