Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [37]
COON SUPPER
For a Friday supper:
Save six hundred pounds of raccoon, buying from local hunters, freezing as necessary. On Wednesday before the supper, cut up your frozen coon; place in saltwater vats to thaw.
Very early Thursday morning—just after daylight—fire your cooking pots. Wash the coon, then boil with carrots, onions, celery, and black pepper. At each pot station a chief cook, preferably with years of experience, to stir and test the meat for state of readiness. When the meat slips from the bone, remove to tables and trim all excess fat. Place in barbecue trays and refrigerate.
Friday morning, place in smokers that you fired before dawn. Pour chicken broth over. When the meat is dark and fully smoked, apply barbecue sauce, place in coon warmer, and remove to banquet site.
—paraphrased from JOHN COVER
The football field of Gillett High School is a dead, January gray, the scoreboard standing but dark for years. Inside, the high-school gym is decked out and looking sharp, filled with long rows of white-clothed tables. Each setting has a souvenir plastic cup, a hat donated by a Little Rock businessman, and a plate already filled with candied sweet potatoes and barbecue rice. Along the tables’ center lines are paper platters of ham; beside each platter is a foil-lined paper bucket overflowing with raccoon.
First thing this morning, the trays of boiled raccoon went into a pair of giant, converted-propane-tank smokers not far from the farm shed. Along with the meat, each tray held an inch of Swanson’s chicken broth (which, as Heath put it, has about as much chicken in it as if a bird walked through water). Nearby, a bonfire roared on a girder-and-tire-rim frame that looked a bit like Fred Flintstone’s car. As embers fell to the ground, cooks shoveled them into the smoker, leaving them to smolder under the meat. After a couple of hours, the cooks drained the trays and poured over Little Pig barbecue sauce, a tomato-based concoction with a healthy dollop of vinegar. Then it all went into the coon warmer (a giant tank that once held red phosphate).
The crowd has been lining up in the January chill for better than thirty minutes; many of the men wear suits. There’s a sextet of young women from Little Rock wearing vibrant purple hats with dangling raccoon tails. One kid wears full coonskin regalia; his hat still has a face. There are women in evening dress or jeans, men in camouflage jackets and hunter’s orange. Lots of people have name tags left over from Blue Dog congressman Marion Berry’s pre-Coon Supper party (the local Methodist minister, Preacher Chuck, was good enough to bring me along, so I’m already half full of broiled wild mallard duck breasts with jalapeño peppers, cream cheese, and bacon, upon which I went to town). The seats are preassigned; once inside, everyone sits and eats without ceremony.
The only guy who ever suggests to me that raccoon tastes like anything else is emcee and self-described “Cajun coon-ass” Phil English. Raccoon, Phil says, tastes like eagle, which I’m almost sure he’s kidding about (for the record, an early expedition of the Mayflower passengers said that eagle was “hardly to be discerned from mutton”). Other than Phil, everyone just gives me a kind of sideways