Letter from America Philip Delves Broughton
How to catch a ’possum – a favourite dish from Boston to Georgia
First, catch your opossum.
This is not hard. Your prey rolls in at dusk, paddling his splayed legs, each perpendicular to his flat body, each waggling its skeletal, rat-like claw foot.
He does it so slowly that you can apprehend him in the traditional Native American manner: smash him over the head with a hand-carved club or a baseball bat.
If you’ve caught a possum that is missing an apostrophe, go to the nearest airport. You are in Australia. This mistake is easily made. Americans apostrophise the opossum as the ’possum, and early English settlers in Australia followed suit when naming its distant Antipodean cousin.
Native across North America – including my Boston backyard after dusk – an adult Didelphis virginiana is about two feet long. Low and flat, it resembles a sheep that has had its curls straightened by a steamroller, or one of those shaggy white rugs that Seventies seducers laid in front of the gas fire along with a pile of 5p pieces for the meter.
The ’possum used to be eaten widely across the United States. Sometime between 1607 and 1611, the Virginia colonist John Smith (aka Mr Pocahontas) noted that the Powhattan Indians called it ‘opassom’, and that it ‘hath an head like a swine’, the ‘bigness of a cat’, and a ‘tail like a rat’.
You can tell how popular it was in those early winters. Smith’s secretary William Strachey said it was a ‘beast in bigness of a pig and in taste alike’. In 1909, President William Taft was fêted at Atlanta, Georgia, with a ‘’possum and ‘’taters’ banquet. The portly President’s hosts gave him a stuffed souvenir called Billy Possum, to compete with Teddy Roosevelt’s stuffed bear.
’Possum is still a delicacy in parts of the South where the roads are bad. The hunting season in Mississippi extends from early October to late February – not to allow the ’possums to breed, but because they taste better in winter.
The ’possum has been accused of being a dinosaur or ‘living fossil’, but this is unfair. The last common ancestor of the current population died a mere 23 million years ago (much later than the dinosaurs), on the Oligocene-miocene boundary. When the seas receded, its heirs crossed the boundary between South and North America, now known to archaeologists as the Great Wall of Trump.
The ’possum is now endemic to North America, mostly because the ’possum mother can shell out as many as 20 babies in a batch, what with her being ‘didelphic’ (having two wombs, one of them a marsupial nursing pouch) and three vaginas (two leading to separate uteri, the third the birth canal). The ’possum male rises to this demanding occasion with a bifurcated penis and, increasing his resemblance to a shuffling old man, an enormous prostate. In William Faulkner’s Flags in the
Dust (1927), the first of his novels to be set in Mississippi’s mythical Yoknapatawpha County, the Sartoris family, still aristocratic but now declining, feast on roast turkey, cured ham, quail, squirrel and ‘a baked ’possum in a bed of sweet potatoes’.
And how do you prepare one for the table? First, pour half a cup of lime into a gallon of boiling water, and scald your victim. Pull the hair out while it’s still warm, and scrape well. Hack off the feet and tail, and the eyes or head too, depending on your preferred presentation. Gut it, making sure you catch a good spray from its scent glands, scald the corpse in boiling water, and let it stand overnight in cold water with a cup of salt and a pod of red pepper.
The next morning, wash your hands. Plunge the ’possum into boiling water, and simmer until the skin is easily pierced by a fork. Transfer to a moderate oven, and bake, skin side up, until crisp and brown. Serve with sweet potatoes, hominy grits and cornbread, and invite your cousins if you’re not already married to them.
This is the classic method as recorded by the improbably named Mrs S R Dull in Southern Cooking (1941). The ‘purging’ is necessary because the ’possum is an indiscriminate scavenger.
If you don’t like it gamey, ‘feed it out’ as recommended by Irma Rombauer in The Joy of Cooking (1975): ‘If possible, trap ’possum and feed it on milk and cereals for ten days before killing it.’
Irma also advises that you remove the ‘small red glands in small of the back and under each foreleg’, and that you change the boiling water three times.
If you wish to retain the flavour of terroir and last week’s trash, consult the Hillbilly Crackpot website: ‘’Possums are particularly fond of garbage dumps – so a trip to the dump, late at night, with beer, flashlights and shotguns, can be loads of fun.’
The paving of Southern back roads has increased the availability of roadkill – perfect for ’possum sausages.