What's Cooking for Groundhog Day?

A possibly creepy Saturday Short that you may still find mildly interesting.

Feb 01, 2025

Hello, dear readers and happy reading! Thank you for sharing your weekend with me. I’d be greatly appreciative if you hit that little heart button up there which will possibly get Substack to notice America Eats!

Here’s how topics are decided at America Eats!

Pat, as usual, is totally empty-headed about what to write about.
Pat panics.
Pat is doing something entirely mundane when she remembers her brother’s birthday is Sunday.
Pat, as is usual in the family, laughs at the idea that her brother was born on Groundhog’s Day.
Pat continues to do something inane, wind blowing across the rippled plains of her barren brain.
Pat suddenly wonders: can you eat groundhog? She never heard you could or could not.
Pat dives into the subject of groundhog cooking for the rest of the day. Turns out there’s a slew of stories and information about groundhog hunting and feasting.
Pat can’t wait to tell everyone in the world how to cook a groundhog.
Pat is relieved she found something to write about.

Groundhog happens to have some terrific culinary recommendations. It’s fairly nutritious, full of vitamins A, C, and D, iron, calcium, and potassium. It’s not particularly fatty, as oppose to opossums whose cooking requires a great deal of changing water and skimming. One good size groundhog will generally feed a family of four while you’ll need at least six squirrels for the same amount. Groundhog meat is tender, their flavor redolent of what they grab from your vegetable and fruit patches, and find in the wild, mainly bark, grains, and nuts.

Groundhog is absolutely excellent. It’s like duck crossed with rabbit.— Alan Brego, The Forager Chef

The one drawback is you have to be a hunter to obtain one. I sometimes live in a little house in the hills of New York State whose next-door neighbor is a hunting lodge. There’s a excellent butcher shop in town. Groundhog is not on either of their radar. I’m on my own if I want to try cooking one. Hunting, though, is not in my skill set so I’ll have to figure out how to get a groundhog to peacefully die on its own. Then I have to immediately locate and extract its sweat glands and skin it. If I ever get up the nerve to do this, I have found a guide with step by step instructions through the process. Brego has a very flavorful groundhog stew recipe to try.

The Library of Congress, as always, provides a thorough history of Goundhog Day. The short of it is that, like much of our heritage, the celebration is rooted in immigrant history, specifically German settlers now known as the Pennsylvania Dutch.

There were three or four hundred men in the hall. At the front were a decorated stage and an eight-foot statue of a groundhog wearing a crown. At the beginning of the meeting, everyone stood reverently as men in top hats carried in a stuffed groundhog and placed it in front of the speaker’s podium. They pledged allegiance to the American flag, sang “America,” and then listened to a prayer, all in the Pennsylvania German Deitsch language. They raised both hands as paws and took an oath of allegiance to the lodge and groundhog; they listened to a weather report, piped into the speaker system, about whether or not the groundhog saw his shadow; they ate a hearty meal; they sang songs; they watched a humorous skit about a lecherous doctor who cured people by transferring their ailments to his assistant; and they listened to an inspirational talk, sprinkled with humor, about the values of Pennsylvania German life. Anyone who spoke English, especially from the podium, was charged a fine for each word.—William W. Donner, Serious Nonsense, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016)

So there you have it, much more than you ever wanted to know about groundhog and Groundhog Day. This in no way means that Punxsutawney Phil is in any danger. All we want from him is to emerge (or be pulled) from his home and assure us spring is near by keeping his shadow to himself. That doesn’t seem much to ask of him, does it?

In recent years, America Eats! has thoughtfully provided readers with additional reading on squirrel and opossum fixings, as well as the hunting lodge beside my little house.