The curiosities of food

by P. L. Simmonds

The Bushman of Africa catches serpents, not only as an article of food, but to procure poison for his arrows.

Various reliable accounts before me prove that rattlesnakes are not unfit for food, and may be placed among the multifarious articles regarded by man as delicacies of the table. The negroes eat the flesh of the rattlesnake, as well as that of other serpents. When the skin and intestines are removed, no bad odour remains. A correspondent of the Penny Magazine thus describes his experience of fried rattlesnakes, at a tavern in Kaskaskia, a small town on the Mississippi. He finds there a party of four or five travellers, who had been on an exploring expedition:—

‘After a brief interview, they politely invited me to partake of the supper they had already bespoken, informing me, at the same time, that they considered themselves peculiarly fortunate in having procured an excellent dish,—in fact, a great delicacy—in a place where they expected to meet with but indifferent fare. What this great delicacy was, they did not attempt to explain; and, having without hesitation accepted of their invitation, I felt no inclination to make any farther inquiries.

‘When the hour of supper arrived, the principal dish—and, indeed, almost the only one upon the table—appeared to me to be a dish of good-sized eels fried. I being the guest of my new acquaintances, had the honor of being the first served with a plate of what the person who presided called ‘Musical Jack.’ ‘Musical Jack,’ thought I, is some species of eel peculiar to the Mississippi and its tributary waters; and taking it for granted that it was all right, I forthwith began to ply my knife and fork. ‘Stop,’ said the individual that occupied the bottom of the table, before I had swallowed two mouthfuls. ‘You, sir, have no idea, I presume, what you are eating; and since you are our guest for the time being, I think it but right that you should have no cause hereafter to think yourself imposed upon. The dish before you, which we familiarly call ‘Musical Jack,’ is composed of rattlesnakes, which the hunter who accompanies us in our tour of exploration was so fortunate to procure for us this afternoon. It is far from the first time that we have fared thus; and, although our own hunter skinned, decapitated, and dressed the creatures, it was only through dint of coaxing that our hostess was prevailed upon to lend her frying-pan for so vile a purpose.’

‘Although curiosity had on many occasions prompted me to taste strange and unsavoury dishes, I must confess that never before did I feel such a loathing and disgust as I did towards the victuals before me. I was scarcely able to listen to the conclusion of this short address, ere I found it prudent to hurry out of the room; nor did I return till supper was over, and ‘Musical Jack’ had either been devoured or dismissed their presence.

‘As far as I recollect the circumstance, there was nothing peculiar or disagreeable in the flavour of the small quantity I ate; and when the subject was calmly discussed on the following day, one of the party assured me he was really partial to the meat of the rattlesnake, although some of the other members of his party had not been fully able to conquer their early-conceived antipathies towards this snake; but that during their long journey they had been occasionally prevailed upon to make trial of a small quantity of the flesh, and were willing to own that had they, been ignorant of its nature, they should have pronounced it of a quality passably good.

‘Ever afterwards in my visits to Kaskaskia, I narrowly examined every dish of a dubious character that was placed before me, in order to satisfy myself that it was not ‘Musical Jack.’’

Dr. Lang, in one of his works, gives us an account of snake cooking in Australia:—

‘One of the black fellows took the snake, and placing it on the branch of a tree, and striking it on the back of the head repeatedly with a piece of wood, threw it into the fire. The animal was not quite dead, for it wriggled for a minute or two in the fire, and then became very stiff and swollen, apparently from the expansion of the gases imprisoned in its body. The black fellow then drew it out of the fire, and with a knife cut through the skin longitudinally on both sides of the animal, from the head to the tail. He then coiled it up as a sailor does a rope, and laid it again upon the fire, turning it over again and again with a stick till he thought it sufficiently done on all sides, and superintending the process of cooking with all the interest imaginable. When he thought it sufficiently roasted, he thrust a stick into the coil, and laid it on the grass to cool, and when cool enough to admit of handling, he took it up again, wrung off its head and tail, which he threw away, and then broke the rest of the animal by the joints of the vertebræ into several pieces, one of which he threw to the other black fellow, and another he began eating himself with much apparent relish. Neither Mr. Wade nor myself having ever previously had the good fortune to witness the dressing of a snake for dinner by the black natives, we were much interested with the whole operation; and as the steam from the roasting snake was by no means unsavoury, and the flesh delicately white, we were each induced to try a bit of it. It was not unpalatable by any means, although rather fibrous and stringy like ling-fish. Mr. Wade observed, that it reminded him of the taste of eels; but as there was a strong prejudice against the use of eels as an article of food in the west of Scotland, in my boyhood, I had never tasted an eel, and was therefore unable to testify to the correctness of this observation. There was doubtless an equally strong prejudice to get over in the case of a snake, and for an hour or two after I had partaken of it, my stomach was ever and anon on the point of insurrection at the very idea of the thing; but, thinking it unmanly to yield to such a feeling, I managed to keep it down.’

In a paper which I published in the Journal of the Society of Arts, in October 1856, (vol. 4, p. 872,) I entered very fully into a description of the various snakes which are met with in different countries, poisonous or harmless, and to that paper I would refer those who wish to obtain descriptive details—scientific or general—not bearing on the subject of food, at present under our consideration.