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By Root 598 0

in Gillett, I get sized up; there’s a kind of basically good-natured circling that usually ends with an assertion that I stand out like . . . well, like a guy from Berkeley hanging around four boiling kettles of raccoon. Heath Long asks where I’m from by asserting that it has to be somewhere else: “I know you’re not from around here.” And when I start to do the list, saying I’m from Connecticut but then California and then Virginia and California again, I get no further than Connecticut before he’s breaking in again, dryly, “Never would have guessed.” Later I think I’ve scored: a farmer looks me up and down, considers, spits, and offers, “I know you’re not from L.A.” That’s something, I think. “Los Angeles,” I imagine, is shorthand for the farthest away you can get without leaving the continental United States; there are limits to how out of place I am here.

Then it hits me: L.A. = Lower Arkansas. Ah.

Every fifteen minutes Scott Plaice leans over a kettle, raising a piece of raccoon on a two-pronged fork. Once the meat barely slips from the bone under its own weight, the men shovel forty pounds of it into gigantic, flat-bottomed, homemade colanders. In the farm shop, Heath and his father, Billy Long, dump the steaming, diminutive shins and flanks and hindquarters across two plastic-covered tables. The men line up, pull on disposable blue gloves, and grab steak and paring knives. Then it’s all business. They hunch silently over the tables, seizing piece after piece, cutting off every bit of visible fat.

One thing is clear: they’re not laboring to bring out the essence of raccoon, highlighting its unique flavor; raccoon is not something to be sliced thin and served as carpaccio. The cooks have already boiled the hell out of the meat. And now, by cutting away the pungent fat, they’re also stripping off most of what would probably taste really distinctive. Fat is a terrific carrier of flavor; one reason that many lean meats tend to “taste like chicken” is that when you compare, say, alligator tail and chicken breast, what you’re mostly comparing is the taste of unadorned lean proteins. In this case unadorned lean protein is the goal; the fat of swamp foragers like muskrat and raccoon isn’t usually classed with that of bacon.

Possum is a different story. De Voe wrote that the animal was usually “scalded like a pig,” only the hair removed with the skin left intact. And Paul Laurence Dunbar, an African-American poet and the son of slaves, wrote in his tongue-in-cheek 1905 poem “Possum”:

Ef dey’s anyt’ing dat riles me . . .

Hit’s to see some ign’ant white man

’Mittin’ dat owdacious sin—

W’en he want to cook a possum

Tekin’ off de possum’s skin. . . .

Possum skin is jes’ lak shoat skin;

Jes’ you swinge an’ scrope it down,

Tek a good sha’p knife an’ sco’ it,

Den you bake it good an’ brown. . . .

White folks t’ink dey know ’bout eatin’,

An’ I reckon dat dey do

Sometimes git a little idee

Of a middlin’ dish er two;

But dey ain’t a t’ing dey knows of

Dat I reckon cain’t be beat

W’en we set down at de table

To an unskun possum’s meat!

But raccoon tastes much stronger, and in Gillett they’ve insisted for decades on trimming it. “Yeah, the recipe changes real slow,” Frank says with a laugh.

“And you’re dead ten years before they take you off a committee,” Scott puts in.

“Hell—we got servers been dead five.”

I pull on gloves, pick out a paring knife, and find an empty space beside a table. Once boiled, it develops, raccoon fat is gluey enough to resist cutting. The trick is to get in under it and peel it off, almost like cutting the rind off an orange, removing as little of the dark meat as possible. We work through sieve after sieve, tossing stripped pieces of raccoon into aluminum roasting trays, the fat and vegetables into a big heap in the table’s center. When a pile is done, the men assume identical positions, feet firmly planted, arms straight, fingers stretched out an even eight inches from their coveralls as they face the bright opening of the farm shop, waiting for the next colander.

After the