One of the funniest food-related things ever to air on television is the episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia in which Charlie and Dee steal deer meat out of Frank’s fridge. The boorish duo love the taste so much that they become unlikely foodies. To get them to stop eating it, Frank tells them he secretly switched the deer meat for human meat (“I’m glad you had a good time eating human meat,” Danny DeVito’s character crows). Charlie and Dee initially refuse to believe it, and go to Chinatown looking for “weird meats” in order to try to reproduce the exotic taste they’ve been introduced to, even going so far as to eat a monkey because, according to Charlie, “monkeys are like nature’s humans.” Eventually, however, they decide it really was human meat, and they experience what they call “the hunger”: “You get one taste of delicious, delicious human meat and nothing ever satisfies you again.” It turns out the mystery meat belonged to a raccoon, and the hunger was probably just a stomach bug.
All of this is to say that you really have to be careful when you’re cooking game, and no one knows that better than Henry’s End chef-owner Mark Lahm. Today, Fork in the Road interviews him about his wintertime game menu, which runs through March. On tonight’s menu: “Herb-crusted elk chops, ostrich au poivre, wild boar stew with truffled polenta, quail stuffed with figs, mixed game grill, turtle soup and our country game pâté.” You’ll notice raccoon is not on the menu, and neither is bear. “Bear is pretty raunchy,” says Lahm, “But people request it all the time.” Once you have the hunger …
