Girl Hunter

by Georgia Pellegrini

  1. Sprinkle the cutlets with salt and pepper. In a bowl, stir together the flour and bread crumbs, adding 1 teaspoon each of salt and pepper.

  2. Pour the vegetable oil into a skillet to about 1-inch depth and heat over an open fire or stove top.

  3. Brush the cutlets with a bit of oil on both sides and dip them into the crumb mixture until covered. Set aside on a plate.

  4. Test the temperature of the oil by adding a cutlet and seeing if the oil begins to bubble assertively. If it doesn’t, remove the cutlet and let the oil become hotter. If it does, continue adding more cutlets. Cook until one side is golden brown, then flip and cook until the other side is golden.

  5. Transfer to a plate covered in paper towels or a wire rack and sprinkle with a bit more salt to keep them crispy. Serve immediately with a Cranberry Relish or your favorite chutney.

  Venison Sausage

  Makes 5 pounds

  Sausages are one of the oldest prepared foods. Traditionally, sausages made use of the less desirable animal parts and scraps that could be cured in salt and put in the cleaned, inside-out intestines of an animal. Today, things aren’t done much differently than they were in 589 BC. Sausage is simply a combination of meat, fat, salt, and spices, stuffed into natural animal casing. The combinations of flavors are endless and it is a chance to experiment with your favorite ingredients. Salt and pink curing salt are the two most important ingredients. As you experiment, write down the amounts of each ingredient that you use so you can go back and adjust.

  3 1/2 pounds venison shoulder or haunch, cubed

  3/4 pound hog shoulder butt, cubed

  3/4 pound hog or domestic pig fat, cubed

  2 tablespoons sugar

  3 tablespoons kosher salt

  1 tablespoon onion powder

  1 teaspoon freshly ground white pepper

  2 teaspoons paprika

  1 teaspoon pink curing salt #1 (see Note)

  1/2 teaspoon ground allspice

  1/2 teaspoon grated nutmeg

  1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

  1/2 teaspoon garlic powder

  1 cup ice water

  4 tablespoons grape seed oil

  Natural pork casings, soaked in a bowl of saltwater

  1. Before you are ready to grind the meat, put it in the freezer for about 1 hour, until the meat is firm but not frozen.

  2. Grind the meat and fat through a medium die, taking care to alternate pieces of meat and fat.

  3. Place the meat in the bowl of a stand mixer and add everything but the water. Mix well with the paddle attachment for about 1 minute, or with your hands for longer.

  4. Add half of the ice water and continue mixing until the meat and fat are emulsified. The meat will develop a uniform, sticky appearance.

  5. Work the meat through your fingers, squeezing it against the sides of the bowl.

  6. Continue adding water until the meat is loose but not watery.

  7. Heat 1 tablespoon of the oil in a small skillet. Cook 1 tablespoon of the mixture in the oil to taste the seasoning and adjust as necessary.

  8. With a sausage stuffer, stuff the mixture into pork casings 6 to 8 inches long, pricking the casings with a sterilized needle as you go, to prevent air bubbles. Twist off the casing into links and let sit overnight in the refrigerator.

  9. To cook, heat the remaining 3 tablespoons of oil in a skillet and sear over medium-low heat for about 15 minutes, turning often. The internal temperature should be 160°F.

  Note: Also referred to as Prague powder, tinted cure mix, or Insta Cure #1, pink curing salt #1 (a mixture of salt and nitrite) is used in many types of cured meat products that are made and then cooked or eaten fairly quickly. The nitrite keeps the meat safe for a short period of time, and maintains the meat’s red color as well as gives it that “cured” taste. Its main purpose it to prevent botulism poisoning.

  Pink salt #2 is also known as Insta Cure #2 and Prague powder. It is a mixture of salt, sodium nitrate, and sodium nitrite, and used on meats that are dry cured over an extended period of time. The sodium nitrate breaks down over time to sodium nitrite, which then breaks down to nitric oxide, an oxidizing agent that keeps the meat safe from botulism.

  Both mixtures can be purchased from many places on the Internet.

  Smoked Venison Kielbasa

  Makes 5 pounds

  Kielbasa is the descendent of an Eastern European sausage. The texture is different from a regular sausage in that it is emulsified, making it most similar to a large, smoked hot dog. This emulsification is done with the aid of ice and milk powder. It is important that this meat mixture be particularly cold before it is pushed through the sausage grinder, because it will be ground more finely than a typical sausage.

