Owen O'Learys Beast Feast

Once or twice a year Owen O'Learys, just over the line in Brockton, offers a three course wild game menu. It's open to question just how "wild" the animals actually are and the menu quite accurately also calls the menu items "exotics" since they are most often raised on game farms. The menu is offered for two nights only with Thursday, November 17 as the second day. The cost of the meal is $21.99 and if you are not a regular at some fru-fru French restaurant where one perfect asparagus spear and a slice of raw duck breast makes a meal, then you should adjust your portion size expectation downwards. That's not a criticism. Owen O'Leary's usually provides a normal Amerian sized dinner, but the Beast Feast makes up in elegance what it lacks in shear size.

The menu offers two appetizers, a soup or salad, and your choice of four main courses. I'm mentioning the meal here today because the choices this time allows you to create a meal that could have been eaten at a fancy restaurant in the 19th century. Thus, I started with an appetizer of Fried Rocky Mountain Oysters with Spicy Cocktail Sauce. The dish was actually a single "oyster," that part of the bull that makes a bull a bull, flattened, breaded and fried. This dish was a popular dish among gentlemen of the Gilded Age because, like real oysters, it was considered an aphrodisiac. In reality the dish didn't have much flavor on its own-certainly not like a real oyster, but the cocktail sauce was an excellent blend of sweet tomato, spiciness, and an undertone of smoke.  The next course was turtle soup, the highlight of the night. I've eaten alligator and yes, it does taste like a slightly fishy, chewy version of chicken. Turtle doesn't taste like chicken. It's a dark meat that infuses the thick brown broth with a rich, mild gamey quality. The Owen O'Leary version was well made with carrot, corn, and beans adding their accents to the soup.

Don't know what species of turtle was used. As I said in a recent article, it's illegal to use sea turtle in soup in the United States. In fact, any turtle population can't be sustainably harvested due to the slow reproductive rates of turtles. An exception might be the snapping turtle which is the traditional reptile of choice for American turtle soup. You can find snapping turtle soup from Bookbinders, an old Philadelphia food company and restaurant, in supermarkets. Turtle soup was the favorite meal of President "Big Bill" Taft. My favorite soup remains Maguire's cream of roasted garlic and onion soup, but the turtle soup last night is up there. I'm going to search out a recipe for it and mock turtle soup as well.

The main course was goose. I like geese as pets and watch animals-they have sass and are funny, but I've never had much luck cooking goose. The result has often been chewy. The serving last night was a part of a sliced goose breast with a pomegranate and tangerine sauce and wild rice with goose cracklings. About half the breast meat was chewy! Geese fly and flap and build up muscle in the breast so toughness is apparently to be expected. The taste was a stronger version of duck and the sauce was infinitely better than the typical orange sauce used with duck. Pieces of mandarin "orange"ddd and pomegranate seeds served as a garnish to the sauce which was tasty without being cloyingly sweet. It did not obscure the flavor of the goose. Crunching the seeds gave a burst of flavor that was very pleasing. Probably not a sauce one would have found at Delmonico's for their roast goose, but delicious none the less. The wild rice was superb. The real stuff with a smaller than normal percentage of white rice enriched by the crackings and some goose fat. By the time I was done with my three courses I had come to envy Diamond Jim Brady who dined like this every night!