Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [31]
The steam from the kettles is furious, bathing me and Frank in a thick, gray blanket that I feel it would be somehow dishonorable to flee from; I just stand there and use the time to practice breathing through my mouth. I’d imagined that even if the smell of two big vats of raw meat was nauseating, the smell of that same meat cooking in a broth of onions, celery, carrots, and black pepper might be appetizing. But no, I’m soon feeling sick again. Smells like coon, the farmers here will say. That’s it. And that’s right, raccoon smells exactly like raccoon, a smell like nothing I’ve smelled before but which I’ll now recognize until I die (not, I hope, as a result of eating raccoon).
For the record, though: it’s a smell that’s trying its damnedest to smell good, as would any combination of aromatic vegetables and fatty meat. I keep wanting to offer a compliment, to say how it smells delicious, but always before I can form the words I’m arrested by an iron ballast of Paddy breakfast and a whiff of the pungent, bubbling pots. Probably a small leak in the propane line adds to the funk.
But mostly, everyone agrees, it’s the fat. Raccoon fat is pretty awful stuff. “End of the day, that pot’ll be about half coon grease. Dogs won’t eat it,” Scott says, and Heath Long throws in “that there is the one thing a man’ll eat that a dog won’t touch,” and a third farmer muses, “If I live fifty years, I might could think of something to do with the fat.” When I get too close to look at one of the bubbling cauldrons, a last guy observes that if I let that shit splatter me, I’ll stink all day.
Sometimes the scorn extends to the meat itself. Very early in the day, these members of the Gillett Farmers’ and Businessmen’s Club started cooking up Boston butts and chicken in a homemade smoker with rotating grills, which affords ample chances to compare and contrast the raccoon with other meat: “Yeah, we’re gonna eat real well, but . . . ”—laughing, nodding toward the kettles—“it won’t be comin’ out of there.” Yes, the Coon Supper is a sixty-three-year tradition, in a shrinking town that’s only 104 years old to begin with. Still, some of the men will conclude, disdainfully, that the meat’s local importance during the Depression only proves that people were real hungry back then. In this they’re a bit like chef Homaro Cantu at Chicago’s Moto restaurant, who served raccoon with a yellow stripe across the plate to make it look like roadkill (“disdain” may be too strong a word—Cantu would probably vote for “playful”—but there was at least as much irony on the plates as there was actual food).
Then there’s Heath’s father, Billy, who declares that he’s going to just eat holy hell out of the raccoon. Most people in Gillett seem to like the flavor; they’re closer in spirit to customers of the semiunderground raccoon trade in Illinois, where a single dealer can sell 250 carcasses in a week, or to those who buy raccoon, possum, muskrat, and beaver from a stall at the Soulard Farmer’s Market in St. Louis. Still, the days of hunting raccoon as a completely integral part of Gillett life, whether for the money from pelts, or a simple meal, are mostly over.
Gillett isn’t a big place, but you have to drive to hunt raccoon—you can’t just walk out your front door with a hound and a .22 and start working the woods. There are miles of rice fields between the kettles and the beginning of the trees. So most of the raccoons are hunted by truly rural people, people whose lawns end in forest or marsh instead of the neighbor’s mowed grass. Besides, raccoon hunts take time, effort, and money, especially when you factor in a good dog or two. Dogs are both necessary and legally required—you can be fined or arrested for hunting after dark without a hound (according to the Arkansas Game & Fish Commission, it’s otherwise just impossible to find the raccoon).
John Cover is Gillett’s self-appointed local historian (he edited a volume of essays on the town for its 2006 centenary), and he has a deep appreciation for the tradition of the supper. He shows me a picture of him and his