How to Cook your Pet

Originally published in an edition of Food & Wine Magazine that came out on April 1st.

Unfortunately a few people failed to spot the spoof!

How To Cook Your Pet

In this, the first of a two-part article, omnivore chef Jimmy Har Pang tells you how to broaden the spectrum of your gastro-joy.

Jimmy Har Pang was born in Hong Kong but spent his childhood in Borneo where his parents, both anthropologists, were working. After leaving school he took a job as deckhand on a tramp steamer, after which he cooked on every kind of vessel from bulk carriers to cruise ships. Jimmy spent five years at sea “going round the world in a clockwise direction” and developing his palate; “I was ravenous. I wanted to taste everything. The stranger, the more exotic the better.”
Jimmy’s career as a chef was kick-started by a chance reunion in Kuala Lumpur with an old school chum Tony Cheng Fun. Tony, a self-made millionaire operating in the Hong Kong futures market, provided the capital to set Jimmy up in his first catering venture, ‘Dyaks’, an authentic Borneo-style barbecue restaurant. “It was a fun place. We had dishes like ‘head hunter’s ribs’ on the menu. But after three years I got bored, sold up and went to chef in Shanghai. It was fantastic. At last I was able to cook and taste everything I’d dreamed of cooking. But the social life was not amazing and I couldn’t get the French and Californian wines I’d learned to love while I was on the ships. So after a couple of years I took off for San Fran, working seventeen-hours a day in a Chinese take-away until I could afford my own place again. It took me three years of toil and sweat. That mother sure was a dump and the owner a big cheating crook. In the Bam Sook’s grimy kitchen ‘sweet-and-sour chicken’ wasn’t always chicken, I can tell you!”
“First off, let me say the last thing I want you to do is read this article and take a cleaver to your dewy-eyed Spaniel puppy. But if it dies from natural causes, why waste it? Also you might be lucky enough to find yourself working in a country where they have a more enlightened approach to gastronomy; a land where they eat anything and everything. In such a case it helps if you know the proper way to fillet a budgerigar or skin a hamster.”

CAT
Cat got an honourable mention in the first English language edition of The Larousse Gastronomique where its flavour was described as ‘halfway between that of rabbit and chicken’. For culinary purposes you can treat cat in the same manner as chicken and, when it comes to choose a moggie for the table, the same rules apply. I know there are no such things as battery cats but if you are intent on consuming Kitty at the end of her allotted lifespan you should boot her fat butt out of that fireside basket. Go on, tip her out the door and encourage her to chase mice down the street. When it comes to cats, like chickens, free range is best.

DOG
Chinese dogs, the ones with the purple tongues and curly tails, are called ‘Chow’. The word means ‘food’, symbolising that, for thousands of years in China, dogs were bred exclusively for the table and that, as such, ‘walkies’ wasn’t an option. Interestingly enough, a deck scrubber I met while working on a trampie out of Recife told me Chihuahua – that yappy little dog – means (in Mexspeak) ‘small snack’, ‘aperitif’ or some such. Mind you, he also told me he was the last surviving linear descendent of Moctezuma Xocoyotzin… When it comes to cooking dog you can treat it like pork and indeed it joints up in much the same way – leg, ribs, loin, belly etc. Just don’t be tempted to spit roast it whole like suckling pig. The sight of Fido or Spot rolling round with an apple in his mouth will give your kids nightmares.

HORSE
My maternal grandfather, may his soul be blessed, was a great gambler – until he met his death at the hands of a hit man from the Ying Tang Tong in a Macau casino. Mah jong, poker, blackjack, greyhounds, football pools, lotteries, the general election, flies crawling up a wall; Charlie Siu Bao would bet on anything and everything. Except for horses, which he described as “untrustworthy”. Grandfather had a saying, “mai hen lard fwee na dai”, an approximate translation of which is “the only good horse is the one in the pot”. Now to let you into a secret: part of my reason for being in Ireland is to explore the possibility of acquiring the carcasses of dead racehorses, especially those who have won important races. I want to talk to some of your great horse farmers, Mr. Magnier, Mr. Maktoum, Mr. Ferguson. My brother Eddie’s firm, Thoroughbred Salami Ltd., in which I have a small stake, made a start by acquiring the remains of the runner-up of the Gold Cup at Happy Valley and the resulting salami is selling well (although nobody seems to want the burgers). But just imagine what our friends the Japanese would pay for a few slices of Desert Orchid.

