Muskrat dinners: Monroe County's proudest acquired taste

Every region has a dish outsiders won’t touch and locals defend to the death. In Monroe County, it’s muskrat. The French-Canadian families who settled the River Raisin and the Lake Erie marshes in the 1780s trapped muskrat for fur and learned to cook it — parboiled and fried with onions, served with creamed corn, the traditional way — and the habit became identity: to this day their descendants are known, affectionately and officially, as the “Muskrat French.” Local lore even holds that the Church granted a special Lenten dispensation so marsh families could eat muskrat on meatless Fridays, the kind of story that gets retold over every plate.

The tradition is very much alive. Lodges, gun clubs, and parish halls around Monroe, Erie, and LaSalle still hold muskrat dinners every winter and Lent, drawing hundreds of people — some for seconds, some on a dare. You don’t have to partake to live here. But it tells you something good about the place: this corner of Michigan remembers exactly who it is, and it’ll feed you to prove it.