AHC Rotisserie rabbit, dormouse, and guinea pig in supermarkets

baltur2

With an earliest POD of 1800, make it so that rotisserie rabbit, dormouse, and guinea pig is as common in North American and European supermarkets and fast food stalls in 2019 as rotisserie chicken is in OTL.

Bonus points if the consumption of dormice is promoted by a fan of Ancient Roman history.
 
The Professor

The Professor

Dormice is hard as they're nocturnal and hibernate. So they're generally trapped and trapping won't supply them in the large numbers needed to be more than a luxury or delicacy.
Rabbits and Guinea Pigs are easier as they're easier to breed in captivity to rear as food.
What you'll want to do is discourage them as pets.
 

Skraea

The Professor said:
Dormice is hard as they're nocturnal and hibernate. So they're generally trapped and trapping won't supply them in the large numbers needed to be more than a luxury or delicacy.
Rabbits and Guinea Pigs are easier as they're easier to breed in captivity to rear as food.
What you'll want to do is discourage them as pets.
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Actually the Romans domesticated the Edible Dormouse and they're still eaten in Central to East Europe. What needs to happen is for Edible Domice to still be kept as livestock and the Guinea Pig to be accepted as livestock outside of the Andes. I didn't mention rabbits,because rabbits are well established as livestock worldwide.
 
The Professor

The Professor

Skraea said:
Actually the Romans domesticated the Edible Dormouse and they're still eaten in Central to East Europe. What needs to happen is for Edible Domice to still be kept as livestock and the Guinea Pig to be accepted as livestock outside of the Andes. I didn't mention rabbits,because rabbits are well established as livestock worldwide.
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I'm aware. But it's been several centuries since it was stopped. Unlike rabbits and guineas. That should say something about how hard said domestication is to maintain as general livestock. They're currently provided via trapping.
 
Dolan

Dolan

Banned
Chinese are the one who successfully "Pull a Meiji".

We would have Rotisserie Dogs and Dog Meat as common item on Asian Supermarket.
 
Skallagrim

Skallagrim

Banned
SealTheRealDeal said:
Where the hell do you live that commonly has rotisserie chicken in food stalls?
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I know five butchers who have this, within cycling distance of my home, plus two Turkish supermarkets. And every Saturday market has a butcher stall that also offers it. This is totally normal in the Netherlands and in (at least parts of) Germany.


Rabbits and guinea pigs are easy enough. All it needs is a bit of initial popularity. Number of kebab shops in the Netherlands in 1950: close to fucking zero. Number of kebab shops shops in the Netherlands right now: close to fucking infinite. Immigration from Muslim countries did that, with no additional efforts needed.

Maybe a TL where, for some reason, immigration from Islamic countries is strongly rejected in the West? Labour migration to Northern Europe came from Southern Europe first, where eating rabbit is far more common than up North. More immigration from Southern Italy and Spain = more Italian and Spanish restaurants and shops with rabbit on offer. If the demand for labour migration is then met by encouraging immigrants from South America, you can get cuy (guinea pig) to be as normal in Western Europe as kebab is in OTL.

I'm not sure about the dormice, though. They are cost-inefficient, so fated to be luxury food. I can get that done, sure, but making them popular with the masses is very unlikely. The price would just be too high to make it competitive.
 
Dolan

Dolan

Banned
Hindustani Person said:
That’s pretty racist. Dogmeat isn’t part of Chinese cuisine by and large.
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Note: I am Chinese myself and yes, Dog Cuisine is pretty much was my family tradition, and yes, We eat dog meat as delicacy.

Not eating dog meat is pretty much Western Culture forced upon the world. Various culture around the world already eating dogs since thousands of years ago, being told that eating dogs is cruel and "inhumane" is akin of Hindus telling others to stop eating cows.
 

Dathi THorfinnsson

Rabbits should be possible. But Guinea Pigs and dormice are likely to be too expensive.
Chickens are relatively easy to mechanically pluck, and apparently they're mechanically gutted, too.
Mammals would likely have to be skinned, which would be a trickier task - unless the fur could be singed off?
In any case, eviscerating a 5 lb chicken is apparently doable and quite economic. If you had large scale production of rabbits, building machinery to gut a 5 lb rabbit ought to work fine.
As I say, rabbits should be doable.

But mechanically eviscerating a 1 lb guinea pig or a 2 oz dormouse would likely cost almost as much per animal as for a chicken.
Making the process expensive for guinea pigs, and prohibitively so for dormice.

Of course, the Romans ate them whole, didn't they? Heads and bones and guts and all. Ick.

----
OK edible dormice are like 4.5 oz, not 2
And guinea pigs can easily be over 2 lb.
Still.
(Edit. Chicken 2-2.5 kg, guinea pig 1 kg, dormouse 125g, ballpark, in real units)

If dormice were eaten whole, they might be price competitive. But not on a rotisserie, I'm sure. Probably sold in oil or honey or something in tins or jars.
 
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pompejus

Dolan said:
Not eating dog meat is pretty much Western Culture forced upon the world. Various culture around the world already eating dogs since thousands of years ago, being told that eating dogs is cruel and "inhumane" is akin of Hindus telling others to stop eating cows.
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My opposition to eating dogs is more thermodynamical than moral.
 
