I'm sure that nobody would mistake me for a five-star chef, but I’m not helpless in the kitchen either.
One of the things that anyone who reads this blog (which, of course, are darned few people) will already know is that I'm pretty feral, for lack of a better way to put it. An Agrarian and a Distributist at heart, I'd prefer a more agrarian world in every way, including getting as much as your table fare from the fields and streams where you live. I'm a lifelong hunter, but not a head hunter. That's the way hunting where I live when I was a kid. You hunted to put food on the table. I'm not saying that you can't and shouldn't put a trophy on the wall, or go for a big example of what you are after, but hunting is primarily for that.
Not only that, but it's the most honest and ethical way to put mean on the table. I'll truck no arguments from vegetarians and vegans, and others who would maintain a deeply anti nature view of the world. Hunters and Fish Hunters (fishermen) are the population that's most connected to nature, and part of the body of people who try to keep the plant livable for us all. Meat hunters and fishermen most of all.
Wild game, moreover, is the meat source that's closest to what we're evolved to eat.
If I could have my way, the vegetables we'd eat here would come from our own garden, and the meat from the fields. That is in fact partially true now, although I haven't put in a garden for several years as my well is down and, like a lot of things in my old age, I haven't gotten around to having it fixed.
Well, having spouted off. I'll be putting in some recipes here, an endeavor that was inspired by something recent that I'll keep off-line.
I'll note here in addition that there are some links below. I think these links are useful, which doesn't mean I've tried everything listed there. I'm not, as noted, a trained chef. The links are to sites by people who have a lot more food knowledge than I do.
My bonafides
Okay, so what, if anything, qualifies me to say anything about the topic of cooking wild game?
Well, quite a bit, really.
For one thing, I grew up eating wild fish and fowl, as well as wild leporids (i.e, rabbits).
My father was an avid outdoorsman. Unlike me, he inclined more towards fishing than hunting, but when fall came he switched from fishing to bird hunting. He started fishing in the spring as soon as you could, and then fished all summer, and into the fall He continued fishing basically until the snow flew, even after he started bird hunting. He didn't ice fish much, however, so he took the cold winter months off from fishing.
He started hunting birds when sage chicken season opened in the fall and soon started hunting ducks and geese after that, with an occasional mix of other birds as well. When I was old enough to hunt and fish, which in the case of hunting was five years of age, I started that. When I was just about that age, I started hunting rabbits as well.
My father had hunted big game when he was single, but some time after he married, he stopped for a while due to the pressures of work and having a small family. Also, in those days, hunting big game was more of an expedition than it is now, in spite of what people might think. When I was about 10 or 12 or so, however, he started again, probably as he had more time and I wanted to. At that time, you couldn't hunt big game until you were 14, so I had a couple of years of observational experience before I started hunting big game too.
When my father started hunting big game again, it was antelope. I don't recall him getting a big game license during my lifetime for anything else. But I did. I started hunting deer the same year I started hunting antelope, and added elk hunting as soon as I had the automotive freedom to do that. By the time I was a late teen, I was fishing in the spring, but switched to hunting as soon as the season was on, and hunted until the last of the seasons. I wasn't an ice fisherman at that point either.
Now, we were a family of three. And what this should tell you is that we were eating a lot of wild game. When I was born Catholics still had meatless Fridays every week of the year, and therefore we normally had trout for Friday dinner. We continued on with this even after it was no longer required, as we had lots of fish. My father froze fish so we continued to have them long after it grew too cold to continue fishing. And as this should also indicate, we ate a lot of waterfowl during the season as well as some other game birds. Once my father started big game hunting, and then I did, we had antelope and deer as well. As both my father and I took antelope, and I usually got additional tags, we had quite a bit of antelope.
So I grew up in a household were wild game was a staple.
That doesn't mean, of course, well-prepared wild game. My mother was an awful cook and that applied universally to everything. But my father was a really good cook and when she could no longer cook, my father took over. By observation, I started to learn how to cook wild game then.
To add to this, from 1983, when I graduated from community college, until 1995, when I got married, I lived pretty much exclusively on wild game. That's a period of 12 years, of course, which is a significant period. I didn't normally buy meat at the grocery store when I was a college student unless I flat out ran out of wild game, which would occur. And when I was first practicing law and living at home, I was bringing home a lot of wild game. When my father died, and it was my mother and me for a time, I did the cooking normally, and wild game it was.
Cook a lot of wild game, and you'll learn how to cook it.
An additional bonafide
My grandfather owned a packing house and my father had worked in it. He knew how to butcher meat. Watching him do it, I learned how to do it, although I was never anywhere as good at it as he was.
I don't like taking my game meat to a meat processor and for years I absolutely wouldn't. I butchered things myself. The pressures of work and life, and the fact that my wife didn't like me spending an entire day butchering, meant that I eventually relented, and I do now, and have for a number of years. I'd still rather not, but I have made that compromise.
I've butchered or helped butcher everything from rabbits up to cattle.
A note on wild meat and how not to ruin it.
Eat wild mean and sooner or later you'll hear somebody say they don't like it, as "it's gamey".
