Alert! Today's New York Times Dining Section should come with a warning label -- Rated S for Strong Stomach Required.
We've been cheering the pop-culture-ization of this starchy section, but "snagging pigeons from under bridges and behind air-conditioners" is taking it too far, don't you think?
So glad this article didn't end with a recipe.
We do agree with this quote from Steven Rinella's Scavengers Guide to Haute Cuisine, but didn't need to read about the mange squirrel and the headless sparrow over breakfast:
“If someone were watching from a distant planet,” he writes, “our beliefs might look like this: domestic animals should be more wild; wild animals should be more domestic; and wild meat is good, so long as someone else kills it.”
Fear Factor fans will savor the rest of today's Dining section too: Tales from the Butcher Case about keeping meat "red well past its usual shelf life" and a Buffalo-Style Chicken Wing Salad recipe. Good information, all of this, but too much to take at once.
Huh. I don't know what to think of that scavenger guy. None of what he's eating is that uncommon in other places, we are just squeamish Americans on some level, but I think the difference is the places I have had pigeon, I am fairly sure it was not a scruffy bird someone nabbed off the piazza but a healthy, fat, farmed bird that ate actual grain instead of trash. I would expect most of the things he talks about catching and wanting to eat to have high odds of having themselves fed out of dumpsters. In other words, I guess I would have no qualms about my father-in-law's offers of squirrel stew if they were healthy little fat free-range nut-eaters instead of mangy garbage eaters. That, I will say, is my problem with this guy. And since when are a lot of these things "questionable" game meat in the first place? Moose, elk, rabbit, goose, maybe I am now living in a more hunting-oriented area than NYC but I wouldn't blink twice at any of those things on a menu.
view Anne (in Reno)'s profile