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As time has moved on, I think some of those traditions have been lost. "My grandparents, when they were coming through the Depression, ate that way. "It’s an old-timey food," Flores told me after his demonstration, squirrel grease still in my mouth. When I tell others my dad used to hunt squirrel, I see them try to calculate my age, adding a few decades. When I told a friend my weekend plans involved eating squirrel, she made a roadkill joke. They may be edible, but they aren’t palatable to diners who imagine squirrel pot pie as a punchline in a hillbilly joke book rather than an entry in a haute cuisine cookbook. It’s an object that was once used daily, but whose value now lies in its novelty. A plate of squirrel belongs in the building that holds Abraham Lincoln’s hat, Julia Child’s kitchen, and Muhammad Ali’s boxing gloves.
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This is what eating squirrel is for most of us: a joke by default or a history lesson by design. Even though the menu was in the program, the crowd laughed when Flores proudly proclaimed “buttermilk-fried squirrel." A few minutes later, in a stage kitchen modeled like a cooking show’s set, curator Ashley Rose Young asked Flores what he would cook. A Smithsonian employee showed me a video on her phone of Flores carving the tiny skinless squirrel body and dropping the pieces in a bowl of buttermilk. While I waited for Flores’ talk to start, I counted a few dozen onlookers, including a small crowd of kids in FFA jackets. Flores is the executive chef at the Hilton Sedona Resort in Arizona, and he was in Washington to give a cooking demonstration called "Bringing the Outdoors In" at the Smithsonian. Minutes earlier, I’d watched Chef Jason Flores fry the squirrel. It was when I bit into what could best be called the bicep of a cooked squirrel - extending the tiny arm to get the largest chunk between my teeth - that I connected the thing in my mouth with the thing I had startled out of a trash can behind my apartment building earlier that day. A few bites in, all this leads to the unmistakable conclusion the meat can only be squirrel. Getting the meat requires pulling apart bones and joints in a way that articulates just how small this animal is. It’s a little tough, though not chewy, and the buttermilk doesn’t remove all the taste of wilderness. Even under a crisp exterior and mix of familiar spices, the shape, texture, and taste make it clear this is something wild.
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Dredged in flour, fried in bacon fat, and eaten off the bone, the flesh of America’s arboreal rodent at first invites the clichéd comparison to chicken, but not to any part of a chicken anyone can name.