Alpo And Other Savory Delicacies

I sincerely hope that you tried and enjoyed my lung pie recipe featured in last month’s installment. I realize that savory treat may not be high on some folks’ list of favorites, but I also know that once you gagged it down, you’ll never forget its taste. I am equally sure that you’ll think twice now before discarding deer innards or tossing sheep and goat guts or road kill to the eagles or the ravens.

Thinking about lung pie brings to mind another mouth-watering dish that I’d like to share with you, this one from my university days. Five of us - two Costa Rican exchange students from San Jose, a pre-med student from Salina, Kansas, a freshman from the south side of Chicago and me, a veteran with limited language skills - were living in Mrs. Lynch’s basement on Vermont Street in Lawrence, Kansas, a block off campus. The two Costa Ricans were on scholarship, the rest of us had to work to go to school. Needless to say, we had limited resources.

Mrs. Lynch, a widow in her sixties, lived on the first floor and guarded with a zealot’s zeal the approaches to the second floor, which was shared by eight co-eds. The only way up there without being spotted by Mrs. Lynch was up a rickety pear trellis against the back wall of the house. This was a dangerous climb, because the house was built into the side of Mt. Oread, a steep flat-topped hill, 191 feet above the surrounding city of Lawrence, with the campus of the University of Kansas taking up the top. Mrs. Lynch’s backyard fell away steeply from the back of the house. If you tumbled off the trellis, you had a ways to go before you came to a stop.

If you’re into trivia, here are a couple of tidbits about Mt Oread. Originally called Hogback Ridge, Mt. Oread was named after Oread Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts, and was the staging area for William Quantrill’s infamous raid into Lawrence on August 21, 1863. It sits on the water divide between the Kaw and Wakarusa Rivers and offers one of the finest views in Kansas.

Living in that basement was an adventure. For one, we had a bit of a rodent problem. Our pre-med roommate – his name was Carleton Wedell – believed in sanitation and each night he’d lay out mouse poison in the kitchen. The poison didn’t turn out to be fatal, because the next morning there always seemed to be three or four dazed mice running in circles around the legs of the kitchen table. Carleton had a BB-gun, but he was a lousy shot and he could never hit the groggy mice, so it fell to me to take over the daily task of shooting the vermin before breakfast. I’d put a chair in the doorway between the kitchen and our common room to block the little buggers’ obvious escape route, sat down on it and picked them off, one by one. Even in their impaired condition, these mice were pretty skittish and BBs ricocheted off the kitchen surfaces. Mrs. Lynch kept complaining about the dings in her appliances, but we didn’t tell her about the kitchen’s alternate use as a rifle range.


Another thing I learned in Mrs. Lynch’s basement was the fact that Alpo could be considered comfort food, if you’re hungry. It didn’t taste bad, as long as you put lots of pepper and ketchup on it and washed it down with plenty of fluids of your choosing. The trick was to put the can of Alpo in the fridge overnight. This led to a slight contraction of the can’s contents, so that you could extract the mess the next morning in one cylindrical piece. This overnight cooling made it cohesive and gave it the consistency of aspic, kind of jiggly. You then sliced it into slabs about an inch thick and fried them. The slices looked like hamburger patties. We all ate them, except pre-med Carleton. He thought eating dog food was disgusting. But I don’t think he had ever been truly famished in his life. Besides sharing is a good thing, just don’t let your dog know you’re gagging down his food. He or she might take exception.

To pay for Mrs. Lynch’s basement and my university tuition, I got a summer job as a house painter with the university works department. I spent a hot Kansas summer painting married student quarters. I was the tallest in the crew, so I got the chore of painting ceilings. I discovered new muscles in my neck, shoulders and back that I didn’t realize I had.

One of my co-workers was a black guy named Earl Ladd. He lived on the edge of Lawrence along the Kaw River. He invited me to a barbecue at his house one Saturday in July. When I showed up, I was the only white face in sight. I didn’t care and they treated me like one of theirs. Most of them were veterans like me and I spoke their language. Fried catfish and ‘coon were the highlights of the menu. The raccoon was roasted whole on a spit and was dripping with grease. You ate it with mashed sweet potatoes and corn on the cob. I think they were trying to see how the white boy handled a leg of ‘coon. If they thought I would balk at chowing down on their offering, they got the wrong guy. I gagged it down. We washed it down with home brew that came in great big metal buckets. Everyone just dipped their glass or cup in there for refills. The beer had quite a kick. I think they tried to get me drunk, but my long and intimate experience with Bavarian beer helped me persevere. It was a party.

They say raccoon tastes like chicken. I don’t know if I’d go along with that assessment. To me it tasted more like badger. Or perhaps porcupine, without the bitter hemlock or cedar aftertaste. I’ve tried both, though not barbecued badger. That always came in a stew. I remember some years ago at my cottage in the Haliburton Highlands, north of Toronto, my friends and I were barbecuing a porcupine. It had made the mistake of chewing through the brake-line of my wife’s Toyota Tercel. When that happened, I received orders to shoot and kill the miscreant, which I did. But I thought it wasteful to just toss the remains aside and leave them for the wolves.

To barbecue a porcupine, you first have to skin it – very carefully. Porcupine quills are not fun to remove, as anyone who’s ever had to pull them out of their dog’s muzzle can attest. My friends and I were pretty much into the beer and in the bag by then and we were busy basting the porcupine with President’s Choice Memories of Saigon barbecue sauce, when my neighbor, Mrs. Griffin, walked over, asking if we had seen her dog, a miniature Schnauzer. My friend Tim lifted the lid of the barbecue and asked her: “Was it grey?” Needless to say, Mrs. Griffin was not impressed. She was aghast and didn’t think the gag was at all funny. Maybe not.

I should have known that talking about food would get me sidetracked. I guess we’ll have to tackle the recipe for making tasty alcoholic beverages out of Coca Cola and common household fluids, like aftershave lotion, lighter fluid and gasoline in a later installment. Here is a hint: the trick is the proper proportion.