Creative Commons/Rich Anderson.

A man allegedly attacked a Pleasant Grove woman with a frozen armadillo in late September, Dallas’s Fox 4 News reported, reminding us again that basically anything can be turned into a weapon. The news ricocheted around the Internet, as weird animal stories tend to do, making BoingBoing and newspaper websites as far away as Australia.

The Fox 4 story, based on a police statement, said the woman had met her alleged attacker to sell him an armadillo when he turned on her and began hitting her with the carcass. Ida Greshen, the woman injured in the alleged attack, gave a different account of the September 29 incident when tracked down by Eat My Words last week. Dallas Police did not return a call for comment on the incident.

Greshen, 57, said that her alleged attacker, a former flame whom she has known for thirty years, had been storing two dead armadillos in her freezer, preserving them until he could cook them. “I had the armadillo in my icebox,” she said.

Greshen said that on the day of the alleged attack, she did not want to return the armadillo carcasses to the man because he had not repaid her $250 she had loaned him. A tussle ensued in the parking lot of the senior community where Greshen lives, she said, and they both were tugging at the armadillo before he began to hit her with it.

“He took it and hit me with it,” Greshen said. “He went berserk. He had fire in his eyes like he wanted to kill me.” He hit her on the leg and breast, leaving both areas bruised and swollen, Greshen said. The armadillo, which had been removed from its shell (husked?), “wasn’t frozen solid but it was big enough and hard enough to bruise my leg,” she said.

Perhaps more interesting than the attack itself is the story of how armadillos got in Greshen’s freezer in the first place—and the glimpse it affords us into the world of unconventional game meats. The armadillos were not the only type of critter Greshen had on ice—the man also kept the occasional possum or raccoon in her apartment. The man would come over to her house to marinate and cook them because his gas had been cut off, she said.

“I let him cook his ‘coon; I let him cook any kind of wild stuff he thinks he likes,” Greshen said, adding she has never tried the meat herself. “He’s a country boy.”

The man grew up eating this kind of meat and prefers it to the store-bought kind, Greshen said. He obtained the armadillos and other animals on hunting trips to Madisonville, she said. Sometimes he would buy them at a homeless encampment under a bridge in downtown Dallas.

“You can buy all kinds of food and detergent and drugs there, everything really,” Greshen said. “It’s like a flea market without the furniture. People sell all kinds of meats and wildlife there.”

(An item from CultureMap Houston hinted at a brisk armadillo trade on Craigslist. I did a quick search of the major Texas cities last week, and only came across this post, from Fort Worth. When I called the number and left a message inquiring about armadillo meat, a Texas Christian University MBA student called me back, and we quickly realized the ad was a (hilarious) practical joke. “I’m not cutting up any armadillos,” he said.)

Eating these kinds of meat—the gamiest of the gamey?—is not a new thing for Texans. Arthur and Bobbie Coleman’s 1949 work, The Texas Cookbook delves into the dietary habits of Bigfoot Wallace and other rough-and-tumble frontier Texans: “Wallace, for all his colossal appetite, and other explorers … never starved and often feasted even during solo journeys into the wilds of western Central Texas—though it was freely admitted that they were not finicky about their food, and at one time and another some were brought to sample almost everything that moved, including mustang horses, lions and other cats, and skunk (none of which ever attained popular esteem.)”

Eighty years later, during the depression, families were still relying on possums and their ilk for meat. “Their diet is echt Texas poor white Depression fare: ‘short-varmints’ such as squirrels and opossum and lots of cornbread,” wrote Don Graham to describe the family from George Sessions Perry’s 1941 novel, Hold Autumn in Your Hand.

Flickr/Ryan Snyder.

The much maligned nine-banded armadillo, Dasypus novemcinctus, found its way into stew pots during the Great Depression. The scaly mammals were dubbed “Hoover hogs” by people angry at the “a chicken in every pot” slogan that appeared in an RNC ad for Herbert Hoover. (Other pejorative nicknames for this scaly mammal include “possum on the half shell,” “road pizza,” and “pocket dinosaur.”)

However, armadillo, Spanish for “little armored one,” is (rightly!) considered a risky source of protein. It has long been suspected that armadillos carry and spread leprosy, and a recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in April confirmed those suspicions. Scientists found that leprosy patients and infected armadillos carried the same strain of Mycobacterium leprae, the bacteria that causes the disease. It should be noted that eight of the patients in the study had hunted and eaten armadillos in Louisiana and Texas.

Leprosy aside, people can’t still seem to give it up. A story from the The Graham Leader that reveals that at least two entries in the 2009 “Tastes Like Chicken” competition at Throckmorton’s World Championship Rocky Mountain Oyster Fest included armadillo meat.

“One gentleman presented the judges with grilled armadillo shaped like baby chicks. I abstained from the leprosy on the half-shell mostly because I was getting very full but overhead one judge say it tasted like salmon,” Cherry Young wrote.

While I wasn’t able to find that particular recipe, I did unearth a recipe for barbacoa de armadillo from The Texas Cookbook, which I have excerpted below (cook at your own risk!):

Barbacoa de Armadillo

¼ cup celery seed
¼ cup paprika
½ teaspoon sesame seed
6 dried chiletipines
1 tablespoon chile powder
2 tablespoons salt

Mix ingredients well, put into a large shaker, and use as needed. Dress the armadillo and place on the grid. Sear. Sprinkle with barbecue mixture several times while it is cooking. When done, remove from the fire. Pour 2 tablespoons of hot catsup over each serving.

—SONIA SMITH

Tagged: Armadillo meat, Barbacoa de Armadillo, dallas, dillo, game, opossum, possum, raccoon