  3 pounds venison shoulder or haunch, cubed

  1 pound hog butt, cubed

  1 pound hog or domestic pig fat, cubed

  1/2 cup diced bacon

  1/4 cup kosher salt

  1 teaspoon pink salt #1 (see Note, page 164)

  1/2 tablespoon sugar

  1/8 cup finely ground white peppercorns

  1/8 cup mustard powder

  1 teaspoon garlic powder

  2 1/2 cups crushed ice

  1/3 cup milk powder

  Natural pork casings, soaked in a bowl of saltwater

  Homemade Mustard, for serving (page 235)

  Homemade Sauerkraut, for serving (page 234)

  1. In a large nonreactive bowl, combine the venison, pork, fat, bacon, salt, pink salt, sugar, white pepper, mustard powder, and garlic powder. Let sit overnight, if possible in the fridge.

  2. Before you are ready to grind the meat, put it in the freezer for about 1 hour, until the meat is firm but not frozen.

  3. Grind the meat, fat, and bacon through a medium die, taking care to alternate pieces of each of them.

  4. Return the meat to the freezer for at least 30 minutes.

  5. Grind the meat again, this time through a small die, while gradually adding crushed ice. Grind very small amounts of meat at a time. As the meat grinds, it should be cold enough to extrude on its own, without pressure.

  6. Place the mixture in the bowl of stand mixer with a paddle attachment, and mix on the lowest speed for 2 to 3 minutes, stopping to clear the paddle as needed.

  7. Add the milk powder and continue to paddle the mixture for 1 to 2 minutes on the lowest speed. Take care not to overmix, as it could result in a rubbery texture. (You may need to add some ice water to facilitate mixing—no more than 1 cup.)

  8. Poach about 1 tablespoon of sausage in boiling water to test for seasoning and texture, adjusting as necessary.

  9. Stuff the mixture into pork casings 6 to 8 inches long, pricking the casings with a sterilized needle as you go, to prevent air bubbles. Twist off the casing into links and let sit overnight in the refrigerator.

  10. Hot smoke the sausages at 250°F for 45 minutes to 1 hour in a single layer until they are nicely red on all sides and firm. As they smoke, flip the sausages as frequently as possible.

  11. Before serving, sear the sausages in a skillet until golden brown and warmed through. Serve with homemade mustard and homemade sauerkraut.

  Axis Venison Loaf

  Serves 6 to 8

  My grandmother Frances Pellegrini is a home cook extraordinaire. Whenever she invited me to dinner growing up, I always requested her meat loaf. This is her recipe, taken from a family recipe book, as best as it can be put into words. She never was one to take measurements; it was always about whim and intuition. And there is something in her kitchen air that made this meat loaf turn out a special way that I have never been able to duplicate. This recipe uses venison, in this case axis venison, which is very lean, a little sweet, and a very beautiful color.

  1 carrot

  1 large onion

  1 celery stalk

  2 cups button mushrooms (one standard package)

  2 tablespoons olive oil

  1 teaspoon sea salt

  2 1/2
pounds ground axis venison

  1 egg, beaten

  2 tablespoons Marsala

  1/2 cup bread crumbs

  1/3 cup tomato puree

  1/2 cup parsley

  1/2 cup finely chopped fresh basil

  1 teaspoon grated nutmeg

  1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

  1. Blend the carrot, onion, celery, and mushrooms in a food processor until fine but not pureed.

  2. Heat the oil in a skillet and sauté the mixture until softened, about 10 minutes. Sprinkle with salt along the way to help release the juices.

  3. Preheat the oven to 450°F. In a large bowl, combine the vegetables with the rest of the ingredients.

  4. Form the mixture into a loaf and place in a baking dish. You could also use a loaf pan. Bake for 10 minutes, then reduce the temperature to 350°F. Bake for 30 minutes more. Let cool slightly, then cut into thick slices and serve.

  Also try: other antlered game, turkey

  A dog in a kennel barks at his fleas; a dog hunting does not notice them.

  —PROVERB

  10

  NASCAR Hog Hunting

  There are, of course, limits within each of us, no matter our instincts. In part, those limits are inherent to our makeup, unique to our very fiber as a human. But some, I am starting to believe, are also conditioned. It is the age-old question of nature versus nurture. Could my urbanite girlfriends hunt their food if they had to? Would they have walked up that hill toward the turkeys at the command of a scary chef? Probably. But then there is the question of the word hunt. How far would they be able to take the act?