Taste is an individual thing. I heard one Marine Corps veteran of Afghanistan go long on praise on Afghan goat, for instance, which not everyone would, I'm sure. Some of that observation, "it's gamey", really means that the person who is speaking has only eaten grain fed American beef or pork. Grass fed beef, which is the kind we normally have here, tastes considerably different from the beef you buy at the grocery store or get at a steakhouse. Indeed, this is so much the case that if you get used to grass fed beef and then have the latter, it's a shock and not necessarily a pleasant one.
In fact Plains Indians complained, soon after they were bound to reservations, that allotment beef they were give was "sweet" and they didn't like it. Used to leaner bison, it tasted odd. And I can vouch for something similar. After over a decade of normally only eating wild game, getting used to store bought beef again was a bit difficult. I like beef, but to go from lean antelope and deer to fed beef was strange and I found I had a preference for the wild game.
People, I note, make similar complaints about lamb, once an American staple, and all sorts of people claim to dislike mutton, even though they mostly have never eaten either. I love lamb and I like mutton as well.
Which gets me next to this. Some people think they don't like wild game as the meat has been ruined by how it was treated.
You can ruin any meant, and the easiest way to do that is to not remove the heat from it.
The other day I was at the meat processor to drop off an antelope. I was stunned when I got there as the antelope I was dropping off was the only one that had been skinned. I can think of no surer way to make antelope gamey than to not skin it in the field. I can't imagine why people do not do this.
Learning to skin an animal is not hard, and its vital to do it.
When I shoot a big game animal, the very first thing I do is to bleed it by cutting its throat. This involves, I'd note, an element of safety as a person should never ever draw a knife towards himself. If you don't know how to do this, have somebody show you, least you slice yourself open accidentally. People die in the field cutting themselves with hunting knives. If its sharp enough to cut game, it's sharp enough to kill you. Anyhow, you shouldn't be running a knife towards yourself. I'm not going to explain how to do this as, if you don't know, you should have somebody show you so you don't slice yourself open. Bleeding doesn't take long, however, and it removes a lot of heat, right away.
After that, you need dto field dress it. I'm not going to explain how to do that either, but don't ever draw a knife towards yourself or put yourself in a position where you can get cut. Then you need to skin the animal.
The only reason not to skin an animal immediately is that you need to drag it to where you are loading it. Okay, that's a reason. But skin it as soon as you can.
On this, years ago I shot a moose in weather that was right at about 0F. We field dressed it and skinned it and loaded it in my 1/2 ton pickup truck. In spite of that, I still lost a little of it to spoilage.
I'm convinced that at least half of the claims that meat is gamey is due to the meat being absued. The rest has to do with odd occurances, unfamilairity, and bad cooking.
What I'm noting, by the way, applies to smaller game as well. When you shoot rabbits or birds, you really need to field dress them in the field. Rabbits should have their fur removed in the field, both to cool them down, and because they always have fleas. Birds are a little tougher call simply because sometimes you need the plumage to show game wardens what you have. Indeed, that can be true for big game animals in terms of their heads and other evidence of sex. Fish, of course, are easy as you simply remove their guts before you leave the stream.
Big Game
Okay, with all of that, we'll start on big game.
I'm going to really deal with two types of big game here, one being antelope and the other being Cervidae. Cervidae are deer, and that includes all types of conventional deer in the United States, as well as elk, caribou and moose.
This isn't to suggest, I'd note, that every Cervidae tastse the same. Far from it. But they tend to be more similiar than different for the most part. I.e., elk doesn't taste like mule deer, and neither taste like moose, but none of them are close to tasing the same as antelope.
What I'm not dealing with, therefore, are things like buffalo or bear. I'm not, as I have no experience with cooking either. I'm only dealing here with things I know.
Which brings up this. Save for moose, which is a very dark rich meat, every recipe I'll give here works for everything, but you need to keep in mind they are different by degrees. These meets have different characteristics, and a recipe that works really well with one meat, will be so so with another.
Useful Sites:
Hunter Angler Gardner Cook: This site, I'd note, is the most useful, in my opinion. The Author also is sometimes featured in Wyoming Wildlife. He additionally has a podcast, although I haven't listed to much of it.
Wild Harvest Table. This site is sponsored by New York's Cornell University extension and has very good practical recipes. It was originally associated with a (then) young university professor who blogged a lot about hunting in New England, but whose cooperative blog on that topic seems to have gone into the ether, like so many blogs have over the years, but who was clearly, along with his wife who was the main driver of this blog, a fellow killetarian.
Food For Hunters. This blog, like the first one mentioned, has some really good recipes, and it also brings some different prospective to recipes.
A 12 Gauge Girl. Another blog with interesting recipes, from a killetarian prospective, although its very infrequently updated.
Chef In The Wild. Interesting blog, but not updated since December 2020 at the time I'm putting this up.
Cowgirl's Country Life. Not a hunting specific site, but with some hunting recipes. Also, infrequently updated.
The Prairie Homestead. This site has a very active blog and a podcast that has a cult following. I'll be frank that I don't know that this link really belongs here, and I'll also admit that I have some problems with the modern "homestead" movement, while also finding it interesting and sympathizing with it.
Okay, the item above is cheating, but it's another page here on our site.
