the menu
Lake Cow Bacon
The entire bill rested on a single assumption nobody in Congress had personally tested: that hippo is good eating. So let us settle it. What does a hippo taste like, and how on earth do you cook one?
the verdict
Pork, beef, or a shrug
The 1910 sales pitch was confident. The USDA's William Newton Irwin declared hippo meat tasted like a combination of pork and beef, which is the kind of thing you say about a meat you are trying to sell to a nervous public. The press ran with it and christened the product lake cow bacon, betting on the bacon association before a single American had taken a bite.
Modern accounts, from people who have actually eaten it, are messier. The descriptions land all over the map: closer to beef or venison than to fish, a little sweet, lean, lightly marbled, somewhere between lamb and beef. Other eaters call it bland and flat, with no wildness to it at all. The honest summary is that hippo tastes like a mild red meat that cannot decide what it wants to be, which is roughly what you'd expect from a swimming cousin of the whale.
The pitch nobody could argue with
One period line summed up the appeal better than any taste test: a little of him would go a long way. An adult hippo runs well past 3,000 pounds. Whatever it tastes like, there is an enormous amount of it, and that was always the real argument.
do people eat it
Yes, but not here, and not legally
People do eat hippo today, mainly as bushmeat in parts of West and Central Africa, where it is a traditional protein in some communities. It is not widespread, it is often unregulated, and it is a real conservation problem given how the species is doing. Humans have in fact been eating hippo for a very long time. Archaeologists have found hippo in some of the oldest cooked remains we know of, thousands of years old.
In the United States, the meat the bill wanted to make a national staple is now simply illegal. You cannot buy it, order it, or serve it. The single most American ending to this story is that the dish Congress nearly mandated is the one dish you are now banned from eating.
hypothetically
How you would actually cook the thing
Where hippo is eaten, it gets the same treatment as any tough, lean wild red meat: cooked long, cooked hot, or cooked down. None of it is fussy. All of it assumes you have a great deal of meat and time.
Grilled or roasted over fire
The straightforward route. Big cuts cooked over open flame, the way most bushmeat is handled. Lean meat means it dries out fast, so this is a watch-it-closely situation.
Stewed and braised
The smart move for a tough animal. Low and slow in a pot, often in a soup or stew, until the lean muscle finally gives up and turns tender. This is how you would feed a village, or a bayou.
Dried like jerky
Cut thin and dried into something like biltong, the southern African dried meat. Practical before refrigeration, and a sensible plan when your animal weighs more than your truck.
As, allegedly, bacon
The bayou dream: hippo cured and sliced like bacon. There is no evidence anyone in 1910 actually produced lake cow bacon. The name came first. The product never existed. It remains the most famous meat that was never sold.
Hold on, that one is a myth
If you go looking for an authentic 1910 hippopotamus steak recipe in the old newspapers, you will not find one. The Library of Congress has a whole guide to the era's hippo coverage, but it is all about the debate and the Meat Question, not actual cooking instructions. Anyone selling you a vintage hippo recipe is improvising.
the swap
The invasive species we do eat
The bill's real logic, eat your way out of an ecological problem, did not die with it. Louisiana never got hippo on the menu, but it did start promoting nutria, the invasive swamp rat, as a lean guilt-free protein to encourage hunters to thin the herd. It turns out the eat-the-invader plan works fine. We just aimed it at a twenty-pound rodent instead of a two-ton river beast, which in hindsight was the correct call.