I’ve always liked squirrel. When I was little, my Grandmother made squirrels with gravy, mmm. There aren’t many squirrels around where I live now and I am not a very good shot anymore. I was wondering the other day, since they are very similar wouldn’t rats taste like squirrels. Seriously, if you shaved a squirrel’s tail wouldn’t it look like a rat?
Well, since bison tastes pretty close to beef, and most fish tastes pretty much like most other fish, I’d guess that small rodents would all taste the same. Or close, anyway.
(Oddly enough, human is said to taste like ham.)
Actually, human flesh is said to taste like pork. It wouldn’t taste like ham unless you smoked it, and then it’s anyone’s guess. Smoked turkey drumstickscan taste a lot like hame, but I don’t think unsmoked drumsticks taste particularly like pork.
But smoking human flesh? Who has that kind of time? I usually just make pemmican.
“…and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now, tell me what you know…”
Groucho Marx
To an extent, we are what we eat; small herbivorous animals probably all taste reasonably similar (I think squirrel tastes like rabbit) - makes sense of the pigs/humans thing - we both eat the same sort of diet (everything).
Rats, however, aren’t herbivorous, so I’d expect them to taste a little richer than squirrel.
Not really. Ever try catfish or tilapia? They taste about as different from each other as beef and turkey.
I’ve never eaten squirrel or rat, but I have eaten muskrat. I figure that it might be in the middle ground between the two. It really was pretty good. Slightly greasy and tender darkmeat. It was a bit gamey but well disguised in it’s cooking medium, barbecue sauce. Nothing like a BBQMuskrat sandwich!
I’ve eaten rat. Not black rat or Norway rat but wild rat of the genus Rattus. Tasted fairly bland really. Not chicken bland but more generic meat bland, like overcooked beef. It tasted like meat but beyond that it had no distinctive flavour like pork or mutton does.
May not have been helped by the cooking style which was slightly burned on an open fire. But I can say that if someone gave me boneless rat and beef prepared in the same manner I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference whereas I could pick pork or mutton.
I have never eaten squirrel so I can’t help there.
I’ve eaten rat, squirrel, and muskrat, as well as several other rodents. In my opinion, rat is inferior to squirrel.
The species of rat I’ve had was the Polynesian rat, Rattus exulans, in New Zealand (lightly dusted with flour and fried in butter). The meat was rather dark, and a bit gamey. Not bad, but I probably wouldn’t order it in a restaurant. R. exulans is mostly herbivorous and rat connoisseurs supposedly prefer them to Norway or black rats, which are more carnivorous. I personally haven’t sampled the latter.
I’ve had squirrel stew (Eastern Gray Squirrel). It was rather tasty, and the meat rather like rabbit. I much preferred it to rat.
I’ve had muskrat cacciatore, and again the meat was dark and a bit gamey. Not as good as squirrel, in my book.
The best-tasting rodents, in my experience, are Guinea Pig, which I have had on serveral occasions in fancy restaurants in Cusco, Peru, and paca (a large forest-dwelling tropical rodent), which I have had in a little comedor in a small town in the Darien in Panama. Both are very good, very much like pork.