Many years ago a friend from the US came to visit me in Germany. As a very special treat I took her one evening to a restaurant famous for its delicious and excellent game dishes. However, when I suggested the roasted hare (very yummy), my friend turned slightly green in the face and whispered: “I can’t eat that – it reminds me of Thumper.” A cartoon animal??? I did not even dare to suggest some of the other dishes which involved deer; that might have ended with my friend calling home in tears, sobbing: “They want me to eat Bambi!”
In the end my friend settled for a chicken dish. Apparently there had been no animated movies around with a cute motherless chicken braving the big wild world with the help of some friends.
I remembered this little story while having dinner the other night at Ruth’s Chris Steak House in Pasadena. Yes, they do serve venison; actually, it is the only place I know around here that does. They also know how to handle it, my double cut venison chops were superb and perfectly cooked, a real culinary delight of the first order.
Call me callous and heartless, but I do like Bambi’s mother, especially with blackberry sauce.
My husband and son are hunters, so we eat venison fairly often, although we don’t do anything that fancy with it. We also have eaten wild hog, squirrel, rabbit, dove, quail, duck, and wild turkey. Some of it, like the quail, I like. The rest, not so much.
Squirrel – I have never had that. In Europe they are not considered food, at least not for human consumption. Foxes and other predators like them, though.
I also never had the pleasure of eating wild turkey; I only know the tame farm-raised ones. I bet that a wild turkey is quite, quite delicious. Everything else I’ve had and enjoyed it.
As a funny aside: Even though I am not a hunter (I can’t even touch a gun) I do know how to skin a hare/rabbit and I pluck a mean dove or any other bird. My father had friends who went hunting and we often had fresh game. The smaller animals always came in their natural state, unskinned, unplucked. A huge part of the education in our house was along the lines of “it can never hurt to know how to…” and I learned all about how to handle the meat from start (letting it hang for a while) to finish (sizzling on the plate). So, if I ever would get stuck on that uninhabited island, I would know how to get myself a meal. Although I would probably need to bone up on how to catch my meal. Let’s see – run fast and grab it, snares, a huge club, sing to it until it commits suicide…