CaekDaemon

CaekDaemon

Donor
SealTheRealDeal said:
Where the hell do you live that commonly has rotisserie chicken in food stalls?
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In the UK, I'd be surprised if any mid-sized supermarket didn't have a deli section, pretty much all of which have a hot counter where you can get rotisserie chicken. Hell, they're nearly as common as the ones with bakeries around here. Sure, I wouldn't find them in any little food stories, but that's more because little food stores are pretty damn rare around here - even my local Co-op had one before the place closed down and got replaced by a Budgens, which also had one, before being replaced by an Aldi, which is the first one in a list of five different shops to own the building to not have one.

They're pretty much everywhere, and I'd bet you could travel down one of the motorways here and find a place selling rotisserie chicken at one of the service stations, or just a little off the motorway. If not, there'll be a Greggs :p
 

stevej713

SealTheRealDeal said:
Where the hell do you live that commonly has rotisserie chicken in food stalls?
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Where do you live that rotisserie chicken is not common? In the American Midwest, which is probably no different from the rest of the country, every supermarket near me has rotisserie chicken for sale. I buy rotisserie chicken (rosemary garlic flavored) at Jewel quite often.

As for food stalls, they're not too common near me, but I saw rotisserie chicken available at a recent harvest festival.
 

Shutenmaru

Dolan said:
Chinese are the one who successfully "Pull a Meiji".

We would have Rotisserie Dogs and Dog Meat as common item on Asian Supermarket.
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This would be difficult, even in secular Western society dogs are given an almost spiritual level of reverence. It's not unlike how Hindus revere cows, perhaps even more so since dogs are kept in the home, cuddled and treated as family members.

Would require a wildly divergent PoD to make dog meat acceptable in the West.

Dolan said:
Note: I am Chinese myself and yes, Dog Cuisine is pretty much was my family tradition, and yes, We eat dog meat as delicacy.

Not eating dog meat is pretty much Western Culture forced upon the world. Various culture around the world already eating dogs since thousands of years ago, being told that eating dogs is cruel and "inhumane" is akin of Hindus telling others to stop eating cows.
Click to expand...

That's not the case everywhere, at least in the Islamic World carnivores are considered Haram to consume so dogs are out of the question. Not to mention in many places where dogs are not pets they are pests and nuisances who carry disease, which makes them less palatable unless they are being bred specifically for food.
 

baltur2

SealTheRealDeal said:
Where the hell do you live that commonly has rotisserie chicken in food stalls?
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Hungary. Rotisserie chicken has been the earliest modern fast food here, ubiquitous since the 1970s, even hamburgers, pizza, and hot dogs only really arrived after 1980. I believe it was also similar in East Germany.

Hindustani Person said:
That’s pretty racist. Dogmeat isn’t part of Chinese cuisine by and large.
Click to expand...

Many non-Asian cultures have a tradition of dog meat. For the Aztecs, their largest livestock after the turkey was a relative of the modern Chihuahua.
In medieval Poland and Hungary, although dogs weren't really eaten outside of famine conditions, fat of dogs was a common ingredient of some traditional local healing salves and potions. The bones of dogs were also used to make glue.
 
P L Richards

P L Richards

Rabbit should be quite doable. During my childhood in the 50s and 60s in southern England my mother regularly bought and cooked rabbit in rotation with other meats; we usually had it in a stew. And this wasn't any foreign influence; our cuisine was plain English. The present ubiquity of chicken is quite a recent phenomenon; we'd only have ihat as a special treat at Christmas, say, or Easter. (Never had Turkey - that was an American thing). I'd guess that during the early 1960s I probably ate more rabbit than chicken. What's needed for rabbit to become more common is that rabbits aren't generally adopted as common middle claas pets, and there's much less or no literature characterising them as loveable and 'cute'; no Beatrix Potter for example.

For guinea pigs, they need to be introduced into Europe and used as food animals before they can be established as pets. Again you have to remove the cuteness factor. But dormice, as others have noted, are much more problematical.

[BTW I should perhaps make it clear that nowadays I am a vegetarian and don't eat any meat or fish.]
 
SealTheRealDeal

SealTheRealDeal

CaekDaemon said:
In the UK, I'd be surprised if any mid-sized supermarket didn't have a deli section, pretty much all of which have a hot counter where you can get rotisserie chicken. Hell, they're nearly as common as the ones with bakeries around here. Sure, I wouldn't find them in any little food stories, but that's more because little food stores are pretty damn rare around here - even my local Co-op had one before the place closed down and got replaced by a Budgens, which also had one, before being replaced by an Aldi, which is the first one in a list of five different shops to own the building to not have one.

They're pretty much everywhere, and I'd bet you could travel down one of the motorways here and find a place selling rotisserie chicken at one of the service stations, or just a little off the motorway. If not, there'll be a Greggs :p
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stevej713 said:
Where do you live that rotisserie chicken is not common? In the American Midwest, which is probably no different from the rest of the country, every supermarket near me has rotisserie chicken for sale. I buy rotisserie chicken (rosemary garlic flavored) at Jewel quite often.

As for food stalls, they're not too common near me, but I saw rotisserie chicken available at a recent harvest festival.
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Notice how I specified stalls? As in street vendors? Yeah, supermarkets (at least the fancier ones) have delis with rotisserie chicken. Street vendors though :/
 
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