Always remember that after the porcupine is skinned, dressed and cleaned, it should be put in a pot and parboiled, changing the water once or twice, after which it may be cooked in any way which appeals to the camper. The
North Method
Is to place it in the Dutch oven with a few hunks of fat pork; let the porcupine itself rest upon some hard-tack, hard biscuit or stale bread of any kind, which has been slightly softened with water.
On top of the porcupine lay a nice slice or two of fat pork and place another layer of soaked hard biscuit or hard-tack on the pork, put it in a Dutch oven and place the Dutch oven on the hot coals, put a cover on the Dutch oven and heap the living coals over the top of it and the ashes atop of that; let it bake slowly until the flesh parts from the bones. Thus cooked it will taste something like veal with a suggestion of sucking pig. The tail of the porcupine, like the
Tail of the Beaver
Is considered a special delicacy. Many of the old wilderness men hang the flat trowel-like tails of the beaver for a day or two in the chimney of their shack to allow the oily matter to exude from it, and thus take away the otherwise strong taste; others parboil it as advocated for porcupine meat, after which the tail may be roasted or baked and the rough skin removed before eating.
Beaver Tail Soup
Is made by stewing the tails with what other ingredients one may have in camp; all such dishes should be allowed to simmer for a long while in place of boiling rapidly.
A man who was hunting in North Michigan said, "Although I am a Marylander, and an Eastern Shore one at that, and consequently know what good things to eat are, I want to tell you that I'll have to take off my hat to the lumber camp cook as the discoverer, fabricator and dispenser of a dish that knocks the Eastern Shore cuisine silly. And that dish is beaver-tail soup. When the beaver was brought into camp the camp cook went nearly wild, and so did the lumbermen when they heard the news, and all because they were pining for beaver-tail soup.
"The cook took that broad appendage of the beaver, mailed like an armadillo, took from it the underlying bone and meat and from it made such a soup as never came from any other stock, at the beck of the most expert and scientific chef that ever put a kettle on."