In November of 1926, a woman from Mississippi sent President Calvin Coolidge a raccoon for Thanksgiving. An accompanying note promised that it had, in her words, a “toothsome flavor.” The story of the day, however, was not that Coolidge received a raccoon for dinner, but rather that he declined to eat it. “Coolidge Has Raccoon; Probably Won’t Eat It,” read The Boston Herald.
Indeed, countless other raccoons throughout American history did not share such a lucky fate as Coolidge’s pardoned critter. Raccoon meat is a longstanding American culinary staple that went from “slave food” to New York City markets to cookbooks across the country. The critters that once sustained entire regions have disappeared from most modern dinner tables, but not all of them.
Written documents outlining Native American diets are scant, but it’s more than apparent that the practice of eating raccoon originated with them and was later handed down to enslaved African people across the American South. Michael Twitty, James Beard Award-winning author of The Cooking Gene, points out that the word itself comes from the term aroughcun, Powhatan for “hand-scratcher,” which in the mouths of many West Africans, who have no “r” sound in their language, became the antiquated but colloquially known “coon.”
Enslaved African people throughout the American South incorporated raccoon into their daily diets to supplement the meager provisions offered on plantations. They were no strangers to small-game hunting: The raccoons of North America behave much like the grasscutters of West Africa, a similarly nocturnal bush rodent that Africans had trapped and eaten for centuries. “They were master trappers,” says Twitty. “In fact, some of the traps enslaved people used are mirror images of traps from West Africa, if not similar to traps that Native Americans used.”
Enslavers approved of the practice. “The slaves weren’t allowed to hunt during the daytime,” says Hank Shaw, author of Hunt, Gather, Cook. “So after they’d finish their workday, they were permitted to hunt in the middle of the night to get some extra protein in their diet.” By granting enslaved African people raccoon meat trapped with techniques that fused African and Native American methods, slave owners could keep their slaves well-fed without the risk of arming them. Archaeological evidence pulled from plantations between Florida and Virginia indicates that whole raccoons were often cooked in stews—an echo of West African culinary memory reverberating across the Eastern seaboard.