Gourmet Swanburgers
This year is a significant one in the O’Neill household as we have made it to the 40 year milestone in our marriage. This seems like a pretty gold plated excuse for a party, so Gill and I have started planning how we might celebrate. I am not a great fan of restaurants as experience has taught me that the amount of food on your plate diminishes as the price increases. At the bottom end you have unpretentious KFC where they proudly serve their ‘food’ in buckets. At the top end you are presented with an expensive porcelain plate with a finger nail sized piece of undercooked meat sitting atop a coin sized stack of mushed exotic vegetables grown by virgins in Patagonia, with a drizzle of jus of Amazon rainforest lichen on the side.
With a party at home you can spend weeks, if not months, planning recipes and convincing yourself that a trip to Moore Wilson’s gourmand’s paradise supermarket in Wellington is an absolute necessity. This establishment is the sort of place that not only stocks rain forest lichen jus but offers you a ten-year-old aged version as well.
Doing the dishes is a very boring occupation so, yesterday, I began suggesting more and more outlandish party dishes to Gill to make the time go more quickly. She takes this teasing in good part as she knows that it keeps me happy, and more importantly, keeps me by the sink. In between suggesting reasons why sausages stick to our non-stick pans and chipping titanium grade baked-on fruit remains from a pie dish, I tried to invent the most politically incorrect dish I could think of.
I got the impression that my increasingly bizarre suggestions were beginning to irritate Gill. She hid this reasonably well as there were still several pots remaining to be scrubbed.
“What about swan burgers?” I tried to hide the triumph in my voice. The idea of transforming a swan into the most mundane of dishes appealed to me in some twisted way. Gill gave me a withering look.
Warming to my theme, I painted a whole scenario of going swan hunting and bringing the bird home slung over my shoulder. I have always marveled at the covers of Pig Hunter magazine where bearded grizzly men pose proudly - heads jammed between trotters - with several hundred kilos of dead pig on their backs. A framed picture of me with a dead swan could make a perfect Christmas present for my two-year-old granddaughter.
After the dishes were finished I began wondering if I could possibly be the only person to have thought up this gastronomic novelty. To my amazement, googling ‘swan burger’ actually worked. The first search result was,
“Build Your Dream Burger” – macdonalds.co.nz
Could the putative inventor of the hamburger really have beaten me to it? Sadly their idea of a dream burger was not quite as ambitious as mine. Although they offered 9 varieties of sauce, their meat option only extended to beef and bacon. Swan was off the menu.
The second result, however, looked a lot more promising,
“Gourmet Swan Meat Burgers”
http://www.instructables.com/id/Gourmet-Swan-Meat-Burgers/
You have to go and read this article as it tells you all you need to know about cooking swan. What put the icing on the cake, to use a culinary metaphor, was the discovery that in New Zealand, where I live, hunting swans is perfectly legal. The only restriction is that you have to do it in duck hunting season, which seems reasonable to me. You can’t just go around killing swans any time you like.
The author realizes that not all countries have such an enlightened approach and cautions,
“ALWAYS check with local authorities before blowing the S?#t out of anything. I'm sure they are protected in some parts of the world.”
In the UK all swans are the property of Her Majesty the Queen, and killing one is probably a treasonable offence. So it’s not a great idea to ring your local police station and ask if it is OK to blow the S?#t out of one. As a general rule using this phrase on the phone to the police is likely to relult in some serious misunderstandings and a long jail sentence given the times we live in. However, I realize the author was just trying to be helpful.
In his kitchen, the author decided on a minimalist approach and crumbed his swan before pan frying it. The verdict? Lean, tender and a ‘gamey’ taste. The gamey taste was probably because the bird had been ‘hung’ prior to cooking. The author comments with commendable modesty,
“…I know nothing about swans so this has largely been 1 big experiment…I hung the bird for about 2 days…I know there is a saying about hanging bird till the body drops off the head, but that seemed a little over the top to me.”
Not leaving the swan to rot till it was decapitated by natural causes was probably a wise move.
This whole episode only served to prove, yet again, that there is no fantasy so outlandish that someone on the internet has not already thought of it. Will we be serving swan burgers at our anniversary party? Well, if there’s anyone out there going duck hunting please keep an eye out for swans and send me an e mail if you have one spare.
Note for the pedantic.The Queen doesn’t actually ‘own’ every swan in the UK. She can claim any mute swan in open waters. I don’t think she exercises the right very often but it’s probably nice for her to know she can - if she ever fancies a swan burger.
Note for the mischievous. If you google ‘shit burger’ the MacDonald’s ‘dream burger’ result will pop up. This time, however, they are ranked at the bottom rather the top of the search page results. Even their shit burgers aren’t the best it would appear.