Can you eat raccoon year round?

jmorris said:

I’m not saying I am not a terrible cook, I very well could be. Might be why, I prefer to cook meats that I can make taste good.

I also always enjoy how often people that are talking about preparing odd foods also always compare the results to things everyone always enjoys, generally using the word “like”.

“Try this, it tastes like chicken.” Really, in that case, I’ll just have the chicken...

No man in his right mind would tell his wife, the chicken dinner she prepared (if he is so lucky), tastes like rattlesnake. Unless it is well known that her rattlesnake is better than her chicken.

Click to expand...

Oh my wife thinks I’m nuts too! You should have seen her reaction when she found the skinned out rattlesnake in a ziplock bag in the fridge! That was a few years ago and she still brings it up hahahah
As for the “ tastes like” analogy, how else would one convey the flavor of a meat without comparing it to a commonly known flavor. That yote backstrap did taste just like pork. I believe you could give that to someone and they wouldn’t know the difference ( don’t do that folks nobody likes to be tricked and it’s just not funny). I’d also prefer the real thing so to speak and stock my freezer with pork not coyote steaks. I don’t have any desire to eat it again but now I know.

Patocazador said:

I've eaten armadillo, gator, snapping turtle, rattlesnake, coots, gallinules, and even possum but never had the nerve to try coon. No coyote or bobcat for me either.

Click to expand...

Aren't armadillos supposed to carry leprosy?

A long ago friend who lived in Louisiana where raccoons abound told me he ate it at least one a month all year long. He did say learning how to cook it was a challenge. He died a couple years ago. His wife told me it was a heart attack so I would not worry about eating it anytime. It is popular in LA.

I had BBQ coon once when a kid on my uncles farm in Missouri , it was dark red meat with lots of pepper. .

It is a tough meat and greasy . A good way to cook it is in a crockpot or make a soup or stew with it .

The first frost comes from wolves or warbles . It comes from a fly larvae . Around here you mostly hear about it in squirrels in late fall . I guess by the first frost it has left the host animal . It is nasty looking , but will not hurt you if you cook the meat good . I have never seen a flea , tick or wolf on a squirrel though .

With rabbits my grandpa always told my cousin and I to wear gloves when skinning a rabbit , because of the possibility of getting rabbit fever or tularemia and my grandpa didn’t take many precautions , so it stuck with me . The main thing that I see in rabbits around here when cleaning them is tapeworms . If they have a lot of fleas on them , most of the time they will have tapeworms . I find them infested with fleas in February , depending on where we hunt . I don’t let my dogs eat the guts or let anyone hunting with me clean a rabbit until my dogs are up . Or they will get tapeworms .

Squirrels and rabbits get werbles here in the summer, and I have seen squirrels with the pox in the summer. The deer I have killed in the early archery season here (when its still hot as blue blazes) are always ate up with ticks and such. You can really see them on the white belly when you first drop them.

George P said:

Aren't armadillos supposed to carry leprosy?

Click to expand...

I went to a wild game cookout and ate it. It was delicious. It tasted like young succulent pork. However, I never cleaned one after watching someone else do it. The blood was maroon not red. It kind of spooked me.

I was going to eat a hooded merganser once but the meat cooked up gray instead of reddish-brown so I vetoed that idea.

My ancestors ate coons and possums and
such year round with no problems.
If they'd turned up their noses, they'd have
went hungry with just a few greens and a
piece of cornbread or a biscuit.
Animals and fish you're eating need to be
dressed ASAP and cared for so they'll
taste decent
Get the guts and the glands out ASAP
and trim off the ugly mess and it'll be ok.
I know a lot of people are partial to bloody
meat these days, but I'd advise to cook
it thoroughly

With some dark days looming on the
horizon, it'd be a good idea to learn how
to dress all kinds of animals and fish
and fowl for your consumption and
not rely on an outside source

Growing up, my family was dirt poor, not bragging or complaining, just stating a fact. As a small boy, one of the few things I remember about growing up was the variety of critters we ate. Of course we ate chicken, but I remember eating boiled quail eggs, turtle, rabbit and squirrel, probably opossum, fish of all kinds, but no coon. The kids, me, couldn't eat the white meat of the chicken, it was reserved for adults. My piece was the thigh. When times were tough I remember eating cornmeal mush, or as Mama called it, meal soup, and nothing else, and potato dumplings, I still love dumplings today.

