Delicious Possum Recipes the Whole Family Will Fight Over

Delicious possum recipes the whole family will fight over come down to two dishes. Possum and taters, and a whole possum roasted over sweet potatoes.

Both need a full marsupial, most of an afternoon, and one relative with opinions.

The meat runs dark and greasy and lands close to rabbit. Whether it comes out delicious depends almost entirely on owning a thermometer.

Start with the paperwork

Tennessee lets you take possum during raccoon season, and on private land that season never closes. The bag limit is four per person per night.

Four. Per person. Per night.

Somebody in Nashville decided five would be excessive. That person has not met your uncle.

Missouri wants a small game hunting permit first. Residents may then legally sell the fur.

Buy one. A license costs less than the sweet potatoes and keeps a game warden out of your driveway at eleven at night.

Roadkill is where people get reckless. Washington hands out a free salvage permit if you file within 24 hours, and the rule covers deer and elk only. The possum did not make the cut.

Washington also states outright that it does not guarantee salvaged meat is fit to eat, which is the government version of good luck out there.

Fifty teeth and a forked situation

The Virginia opossum carries 50 teeth, more than any land mammal in North America, packed into a skull about the size of a grapefruit. It shows you all of them when annoyed.

Fifty teeth on a house cat frame reads less like biology and more like a rental agreement with a mouth.

It is also the only marsupial north of Mexico and has been around roughly 70 million years, which means it outlasted the dinosaurs by being too unpleasant to bother with.

The male possum has a forked penis. That one fact caused four centuries of confusion.

Early colonists saw it, thought hard, and concluded that possums mate through the female’s nostrils and that she then sneezes the babies into her pouch.

That was the accepted explanation. Grown men wrote it down and other grown men nodded.

Somebody looked at a two-pronged organ, looked at a nose, and thought: sure.

Georgia Extension puts a normal adult at four to six pounds and notes they shrug off snake venom and then eat the snake, so your dinner has a better constitution than you do.

Check the passport

Species first. Your yard possum and the one in a New Zealand trapping video are not the same animal.

New Zealand’s possum is the brushtail, an Australian import brought over in 1837 for the fur trade. It is not the American opossum and never was.

Bushy tail, round ears, permanently annoyed. If yours looks like it belongs in a Qantas commercial, something went wrong upstream.

The two that are worth the trouble

Everything else people do to a possum is a variation on these two, mostly worse.

Possum and taters

This one has a presidential endorsement, which is more than shrimp cocktail can claim.

On January 15, 1909, the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce served president-elect William Howard Taft an 18-pound roasted possum with Georgia yams and persimmon beer at a formal banquet.

Six hundred other guests ate possum that same night in the same room.

Eighteen pounds is roughly three normal possums fused into one, and Taft went at his so hard that a doctor sitting nearby told him to slow down.

The man ate a marsupial the size of a car battery and the country responded by making him a plush toy.

Billy Possum was built to replace the teddy bear. It lasted about six months.

One cleaned animal feeds six adults and one holdout on sweet potatoes.

• One possum, cleaned and dressed
• 8 sweet potatoes, peeled and halved
• 2 tablespoons butter
• 1 tablespoon brown sugar
• Salt, black pepper, and either thyme or marjoram
• A heavy pot with a lid that seals properly. This is not the place for the warped one from college.

Parboil the possum an hour in salted water, then pour that water out. Do not smell it, do not investigate it, do not let the dog near it.

Back in the pot with an inch of fresh water and the lid clamped down, another hour on low while the fat renders out.

Add the sweet potatoes around the edges with the butter and brown sugar, baste every 15 minutes, then finish it uncovered at 325°F until the skin crisps.

The drippings and a spoonful of flour make the gravy, and that gravy is the only reason anybody at the table admits what they are eating.

The sweet potato roast

Same animal, far less babysitting, and the version to make for skeptics.

1. Soak the cleaned possum overnight in salted water in the refrigerator, then rinse it thoroughly.
2. Rub it down hard with salt, pepper, and a squeeze of lemon.
3. Set it on a rack in the roasting pan so the grease has somewhere to go. This matters more than any seasoning you own.
4. Add water to the bottom of the pan, cover, and roast at 325°F for about 45 minutes per pound.
5. Surround it with halved sweet potatoes for the last hour, basting them in the drippings.
6. Pull the lid for the final 20 minutes and let the top go dark and blistered.

Serve it whole if your family has a sense of humor about all this. Carve it in the kitchen if anyone at the table is new.

165 or don’t bother

Old recipes are right by accident.

They all say to cook it until the meat falls off the bone, and none of them say why.

CDC guidance is blunt. Wild game has to reach 165°F internally to kill Trichinella, and freezing will not reliably finish the job.

Curing and smoking do not manage it either. Ask any jerky casualty.

Ten people in western North Carolina came down with probable trichinellosis in November 2023, all of them traced to one gathering with undercooked bear meat.

There is no shortcut around the number. 165°F sits well past well-done on any muscle, so the falling-apart texture has to come from hours of low heat.

Two centuries of Southern cooks solved a parasite problem and called it tenderness.

Use a thermometer. Color is not doneness, and on an animal this greasy your eyes will lie to you.

The tick thing is a lie

Someone at the table will announce that possums eat 5,000 ticks a week and that you are a monster.

The 2009 study behind that meme put 100 larval ticks on five captive opossums, counted how many fell off over four days, and never opened a stomach.

In 2021, researchers reviewed 23 diet studies and dissected 32 wild opossums, and found no ticks in any of them.

Five captive animals and a pile of missing ticks canonized an entire species.

Before you poke it

Playing possum is an involuntary shutdown. The animal goes rigid, froths at the mouth, voids its bowels, and its tongue turns blue.

It can hold that for hours after you have gone back inside.

So the one on your lawn may just be having a terrible afternoon.

Adults are likelier to hiss and bare their teeth than to drop, so a limp one is usually young, badly frightened, or genuinely dead. Worth knowing before you touch anything.

Go buy a thermometer that reads past 200°F, then pull up your state’s small game regulations tonight and read the furbearer section before you plan a menu around an animal you have not caught.