4) Beavers’ Tails
First off, this is not to be confused with the beloved Canadian snack of the same name. That beaver tail is a delicious, hand-stretched, deep-fried wheat dough. And other than the fact that it’s shaped like a beaver’s tail, there’s very that’s little weird about it. The same can’t be said for the beaver tail here in question although the two are linked: in the eighteenth century Canada’s early European settlers noticed that the aboriginals would cook beaver tails over an open fire until they cracked (the tails that is, not the onlookers), so they could access the meat inside, leading them to apply the same technique to their bread.
But not all settlers shied away from this aboriginal delicacy, as testified by literature of the time. In A Journey to the Rocky Mountains (1839), Wislnzus wrote, “In summer the beavers are lean… but in winter they get fat and have thicker hair. Their meat is very palatable. The tails, which are fat all through, are especially regarded as delicacies”. The British explorer and travel writer George Ruxton (1821 – 1848) once wrote about eating the tail of “an old “man” beaver whose head was perfectly grey with age, and his beard of the same venerable hue.”
What’s less well-known is that this delicacy wasn’t only exclusive to North America but was eaten in considerable quantities in pre-Reformation Europe too. It goes without saying that in the fifteenth century the Church had enormous power in dictating the lives and values of Europe’s god-fearing population (which, in effect, was the entire population). On fast days, which included not just lent but also Advent, Fridays, and Wednesdays to name a few, eating animals was forbidden. But fish weren’t, and because beavers were native to water rather than land, people were able to get around this stricture by munching on their tails.
So how do you go about making this bizarre delicacy? Well you can cook it directly on burning coals, stick it on a grill above open flames, or just not even go there in the first place! If you choose to cook it on coals, you’ll know it’s done when it turns black. Peel away the blistered skin and you’ll be left with muscles, tendons, and a single bone running down the middle, hidden behind a layer of oozing fat. Hungry?