The season of mists and mellow Sunday lunches is upon us, and my body yearns for fires and nourishing platefuls of meat. Wild game, in particular, is a special treat of autumn. But how to cook it? Most of us live closer to supermarkets than woodlands, and don’t have the knowledge of deep country-dwellers.
By chance I happened upon Wild Meat in a Day, a course in Suffolk run by an enterprising new organisation called Food Safari. The aim is to bring you closer to the excellent food producers in the area, be they smokers, piggers, mushroom-hunters or small-scale fisherfolk. The days revolve around hands-on experience, usually with a field trip. You learn skills, recipes and tips from the people who live close to the land.
Base camp is the Anchor, a well-revamped pub in the delightful coastal village of Walberswick (www.anchoratwalberswick.com). The owners are Mark and Sophie Dorber; he is a world-class beer expert and she is a potter and chef. First came a rough guide to game conducted by Robert Gooch, a Rick Stein ‘food hero’ who runs game dealer the Wild Meat Company (www.wildmeat.co.uk). Birds of the air and beasts of the field are abundant in East Anglia, with its plentiful grain and hedgerows for food and shelter. Pheasants and partridges are usually farmed in pens before being released, but about 20-30 per cent are entirely wild here — more than in other parts of the country. Then there are the more unusual birds which are born and bred in the field, such as the long-billed snipe, from which we get the word ‘sniper’ because it is so difficult to shoot. The meat has a whiff — somehow delectable — of rotting mushrooms.
The most widely available game is venison. One of Robert’s butchers, Ray, deconstructed a carcass as he talked us through which cuts are the most tender for roasting — such as the fillet — and which are the tougher ones best put in stews, such as the shoulder. Small can be good when it comes to deer. The gourmet’s top choice for venison is said to be the finely textured roe or fallow, alongside the little muntjac and sika, escapees from parklands that now live in the wild. The delicious liver, alas, is usually taken by the stalker as a perk — get hold of one if you can.
I could have listened to Ray all day. He was like a character in a Benjamin Britten opera, interesting on anything Suffolk, let alone butchery, a subject he’d lived and chopped all his life.
But it was time to get down to work. I was amazed to be handed an entire haunch of roe-deer venison — a back leg the size of a small dog — and a butcher-sharp knife. We followed Ray, carefully parting the flesh like velvet curtains and trying not to feel like Hannibal Lecter on The Generation Game. It was a complex and engaging task.
The Anchor’s head chef taught us how to jug hare, curry snipe (wild birds, often originating in the East, take well to spices) and roast a succulent pheasant. For the latter, it is important to protect the breast from drying out, in this case by easing under the skin a mixture of soft cheese (here a local one, Wonmil) combined with rowan jelly, black pepper and salt. We barbequed marinated partridge — cold-weather barbeques on sunny days are under-rated — and learned how to joint and cook a rabbit. According to Ray, wild British ones (as opposed to the farmed Chinese) are best from autumn onwards because of the dryer forage. Incidentally, rabbit offal is also a mini but delectable treat — the Anchor & Hope gastropub in London serves them up in a mustardy-dressed salad.
And then we ate, gathered around a long table with Mark Dorber hosting us with a succession of interesting beers alongside the platefuls of delicious game.
Food Safari is a genuine and generous-hearted enterprise, run by a young couple, Polly and Tim Robinson, that is properly ‘field to fork’. I’m tempted by their beer safari, a tour from barley to barrel, with food matching. And who can resist the pig day which takes you from the whole hog through to Suffolk sausages?
The next Wild Food in a Day courses are on 3 October and 8 November. Food Safari (www.foodsafari.co.uk) will be at the celebrated Aldeburgh Food Festival between 26 September and 4 October.
Hattie is wild about game, especially hunt the rabbit offal.