Have a blessed day,

Leon

There was a time in my youth that if we didn't take game we would have no meat. And the only thing we would have left to eat was soup beans. We ate soup beans 365 days a year. I was truly raised on soup beans and still hate them.We would eat about any meat that was out there but not raccoons. The neighbors didn't eat raccoons either. There was enough game out there of different varieties that we were told not to eat coons and possums. And maybe we were told wrong.

Not when I have a freezer full of deer. LOL

There was a time in Ohio that deer were non existent. Wiped out. Until about 1980.

GEM said:

Oysters R in season. What round to you recommend for the oyster. Sorry - moderators - chastise me for this.

Click to expand...

Shouldn't that be "What shell do you recommend for oyster ?"...

My grandma was a child of the depression. She was the baby of a family of 7 kids 2 parents and a grandmother in the home. That’s 10 mouths to feed, during the depression. They are everything “except buzzard and polecat” and grandmas job was to run a trot line on the creek and pond, carry a single shot 22 and kill anything that moved and bring it home for dinner. She listed off a bunch of critters that didn’t sound super appetizing, but apparently was pretty fair. She got scolded for black snake because they eat mice and mice eat what little food was in the pantry. I can see her sitting in her big rocking chair with a cigarette in one hand and her walking cane on the other just totally in a daze telling the story. On to the subject matter... she would kill coins in the winter and hang them up in a tree to let them freeze. If she didn’t kill anything else she would bring home a coon, but she despised it. She said it stunk and had an odd flavor that they never could get out of it. When they tried to make it taste good they used so much stuff that it cost as much as buying soup bones from the butcher.

A few she said were good...
Cottonmouth
Wood hen
Owl
Fox
Bobcat

Muskrat
Snapping turtle
Quail
Pheasant
Rabbit
Fish
Puff balls
Morels
Squirrels
Dandelions
Poke weed
Dandelion greens

These are what we had available from the forest.

I've had racoon before. I gave it to my cousin to cook it for me and it had the texture of stew beef to me. I wouldn't mind eating it again. I had a girlfriend who's grandmother cooked a opossum but I never tried that. I suppose it's good. Jed Clampet in the Beverly Hillbillies loved the way Granny made it.

I have been playing at "primitive" archery for the past couple of decades, and one of the things which impresses me about those gentlemen is that if they kill it, they eat it.

That has become my mantra as well, and I have found that with one horrendous exception (an old boar hog that must have had syphilis or something) that they are right.

Short version: the pressure cooker is a miracle worker. With the exception of syphilitic pigs, there is no meat that cannot be made palatable with a crock pot and a good chili recipe.

ColtPythonElite said:

I believe that hard freeze story is an old wives tale.

Click to expand...

The part about the "freeze" may be as rabbits live in areas where there is no hard freeze, but not eating them at certain times of the year is perhaps the basis for the tale.... Where it does freeze, perhaps sick animals would die, and thus the remainder would be OK to hunt and eat ?
Tularemia aka Rabbit Fever
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tularemia

LD

I like Rib Eye, is that wrong?

Raccoon fat, from my experience has an odd, "flat" gaminess to it, that's hard to cook out (or season around).
And the meat is often very marbled with the fat (except in the very early spring) which makes the meat greasy/oily and imputes that flavor to the meat.
It does not stew well at all.
Unless, perhaps, a person slow cooked the meat to build a bark (and drip away the fat), and stewed the barky-seared meat after.
Can't say I'm a fan.
So, in full answer to the OP question, I'm barely up to eating once a decade, year around not one of my choices.

Yuck!

I’ve eaten raccoon on several occasions at game dinners over the years until the state started regulating the practice of public game dinners.
Mostly it was cooked in a tomato sauce that essentially covered up any game taste.

Tomato sauce , taco seasoning , chili powder and teriyaki sauce works wonders . A good gravy can help things also . My grandma could cook your boot and make it tender and delicious .