Let’s say I moved into a house that was infested with mice and I needed to trap & kill them to make the place habitable. Being a “waste not - want not” kind of person I determine to see if there was some way to include these mice as part of healthy diet.
If cooked properly is there any danger?
What’s the best way to cook them?
What’s the best way to serve them? Fry them to make crunchies for salad?
Can you disembowel and skin them or should you just cook them whole?
Skin, gut and wash some fat mice without removing their heads. Cover them in a pot with ethyl alcohol and marinate 2 hours.
Cut a piece of salt pork or sowbelly into small dice and cook it slowly to extract the fat.
Drain the mice, dredge them thoroughly in a mixture of flour, pepper, and salt, and fry slowly in the rendered fat for about 5 minutes. Add a cup of alcohol and 6 to 8 cloves, cover and simmer for 15 minutes.
Prepare a cream sauce, transfer the sautéed mice to it, and warm them in it for about 10 minutes before serving.
Really all ya need to do is gut 'em, string 'em on a spit and roast over a hot fire, burns off the fur and crisps the skin up nicely!
CMC fnord! Do I have a piece stuck in my teeth? :eek: Hate when that happens!
Primitive folks living in marginal areas consume mice the world over. The closest to the US come from Baja California, where rural Kiliwa still hunt down mice, cook the entire animal on hot coals, grind it into a paste and eat it, all the nutrients in the skin, bone and internal organs ready to nourish one’s body. Once thoroughly cooked, meat is meat, and whole animals even better.
I mean, they probably ate the groceries you bought to eat yourself, right? Unless you’ve been setting out poison, I’d imagine.
ETA - if you’re squeamish, you probably shouldn’t open the thread called “Is there any real danger in making a meal of captured house mice?” while eating. It’s kind of a common sense thing.
In Army survival training we learned that the flesh of ALL birds and ALL mammals is edible. Certain organs, such as polar near liver, should be avoided. So, yeah, mice are edible.
I seem to recall that mice are a suspected vector for the Hanta virus. In the US, I recall that this is particuarly true in the Southwest. So, maybe snacking on mice in New Mexico may not be a good plan.
And cook it thoroughly, as was stated in the OP. Several cases of bubonic plague in recent years have come from eating wild rodents that weren’t thoroughly cooked. I know a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who caught it that way.
Toxoplasmosis is orally acquired and at the asexual stage of its very complicated life cycle can thrive in any mammal, humans included. Mice are common carriers of toxoplasmosis. Toxo protazoa infect the muscle tissues and brains of mice and rats, causing them to become risk-takers. This tends to put them in the path of housecats, who eat them, along with the toxo, and eventually excrete them in their waste. The most common way for a human to get toxo is handling cat feces, but eating a contaminated mouse should do it.
Toxo, as well as being a risk to the fetus of a pregnant women if she gets an infection during pregnancy, has potential links with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder in humans (which, considering how they it makes rats and mice a little crazy, doesn’t sound that far fetched).
I’d be tempted to gut them using an apple corer, then stuff them with a jalapeño pepper which is itself stuffed with Monterey Jack. Deep fry about 5 minutes. Mice stuffed mice.