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Taste: The Story of Britain Through Its Cooking' by Kate Colquhoun (Bloomsbury) is available for £18 + £1.25 p&p. To order, call Telegraph Books on 0870 428 4112 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk
I began to salivate at the sight of a happy couple of squirrels cavorting in my tiny inner-city garden, and was transfixed by squirrel traps
First, catch your squirrel...
Kate Colquhoun
Kate Colquhoun goes nuts for the latest culinary trend
This summer, there's only one dish to serve at dinner parties: squirrel.
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Low in fat, the grey "tree rats" are seasonally available (between winter hibernations), sustainable (there are an estimated two million running around Britain) and easy on food miles, so they tick all the right green boxes. They're also a patriotic meat to have on your plate - eat a grey squirrel and you're improving the odds of the vastly outnumbered native reds.
I wanted to try squirrel for myself - but bringing Tufty to the table can be a time-consuming mission. The meat is selling faster than butchers can get it, not least because it is currently nesting season. Ever since Kingsley Village Butchers in Fraddon, Cornwall, began offering grey squirrel two months ago, it has shifted up to a dozen a day.
Normally, we Brits are almost uniquely squeamish about unfamiliar meat. Even during the food shortages of the Second World War, Ministry of Food recipes for squirrel soup and rook pie were broadly ignored, and horse meat only intermittently filtered on to the black market.
Mrs Tiggywinkle is safe for a while longer, if for no other reason than that coating a hedgehog in clay and burying it in the embers of an open fire is not the most convenient of urban culinary techniques.
Surely squirrels would be easy in comparison? My calls to some of the finest game butchers in London were countered by a sharp intake of breath (Mayfair), laddish mirth (Chiswick) and a promise to call me back from Holland Park (they didn't). The redoubtable Oxford butcher Fellers offered to send out a huntsman especially, but that seemed rather excessive - and my budget certainly wasn't up to it.
I began to salivate at the sight of a happy couple of squirrels cavorting in my tiny inner-city garden, and was transfixed by squirrel traps on the web. Never had the old cookery book directive "First, catch your hare" carried quite such force. Leaping to the rescue came Kingsley Village Butchers, the butchers who had started the trend.
After just a couple of calls, they dispatched three West Country squirrels, packed in ice and sent by special courier to the capital - instantly transforming them into the most expensive rodents in Britain.
As for recipes, the internet is stuffed with instructions: braised squirrel with watercress, squirrel pasty, fricassée, tandoori… One particularly recherché suggestion was for nettle ravioli with squirrel and wild mushroom filling.
My 1961 copy of the Thirties American classic The Joy of Cooking suggested stuffing and roasting them - recipes that hung optimistically between those for opossum and bear.
There were also diagrams for skinning squirrel - one foot braced down on the tail while the fur is peeled away with both hands, rather like pulling the water-logged wellies off a toddler. This gave me pause; even dedicated foodie as I am, I began to falter. So I enlisted the assistance of Simon Cherry - all-round good game cook and owner of the Carpenter's Arms in west London, which has just been named best gastropub in the new Good Food Guide for London.
Despite spotting an intriguing recipe for Peking duck-style squirrel pancakes, we decided to try out a more straightforward squirrel and bacon casserole, courtesy of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's A Cook on the Wild Side. I also saved a few slivers for Thomasina Myers's recipe for squirrel popcorn.
Squirrel flesh is mostly on the back legs, and the saddle is so lean as to be almost fleshless, so you'll need a fair few to feed a family. At £3 to £4 for one, the shop-bought variety is hardly an obvious answer to keeping the lid on an escalating grocery bill.
But it's easy to joint, and Hugh's casserole, with onion, garlic, parsley, stock and white wine, seemed to possess an appropriate rural simplicity. Once done, it was sweet, aromatic, hardly "gamey" in the slightest, and the meat was pleasingly un-rubbery.
As for squirrel popcorn - slivers of meat dipped in soy, then arrowroot, fried in vegetable oil and lightly scattered with crushed fennel seed, allspice, salt and fresh sage - let's just say the results did not look good. But they proved unexpectedly delicious: softly puffed, lightly crunchy, tender and aromatic.
If it weren't so fiddly to get so little flesh off the carcass, it could rival any drinks party nibble.
• 'Taste: The Story of Britain Through Its Cooking' by Kate Colquhoun (Bloomsbury) is available for £18 + £1.25 p&p. To order, call Telegraph Books on 0870 428 4112 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk
