The Culinary Keeper

Making salad is a relatively simple process, be it for a dinner party or for a herd of tortoises.  Different species (including humans) have their different preferences, and you have to be aware that some fruits and vegetables are toxic to certain species, either parts of them or in their entirety.  Still, the process is fairly simple - you rinse, you chop, you mix.  Other recipes from the zoo's kitchen can be a bit more involved.

When I was a kid, reading my first books about zoos, I remember coming across a recipe in one of them that was tailored towards king cobras.  In their wild state, king cobras are snake specialists, and as a steady supply of feeder snakes of appropriate size could be tough for some zoos (especially in the north, where wild snakes are denned up for much of the year, and generally aren't that common) could be difficult to come by, creative measures were called for.  One zoo had developed a recipe for a rather nauseating-sounding sauces, with shed snakeskin as a base ingredient - that they'd cook up in the kitchen, then dip feeder rats into it.  The cobras would smell the snake on the rat and then eat it, solving the problem.

If you look through the records of many older zoos, you might see a lot of mention of a variety of animals, from ducks to elephants, being fed bread.  Bread back then wasn't the white sandwich bread that we see in grocery stores today.  Sometimes it was the same loaves that were baked for human consumption, especially for animals like elephants that needed bulk feeding.  Other animals had specialized breads baked for them, with some zoos having bakeries on grounds to meet the demand.  In some ways, these breads were the predecessors of the commercial chows.

In many ways, the newfangled commercial diets - Mazuri and the like - have reduced the culinary demands placed on zookeepers.  Now, nutritionally complete diets for a variety of species can be obtained simply by opening a bag, then supplementing with some greens, bugs, fruits, meats, or what-have-you.  I did work for a private zoo owner who had an aardvark, however, and the man was too cheap to spring for the Mazuri insectivore diet.  Instead, he determined, somehow, the soaking dry cat food and leafeater biscuits, then putting them in a blender together, was somehow the same thing.  So a big part of my daily kitchen adventure was mixing that mess up.  An even bigger part of it was cleaning the resultant red goo off the ceiling and walls, as our crappy little blender had a bad habit of spitting off its lid at inopportune moments (he also wouldn't spring for a half-decent blender).

I've often thought it would be fun if a lot of old-time zoo folks got together and made a historical cookbook of all of these old recipes.  True, I don't see us making too many of them up in the future anymore.  They are a fascinating piece of zoo history, however, one which I'd hate to lose completely.