How to Cook Snakes (Because It's St. Patrick's Day)

The life of St. Patrick was, to put it lightly, action-packed. He was captured as a slave and taken to Ireland at 16, heard voices a few years later telling him to escape, and did, and then came back to his captor country as a rough-and-tumble proselytizer and fighter of druids. And, perhaps most famously, he managed to drive all the snakes off the Emerald Isle and into the sea.

It's hard to know how much of the story is true, especially since scholars think that the popular St. Patrick might actually be a greatest-hits compilation of a few different saintly dudes. And some say that "snakes" in this case is code for "druids," so the story is more a metaphor for his conversion work than actual herpetological history (and either way, Ireland has never had any snakes on it). But we don't know when the next opportunity to talk about snake recipes is going to come along, so by gum, we're going to take it!

There are all kinds of Asian dishes for snake, from Hong Kong's famous snake soup to snake-in-a-bottle booze, but we're more interested in the Western, and particularly American, way of savoring serpents. Unmentionable Cuisine, a cookbook of ingredients unfamiliar to the typical Western kitchen, notes that "distasteful to many is the fact they slither, sometimes very rapidly," but that hasn't stopped generations of thrifty cooks and outdoor adventurers from chowing down on the occasional snake.

One of the earliest English recipes for snake comes from Richard Bradley's 1736 cookbook, The Country Housewife and Lady's Director in the Management of a House, and the Delights and Profits of a Farm. The book covers a lot of ground, from "the Improvement of Butter and Cheese upon the worst of Soils" to "the best Method of making Ketchup," and includes this recipe for a hearty, leafy Viper-Soup*:*

Bradley notes that he stole the recipe from one Mr. Ganeau, though who exactly that is has been lost to history. Some 50 years later, a snake recipe pops up again in Charlotte Mason's The Lady's Assistant for Regulating and Supplying her Table, which skips the soup and goes straight for the Viper Broth, a variation on the more familiar chicken. After stuffing "a large fowl" with some spices and simmering it in a big pot of water, Mason tells the home cook to then:

But the real boom in snake cuisine came with the American spread westward in the 19th century, when cowboys, settlers, and unlucky travelers took a liking to the taste of rattlesnake meat. Cowboys weren't the best cookbook writers, so contemporary recipes are hard to come by, but the slithery cuisine lives on in states out west and websites for adventurous backwoodsmen.

You can grill a snake, fry it up like chicken or fish, steam it and dip it in cocktail sauce, or otherwise treat it like any good old American protein. Once recipe for Cowboy Snake Cakes calls for a gutted, skinned rattlesnake to be boiled in a crab boil spice mixture, chopped up, mixed with egg, peppers, and onions, and then fried up in a patty.

But if you really want to emphasize the snake's snakiness, you couldn't do much better than Backwoods Bound's recipe for Stuffed Diamondback, by a man named Dale Nestersenn:

Now that's a snake recipe. Just sub in some Irish whiskey for the Jack, and, assuming you can actually find a snake somewhere, you've got yourself a St. Paddy's day spread the serpent-hunting saint himself could be proud of.