For Rat sauté:
"Take the freshly shaved rat and you marinade it in a puddle for a while (till it's drowned), then you stretch it out under a hot lightbulb, then get within dashing distance of a latrine and then you scoff it right down!"
For Rat fricassée:
“...the same, but use a slightly bigger rat.”
While Baldrick may have had a ‘cunning plan’ to take care of deceased animals in the trenches... I do sometimes wonder what happens to the estimated 10 million birds and mammals that are killed on the UK’s roads every year? An ex-colleague of mine was a firm believer in the "waste not, want not" approach. His rule of thumb was "if it’s still warm, it’s good to eat".... many a recently-demised pheasant he spotted on his travels was swiftly loaded into the boot of his car, and was roasting away in his oven that night.
Purgatory-pending pheasants are plentiful on the roads around where we live...they apparently outnumber every fox, deer, badger and rabbit killed by cars by at least six times. This is hardly surprising, as anyone who’s ever seen a pheasant running (they very seldom actually fly) across the road, knows they have not evolved any road instincts to deal with two tons of metal coming at them at 60 mph. Just last weekend B and I were driving home when a pheasant on a death run across a dual carriageway ended up hitching a ride in the middle of our radiator grill. There was an immediate yet distinct smell of roasting pheasant...we pulled over to the side of the road as soon as possible, convinced that we would be pulling a dead, partly cooked bird from the grill......only to find a slightly stunned Percival turning around to peer at us...very disconcerting!
Even on the odd occasion when pheasants do remember that they have wings, the results can be disastrous....I’ve witnessed a couple of these dozy birds launch themselves into the air....thwack!...only to collide mid-flight with a passing truck. Before they knew it, they were carving out a protractor-perfect trajectory back to the side of the road on which they started.
Ownership of road kill is debatable...most country people assume that the driver who kills the rabbit, pheasant or pigeon may not make a meal of it, but the driver of the car behind can. Although the Highways Agency owns all road kill on the UK’s roads, this rule is rarely enforced. It is, though, the party that is responsible for clearing it away. But are there many other people prepared to scrape their dinner off the tarmac rather than visiting their local supermarket? Best known for his BBC programme, The Roadkill Chef, professional forager, Fergus Drennan, describes himself as a ‘vegetarian who eats road kill’. Recently decorated with an Ethical Cuisine award from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Drennan trumpets the merits of mown-down fox, hedgehog and badger over supermarket meats and processed food, and says "eating foxes, squirrels, pheasants, hedgehogs, badgers, rats and rabbits killed by cars is fair game", because "it has not been killed on your behalf". On his website www.wildmanwildfood.com, Drennan extols the virtues of road kill insisting: "It’s not factory farmed or pumped full of antibiotics. It is fresh, local, seasonal and nutritionally rich" and says the best place to find quality road kill is on roads you use daily: "If it wasn’t there the previous day then it’s probably good to eat today."
To finish, flattened fauna can serve scientific and educational purposes, providing an ethical source of animal tissue for research. Scientists at Cardiff University, for example, have studied the diet and environment of otters by post-mortem examinations on almost 1,000 otter carcasses, mainly road kill from across Wales and England. Otters are very difficult species to study, as they are quite elusive and rarely seen in the wild alive. Examining dead otters is a useful way of monitoring river pollution levels because pollutants accumulate up the food chain and they are at the top. The research showed there has been a drop in lead levels in otters since the early 1990s, which reflects the ban on lead in car fuel in the UK.
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