The great possum predicament
By By Robert St. John / food columnist
Feb. 5, 2003
Robert St. John is the executive chef/owner of New South Restaurant Group whose website is www.nsrg.com. His weekly food column appears in various newspapers throughout Mississippi and Louisiana. If you have any questions or comments, he can be reached at robert@nsrg.com or (601) 264-0672.
Alright people, settle down and stop the e-mails and phone calls. I will now admit it. People in the South eat possum. Who knew?
A few weeks ago I wrote a column about Hollywood's misconceptions of the South. I had been watching a program in which a stereotypical Southerner, an actor, was eating possum.
This actor was excited about eating possum. He couldn't wait to have a second helping of possum. The audience was laughing at him, not with him.
In the column, I stated:
That was a true statement at the time.
Now, thanks to Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone and Al Gore, inventor of the Internet, I know people who have eaten possum. A lot of people. A whole lot of people. I know them intimately. I have talked to them at length. I know their family histories, and children's birth dates.
Possum-eating is the heated-sports rivalry of the culinary world. You are either on one side or the other and whichever side you are on you are required to be fanatical about it.
One lady called me a food snob and accused me of being born with a silver spoon in my mouth. My wife laughed at that one, "If only she could see you eating bowlfuls of Cap'n Crunch at 3 a.m." (using a stainless steel spoon, of course).
I asked one varmint connoisseur if possum tastes like chicken. "No," the caller replied,""it just tastes bad." Just as I suspected.
Possums are scavengers. They eat all manner of dead animals. A possum has two choices in life: To be roadkill or to eat roadkill. Thanks to a lengthy, in-depth conversation with another angry caller, I learned that one must catch a possum and put it in a pen for two weeks to flush out its system.
Sadly, no one ever told this lady about leftovers. One invitation to a Tupperware party and her family could have been eating day-old pork chops and butter beans instead of pen-fed possum. In a weird, marsupial-munching twist-of-fate, the possum was eating better than its captor.
Another reader told of a teen-age prank in which a group of kids fed a possum a whole box of chocolate Ex-Lax and left it in a locked office building over the weekend. I'll spare the details.
One lady sent a possum recipe from the Drew County, Ark., 4-H cookbook. OK, so maybe Hollywood was right about Arkansas residents' eating habits.
How has all of this possum consumption taken place without my knowledge? I received recipes for fried possum, boiled possum, baked possum, barbecued possum and possum cooked in a crock pot.
Reader's comments were all over the place. The most common complaint about possum was that it is very fatty. Another person viewed the excess fat as a benefit. He said, "Possum fat can be used as lard in preparing future dishes." No thank you.
All of this talk of lard and possum is beginning to turn my stomach. One reader stated that "baked coon and sweet potatoes" are better than possum any day.
Another sent these cooking instructions: "skin and gut the possum. Place on a nice pine board and slide that combination into a hot oven. Cook for 4 hours. When the possum is thoroughly cooked, remove from oven and eat the pine board."
Finally, some common sense.
I have learned more about the possum than I ever care to remember. Did you know that a possum has 17 nipples? Well, I know. And now you know, too. Try and get a peaceful night's sleep with that little pearl of information floating around in the back of your mind.
I also heard a possum-hunting story from my friend Denton Gibbes, but not a kill-and-eat possum story. It seems he had a "friend" (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) who used to catch possums and put them into burlap sacks.
This "friend" would then carry the live possums to town and stuff them into newspaper racks, where the caged and angry varmints would lay in wait for unsuspecting readers of the morning news.
Author's note: A caged possum waiting to scare a poor, unsuspecting reader of the classified ad section lives a more noble existence than the one sitting around in a chicken pen waiting to be flushed and slaughtered.
I am possumed-out. So, stop with the phone calls and e-mails. If you have enough money to pay Ma Bell for an Internet connection, you can afford a Hungry Man dinner at the grocery store (which tastes only marginally better than baked possum).
Next week's special in the Purple Parrot Caf: Possum a'la Orange!
