This section is from the book "The Book Of Camp-Lore And Woodcraft", by Dan Beard. Also available from Amazon: The Book of Camp-Lore and Woodcraft.
Is considered a special delicacy. Many of the old wilderness men hang the flat trowel-like tails of the beaver for a day or two in the chimney of their shack to allow the oily matter to exude from it, and thus take away the otherwise strong taste; others parboil it as advocated for porcupine meat, after which the tail may be roasted or baked and the rough skin removed before eating.
Is made by stewing the tails with what other ingredients one may have in camp; all such dishes should be allowed to simmer for a long while in place of boiling rapidly.
A man who was hunting in North Michigan said, "Although I am a Marylander, and an Eastern Shore one at that, and consequently know what good things to eat are, I want to tell you that I'll have to take off my hat to the lumber camp cook as the discoverer, fabricator and dispenser of a dish that knocks the Eastern Shore cuisine silly. And that dish is beaver-tail soup. When the beaver was brought into camp the camp cook went nearly wild, and so did the lumbermen when they heard the news, and all because they were pining for beaver-tail soup.
"The cook took that broad appendage of the beaver, mailed like an armadillo, took from it the underlying bone and meat and from it made such a soup as never came from any other stock, at the beck of the most expert and scientific chef that ever put a kettle on."
 
Continue to: