warning: this post is about wild game, please be advised if you have a weak stomach towards this subject matter. dealing with prepackaged meat is very different and does not require some of the more graphic techniques involved with fresh animal breakdown.
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deer, 1997
the first time i had deer meat i was 8. my brother and i were staying with my dad in south carolina for the summer. after playing in the yard with mamaw and papaw's 2 large rottweilers (toro and lucy), mamaw made a snack of venison sausage and imitation crab meat (NOT mixed together, just occupying different space on a plate). either she or my papaw shot the deer somewhere near their house (jury is still out from which body of water the imitation crab meat came from), and i remember thinking how weird it was to be eating deer. bambi. then again, i also remember thinking that it was pretty good, and being kind of a husky kid i had a few too many venison sausage patties followed by some little debbie cakes. i felt like a very edgy 8 year old in that moment. since then, i've had quite a lot of deer my dad has shot on his property, and it's all been absolutely delightful. the climate in south carolina is a typical sticky humid in the summer and a bone chilling cold in the winter. the cicadas roar during the day and the crickets stumble through their chirps throughout the night. the landscape of the south, especially in it's most rural corners, is an electric city full of sound and excitement. wild onions grow thick in the yards as kudzu grows thick on the trees and the streets and the houses and everywhere. muscadine grape vines drape around the shoulders of the hickory trees and tempting blackberry patches are deceitfully full of chiggers and thorns. this is the diet of the deer that roam the area, and when you take a bite of a south carolina deer, you taste the place.
i really wish i had a picture here, but no deer photos this time.
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boar, 2018
i was hanging out on my friend's back porch in cataluyna, spain, overlooking a valley that smells of wild thyme and asparagus and is enclosed on all sides by enviable limestone climbing crags. i'm drinking a spanish red blend from the montsant region, which is my favorite wine region in the world. it's proximity to priorat lends itself to some similar terrior-y (uhhhh....) flavors but with a juicier punch. the sun is setting and it's jacket weather. we are eating pizzas that have been freshly fired in a small pizza oven overlooking their property. this is one of the happiest moments of my life and i feel like this is what diane lane felt most of the time during the movie 'under the tuscan sun'. the over-romanticism of the moment makes me feel, truly, like a middle class white woman in crisis and finding meaning in yogic sounding words and half eaten plates of spaghetti. in that moment, i am thankful that my friends are remarkable people who all very much dislike 'eat pray love'. i feel better.
my friend hattie says: 'brandy, you have to cook this boar meat! we have so much of it!'
and then chris chimes in: 'we broke it down ourselves! it was an awesome experience! bit sad, though, because the boar committed suicide.'
i choke on small sip of wine.
'pardon?'
chris and hattie were climbing one day with one of their friends close to oliana. their friend reached the top of a route and upon pulling over the edge, frightened a wild boar so badly that it panicked and jumped right off an 80 foot cliff. they found the boar later at the base of the crag and decided to take it back to their house to break it down, as it is a rather large boar and could yield a good amount of meat.
i immediately ask to see how much meat there is, and am pleasantly surprised and a little sad when i see about 20 pounds of meat waiting to be cooked. this poor boar! but also, i'm very excited about cooking boar meat, so i decide to compartmentalize the thought that this boar might have been having a very bad life and had some underlying mental issues on top of that and just needed some support from his fellow boars and maybe needed a couple pets from a nice human or something. *proceeds compartmentalization*
i don't have the recipe that i used for the boar, although i can tell you it fed lots and lots of people the night before chris and hattie's wedding, it tasted really really delicious and required quite a bit of work. if i remember correctly it involved fresh tomatoes, olive oil that had been pressed just a few miles away, some variety of beans and an odd assortment of foraged herbs from the surrounding hills. it turned out extremely tender and comforting. despite having so little information about this thing i made, it still stands out as one of my favorite dishes i've made, i remember liking it *that* much. this also might be one of the reasons i am so adamant about writing recipes down now.
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elk, 2019
my pal nick calls me up one night:
'hey, so i shot an elk and i need some help breaking it down.'
i need no convincing of why i should make animal breakdown a priority.
i'd never actually gotten a chance to do something this big, and my 10 am plan to go to a freezing cold garage in a colorado december to slice into a huge animal sounds like the perfect way to spend a morning. we strategized muscle alignments and best cuts and in the end labeled 90% of the bags with the semi mysterious word: 'STEAK'. surrounded by a sea of 'STEAK' we pushed on for about 2 hours, and still had lots of 'STEAK' yet to be broken down. nick brought out a meat grinder and we began to make sausage, working in bus tubs while all of nick's smokejumper friends began to trickle in and take in the carnage that was beginning to see some semblance of organization.
apparently in longmont, colorado, which is just north of boulder, there had been an overpopulation of elk and colorado fish and game had released a lottery for hunters to come help control the population. nick and his friends had made it out the day before and after a harrowing chase, had finally landed a shot straight into the heart of a massive elk. 6 bags of 'STEAK' and 1 large bag of freshly ground elk sausage later, i had made elk steaks (naturally), elk chili, elk sausage, and elk burgers.
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snake, 2016
in china, baijiu (the chinese equivalent of moonshine) is sometimes aged with garden snakes. the first time i went to yangshuo, i was told by the owner of the hostel (monkeyjane, badass and local legend) that the snakes in the baijiu would 'clear out my toxins'. we were both pulling on the cheapest chinese cigarettes and watching the sunset over the karst towers in her hostel's rooftop bar. the setting and moment seemed a bit too romantic for me to pass on the chance to try snake baijiu and wash it down with a big tsing tao beer and some fried pork.
nothing seemed particularly off about the flavor, and i felt very much like that edgy 8 year old who had first tried deer: slightly invincible!
and then:
that night was the first time of two times in my life that i sleepwalked. i woke up in my underwear in the lobby of the hostel, face to face with the nightguard who i had scared into waking up. i screamed a little, and ran back up 3 flights of stairs to my room. also, i walked down 3 flights of stairs in sleepy delirium??
for the next two days i became violently ill, only able to eat one meal a day and not having a vpn, i had no good internet access (which, i know, sounds like a privileged asshole thing to say BUT when you're stuck in bed for a couple of days, it does kind of suck not having youtube or instagram), so i sat under the covers and read my thick paul theroux novel and seemed to live vicariously through the book when i was myself on an exotic adventure that felt like it would be worth reading...when i could get out of bed.
here's a live action photo of me poisoning myself with snake baijiu:
so i might not suggest snake.
but everything else was pretty delicious and definitely worth it.
what i'm saying here is this: if you get a chance to cook with local meat that has been killed recently, go for it. you can taste the freshness and truly understand the process of eating meat. sadly, grocery store meat does not just magically appear in plastic after an animal has lived a magical life out in a green pasture. this is rarely the case. with hunted, local meat, you are getting an animal that is probably causing an ecological imbalance and has lived a very free life. it is truly free range meat.
...even the chinese snakes.