Some call it roadkill. Atlanta called possum a feast fit for a president

Nothing says “hail to the chief” like a steaming plate of possum.

At least that’s what Atlanta once thought. One hundred years ago today, the local chamber of commerce raised eyebrows nationwide by feting President-elect William Howard Taft with a banquet whose centerpiece was Barbecued Opossum with Persimmon Sauce.

“Taft Eats ‘Possum,” The New York Times proclaimed in a front-page headline, noting one of the oddest entrees in the annals of presidential victuals.

How did Atlanta boosters come to believe that the 27th president would enjoy supping on a critter that most Americans now think of as roadkill or a punch line from “The Beverly Hillbillies”?

The answers are political and culinary.

First, people actually ate possum a century ago —- especially in the South.

“It was quite the dish back then,” says Joe Dabney, a cookbook author in Cartersville, who has interviewed a number of old-timers who ate possum but has never tasted the marsupial himself.

One of the most famous of regional cookbooks, Mrs. S.R. Dull’s 1928 classic, “Southern Cooking,” included a recipe for parboiled and roasted possum, complete with instructions for scalding and gutting the varmint.

The political motivations are harder to track.

While the walrus-mustached Taft was the heaviest president in history, at more than 300 pounds, banquet planners didn’t just assume that the man from Ohio would devour anything.

His predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt, had become identified with the Teddy Bear after a hunting trip in Mississippi. The popular imagination demanded a similar mascot for Taft. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, Billy Possum was elected.

“I’ve been trying to run that one down. It’s a little mystifying,” says Ray Henderson, chief of interpretation at the Taft National Historic Site in Cincinnati, which has a Billy Possum watch fob in its collection.

Whatever the reason for the fixation, Atlanta didn’t want to be out-possumed. For days, The Atlanta Constitution documented the search for the most succulent specimen in Georgia. The winner: a fat limb-hanger from Newnan.

On the evening of Jan. 15, 1909, hundreds of worthies filled Atlanta’s new Municipal Auditorium for the great occasion. At the appointed time, a waiter ferried a large chafing dish down the center aisle and presented it to the president-elect. The main course, the Journal reported, “sat grinning in a bed of gravy and sweet potatoes.”

Taft, who had never tried possum, gingerly took a nibble. He smiled and tried another bite.

With that, the Journal wrote, he “settled himself more comfortably in his chair, grasped his knife and fork, and the ‘possum and potatoes fell as swiftly before his attack as the political opposition did in the election just passed.”

Taft soon tired of possum. When admirers in Cairo, Ill., presented him with one of the critters, he said that while he appreciated the gift, he didn’t “hanker for it.”

Neither, apparently, does the current president-elect.

Asked whether Barack Obama had ever tasted possum —- hey, you never know —- transition spokesman Tommy Vietor answered with a slightly exasperated e-mail: “Jeez, I have no idea.”

Obama comes from Hawaii, where many people have a goofy affection for Spam.

What’s worse: potted meat or possum? The historians can debate that one.