BIRDS
The French are the grand masters of bird-biting with larks, thrushes and other feathered novelties appearing on restaurant menus the minute you get ten kms either side of the National 6. It seems the late main man, one Monsieur Mitterand, was a great gourmand with a huge appetite for wolfing down ortolans, tiny birds which someone had the foresight to drown in Armagnac for gustatory purposes. Unfortunately the average household in America, Britain or Ireland is more likely to possess a single canary or a brace of budgerigars but, hey, look on the bright side – Armagnac, even VS grade, ain’t cheap. And you need three full bottles to drown a flock.

TORTOISE
The ultimate convenience food, a strolling crusty meat pie with a penchant for warmth. Pre-heat the oven to 200_C/400_F/Gas 6, open the door, and watch it climb in. Only joking! Problem with tortoises is they invariably don’t survive a hard winter, even after hibernating in a cosy straw-lined shoebox. So there’s only two choices – snack or paperweight.

FISH
Fish farming is getting the knockeroony from the environmentniks at the minute, so if those goldfish currently getting dizzy doing laps of the glass globe are destined for the old whitebait treatment, be careful. Don’t tell a soul unless you want the sandals and tofu bunch waving placards outside your door. The same pretty much applies to ornamental carp. Me, I prefer tropical fish, as my buddy Derry says there’s nothing like the wild and real. With a big shoal milling around in the tank, the kids won’t notice if there are a few missing and they make really neat sashimi, especially the dayglo ones.

ROAD KILL
Not strictly domestic, I know, but there’s a lot about so it would be a sin to waste. Though even moi, king of all omnivores, draws the line at urban foxes. And personally I don’t have much time for the vertically challenged remains of a dog or cat terminated by a yummy mummy at the wheel of an out-of-control MPV. No sir, a carnivore’s life is all about… what’s the word… ‘traceability’. I hear you are big into it in Ireland and my good friend Mr Ross Lewis tells me that even the Beer Board here have gotten on the case. Apparently they’ve introduced a scheme called ‘A Feller’s Beer’, presumably to ensure nobody puts that GM muck into your pint. Anyhow, when it comes to our furry friends, ‘Better the pet you know than the pet you don’t’ is my mantra. Birds are another matter and personally I’d consume anything from a sparrow to an eagle as long as I could still pull the feathers off. A bit of pressure concentrates the flavours that’s for sure, though ten-wheel trucks can overdo things in that department. But let’s be positive – an accident can turn what seems like a tricky prospect into real convenience food. Give you an example – there’s no easier way of getting a pheasant flat enough to cram into a pitta pocket than whamming it with the fender of momma’s Chevvy.

SNAKE
I love it. Sooooo tasty, a sort of cross between chicken and lobster, the flavour is something else, and the texture’s unreal. But your famous restaurateur Paddy Gearbox tells me you got no snakes in Ireland? This I do not believe.

GERBILS AND HAMSTERS
These lazy little bastards, the couch potatoes of the pet world, will lounge around all day with the sunglasses and the Factor 30 on if you let them. Don’t let them away with it; build them a big pen and put in some gym equipment – a treadmill, an exercise wheel – and bang on the cage every morning to make sure they get their sorry asses out of the scratcher. Build up muscle tone for that trip to the BBQ.
So there you have it. Enjoy.
Recipes to follow in the May issue of FOOD & WINE Magazine..

Of course lovers of Cantonese food would have got it right off – Har Pang means ‘prawn cracker’.