Too Good to Chew

Squirrel and Mung Butter dept.

Note; This Substack contains a photo of a foodstuff which was a delicacy in 1840 but might not be met with the same enthusiasm today. Continue at your discretion.

Up until about 1860, the best thing you could say about any food was this:

‘Too Good to Chew.”

And in fact, in the years between 1820 and 1860, there were something like 18,000 deaths per year from people being so enraptured with their food that they forgot to chew, and, well, you can figure out the rest.

The most commonly forgotten-to-chew food during the period was squirrel. Squirrel was consumed in stew, potage and pie; it was roasted, boiled, grilled, fried, baked, smoked, steamed and very often served straight out of the oven, steaming hot, basted with mung butter, as a Christmas offering for friends, neighbors, extended family and the like.

Sadly, far too many Christmases ended up with some cousin or neighbor, inert under the table, with the sad lament from the survivors of the feast, “Too Good to Chew.”

Too Good to Chew

Then, in 1861, in the spring, in nearly every school, most of which were one-room affairs, with kindergartners through eighth graders, after which no more school was necessary—in that season, every schoolchild in the United States of America was admonished, “Don’t Forget to Chew.”

The DFTC directive, which most scholars of the period believe came straight from Lincoln himself, was so effective that by 1895, choking deaths were relatively rare, except in Wyoming and parts of Montana, where squirrel consumption continued unabated, and where the DFTC directive was opposed by the state school board. Indeed, an entire branch of scholarship maintains that choking reduction parallels exactly the near-cessation of the practice of eating squirrel everywhere else, in favor of hot dogs, vanilla pudding, and in some areas, cheese grits.

It’s hard to say. What we do know is that after DFTC had been inculcated in a generation of children, there was no longer a national scourge related to foods being “Too Good to Chew.”

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“Weasel Butter”: