Small Plates & Small Game – Late Night Rat In Kalasin

I’m still going through my Thailand photos, but this is the end of the road for “novel foods.” I’ve just switched to my new Thinkpad, and I’m trying to process all of the photos on my old computer. I’m also trying to knock out some old business before I get on the road tonight for a two week ride across the states with Michele, visiting art museums, family, “world’s biggest” stuff and eating an insane amount of barbecue.

We started talking about eating rat early into my trip. I was in Pattaya, which is a resort town where creepy Dutch tourists go to pick up children for sex and Euros retire on the cheap in an astounding array of condo towers, meeting with an amazing artist named Jiang at his studio, when the subject came up. Jiang had been out to Kalasin with Jessada before, and he started talking about the rat, and how he wouldn’t eat it. I was like “I’ll eat the rat, no problem.” Anyways, Jessada brought it up a couple of times, and my willingness to eat pretty much anything well established, on my last night in Kalasin, he took me out to the fields to hunt and then cook and eat an animal that I really only know as an adorable pet and a storied pest. I’ve never really been able to see rats as either threatening or gross, probably due to many repeated watchings of The Secret of NIMH.

This was the same day as the trip to the Temple on the Mountain – a long, long day. About 9pm or so, Jessada said “let’s go”, and we hopped on his moped, and went about w miles outside of town to the farming fields. where we met up with Danoi and Ole, who had already shot one rat.

above – Danoi with his fist rat. We met up at a place Jessada called the “farmer’s school” a half ruined raised hut where the farmer’s teach their children. They re-build the roof of the hut each year at the beginning of the school year. In the darkness around us, we could hear other groups of farmers and young people drinking, and laughing, but they were all far away. Occasionally we could see the flashing headlamps of other night hunters in the trees in the distance – they were hunting birds. When we drove up, the rat was laid out on the mat in the hut, but Danoi really wanted to show off his trophy.

above – Everyone was kind of chilled out when I got there. Danoi and Ole made a lot of cell phone calls to girls while we sat and had a few drinks. Much of rural Thailand has skipped ever having land lines and gone straight to cellular phones.

above – After some hanging around, Danoi and I made two excursions to hunt for more rats. We got nothing on the first excursion, but bagged rat number two on the second one. This totally took me back to my days growing up, playing at Lord of the Flies in the back canyons of Palos Verdes. It was also a surreal experience, trudging along in designer vans, greased up with “no mosquito” cream and carrying a $1400 camera behind a young man hunting with what turned out to be a percussion cap shotgun ( you can see a shot of him reloading the five foot long muzzle loader here). It was really beautiful out in the fields at night, and we moved across a series of barely visible paths, looking for watering holes where rats gathered. At one point we saw a small running animal, about the size of a rabbit, but it was far away, and Danoi showed no interest in it.

above – back at the hut, Danoi cleaned the rats while he and Ole made phone calls to girls and we drank a healthy amount of Kalasin whiskey, which by the end of my trip, I had developed quite a taste for. Cleaning the rats involved burning and singing their hair in a fire, and then shaving the hair off with a knife or tearing it out in big chunks. It took a really long time, far longer than I would want to spend cleaning an animal that produces so little meat.

above – Danoi and Ole riding back to town. The rats cleaned, and the boys done making cell calls to cute girls, we piled on to mopeds and drove back to town. This picture is possibly my favourite that I took in Thailand – it sums up all of the country’s complexities and identities as I know and love them.

above – Ole prepares the rats for the grill. We went to Danoi’s house to cook the rats. Danoi’s house was very different from Jessada, my host’s, or even Ole’s house. While Jessada has a full modern kitchen (although half of it is outdoors) and refrigerator, and Ole has a gas stove, Danoi’s family seems to do all of their cooking over a single charcoal brazier in the backyard. Danoi was also noticeably poorer than either Jessada or Ole. Cooking procedure was the same as other meals I’ve seen the boys cook, everything cut on a round of wood with a single oddly shaped knife, all food being mixed and prepped in plastic bowls or buckets. Ole separated the entrails of the rats and wrapped them in a banana leaf.

above – the rats grilling in a grill basket. Anything small enough seems to get cooked over charcoal in one of these baskets. Around this time, my anxiety began to kick in a little – what was I doing? Was I trying to prove something? WWTBD? I was committed and determined to consume these guys, though.

above – this was a treat. While we were cooking and waiting, Danoi eased our souls with Kalasin whiskey mixed with Kalasin honey. The honey was raw, the bottle had a bee floating in it, and the two together were heavenly. Later, during the meal, we ate sticky rice dipped in raw honey – it should be the new popcorn, I could have eaten it till dawn.

above – our finished meal. Ole let me shoot the entrails, but he wasn’t happy with the way they came out, as I think he had a bad seal on the banana leaf. So we didn’t eat those. The rats were reall, really well done, and I’m not sure why. They were crispy and super-gamey, a lot like rabbit, but with a “grain/grass fed” taste that reminded me no New Zealand beef. In my notes, I also compared the meat’s texture to a less stringy, fattier frog leg. It’s a white meat, and the legs were really tasty – every other part of the rat really requires some serious work to get at the meat. Regardless of any nervousness I might have had about eating the rats after the long anticipation (It was like 2 AM by the time we ate), I really enjoyed it. It was new, and sometimes in my post-Thailand existence, I get cravings for the gamey flavour of one of these guys.

After eating the rats, we went straight back to Jessada’s and to bed, we were beat, and the next day we had to drive several hours to get me onto the series of aircraft that would carry me home to Los Angeles.