Food writer Regina Schrambling on Slate the other day wrote how grueling it can be coming up with some kind of different take on Thanksgiving dinner each year. Said Schrambling:
“What makes me totally crazy is the persistent pressure to reinvent a wheel that has been going around quite nicely for more than 200 years. Every fall, writers and editors have to knock themselves out to come up with a gimmick—fast turkey, slow turkey, brined turkey, unbrined turkey—when the meal essentially has to stay the same. It’s like redrawing the Kama Sutra when readers really only care about the missionary position.”
That’s a great metaphor — food and sex or vice versa.
I felt the same way when I worked for daily newspapers and was faced with some reoccurring event which causes both reporter and editor great consternation over doing something “unique” this year. Too often though, it just doesn’t work out. That’s why both on local TV and community newspapers you will see stories about firefighters having their Thanksgiving dinner interrupted by a call but they return and everyone has a wonderful meal. Actually — having had the fortune of a past life both as a firefighter and reporter — I can say for a fact that the bells going off screws up more dinners than one might think. I don’t know what firemen did before microwave ovens.
Were I having to write a local Thanksgiving food story today, though, I think I know where I could find something a little different. Although, as Schrambling points out in her column, even an ethnic story such as I am about to relate often joins the trite parade when trying to be different. Nonetheless, here it is: Soul Thanksgiving.
During my daily walk a short while ago one of my route friends and I exchanged Thanksgiving greetings. The man, an African-American, mentioned he was having smoked coon (or raccoon for you perfectionists)tomorrow for his Thanksgiving meal. Now I point out the fact that the man is African-American because coon is considered a delicacy among some of the more rural, or rural-raised, blacks here in East and Southeast Texas.
I remember my father saying he ate coon in his younger days (he grew up in the Depression so he may also have eaten Hoover Hog, a nickname for an armadillo in the wake of Herbert Hoover) and he spoke of blacks in my hometown eating the masked mammal.
Once, I do recall as a child going with my dad to an old black man’s house on some holiday occasion for some reason or another and seeing a coon cooking in a big pot on top of a pot-bellied stove. But I never knew of anyone other than rural African-Americans from my area eating coon until I was in college.
The one time I ate coon was on Super Bowl Sunday 1986. My friend JK had a Super Bowl party and our friend Pete barbecued some coons. As I recalled, it was pretty good. If I am not mistaken Pete — who was also in college — had been trapping some coons for fur. So he also brought some along for the half-time show.
My next coon-as-food encounter — although I didn’t partake — was about six years ago. I was driving on Texas Hwy. 87 south of Newton (in deepest of Deep East Texas) and at the Bleakwood crossroads I spotted a man who had signs out beside his pickup advertising “Shrimp” and “Coon.” Naturally, I turned around and went to have a chat with the man.
The coon salesman — yes, an African-American in case you were wondering — was a little suspicious of me at first. He said that he had the necessary state permit to sell the coon for meat, but whether he did or not I didn’t know nor did I care. Apparently, there only is a short period of time during which raccoon meat can be sold, the coon salesman told me, and one must have a permit to sell the butchered coon. This fellow also told me that his two biggest occasions for selling coon was New Year’s and Super Bowl. Who knew that we were in vogue all those years ago eating coon during a Super Bowl party?
If you read this it might be too late to get a coon for Thanksgiving but if you decide sometime later that you would like to try it, here is a recipe for smoked coon such as my neighborhood friend is having tomorrow.
Regardless whether you are having coon, turkey, ham, cabrito or bologna sandwiches tomorrow, do have happy Thanksgiving.