  Much of the hunting I do today is very different from what my caveman ancestors did. I have never stolen from a cheetah in the trees; I have never outsmarted a lion; I have never chased and killed an animal with a sharp object. The day I killed my first turkey for a restaurant was the closest I had really come to holding an animal as it made the transition from life to death. Perhaps that is why it awakened a dormant part of me. There was something that I recognized that had been stored deep in my marrow. It was something that was now active and pulsing, something that made sense. A gun is a tool, useful and efficient when used properly. But it is also a bit of a cop-out. It is a modern luxury. It is how we manage to not expend more calories hunting our food than we get from eating it. Using bows and arrows would make it a slightly greater challenge, but today even they have been so improved by technology as to be virtually unrecognizable to those of our ancestors. But what about hunting in its most primitive form?

  The next early morning brings the first sprinkling of Arkansas snow, the kind that melts into your eyelashes, leaving your face gleaming and wet. The Commish and I climb into his white pickup, the backseat filled with waterproof clothing and gloves, the front seat appointed with two McDonald’s coffees. We drive along the Mississippi levee in any lane we please, skidding on the loose pebbles and listening to the sounds of country music, then take a steep right into 1,700 acres called the Lakewood Hunting Club. We are here to meet two landowners named Lonny Carson and Jack Bates. Lonny and Jack are serious hog hunters, the kind that own a menagerie of dogs trained and suited just for hog hunting—brave dogs with scars and the remnants of stitches in their chests. There are two kinds of dogs in this menagerie—dogs that trail the hogs and dogs that bring them down. They are combinations of blackmouth cur and mountain cur, with clear blue eyes or fierce black ones.

  They sit in beige plastic kennels at the base of the hunting camp, peering out from a patchwork of metal doors, their nostrils wet and brimming with experience and anticipation. Lonny and Jack pull up in a set of four-wheelers. All at once they release the doors of the kennels and watch the dogs erupt from inside, their muscles twitching under their thin, tight skin. They are bred in rural areas as an all-purpose hunting dog; not recognized as a breed but as a type, leaving their appearance for Mother Nature to decide. A tan one hops to the back of the four-wheeler and sits. The only female dog Lonny has ever owned, she is chained to the seat behind him; he revs up the jackhammer sound of his motor, and takes off with her as if she is his girlfriend.

  I climb into a two-person ATV with the Commish, as the snow begins to spatter on the windshield.

  “Aw, hayell,” he says, looking down under his hand. The gear shift of the four-wheeler has been upholstered with a tanned deer scrotum.

  We follow Jack and Lonny through the woods of Lakewood Hunting Club, down narrow bumpy roads, and stop along the way to collar the dogs. Once long ago, hunters used to walk their dogs in pursuit of the hog. Then, in time, they rode horses. Years later they began to use four-wheelers with a marginal antenna system to help monitor the location of the dogs as they dashed through the woods. Now the dogs are fitted with collars that track them through a modern GPS system, which will tell the hunter how fast a dog is traveling and how many feet north or south it is from the tracking device. Jack and Lonny enter the names of the dogs into their locators and, one by one, attach collars to their necks. Once fitted, the dogs jump off, their necks blinking.

  “You can practically see what they’re thinking on this,” Lonny says.

  “Soon they’ll be using video.”

  “Hell, y’all need an IT person with y’all,” the Commish says as we wait for them to tinker.

  “Look at ’em. He knows they’re hogs out there,” Jack says, fitting a gray spotted cur.

  “What’s his name?” the Commish asks.

  “He got a bunch of names,” Jack says.

  “What’s his name today?”

  “Uh . . . Bobby.”

  “He’s Bobby ’til he messes up, then he’s Sonofabitch.”

  The last dog jumps from the kennel more slowly. He has piercing blue eyes and the round head of a cur. He has a mess of fresh stitches on his chest. He is the oldest and the wisest of the menagerie. He has seen things.

  “If the other dogs can’t find one, you turn Beau loose and he’ll make one,” Lonny says. Beau jogs off slowly, ready to go to work, unamused, his neck blinking.

  The low pressure and the moist, snowy air improve the dogs’ sense of smell. This morning they are fervent with the burning perfume of hog in their throats. We follow them until all we can do is watch them as blinking red dots on a screen, as they disappear into the woods. We stop to listen from time to time. Lonny bites into a McDonald’s biscuit as the Commish sips coffee, and tucks his cup next to the deer scrotum. I sit smelling the wet air, feeling the snowflakes settle onto my lips. The light glints off the long knife holstered against Lonny’s hip, attached to a chain dangling in a loop from his leather belt. We sit and wait with the motors turned off, the snow in our faces, and the fumes of McDonald’s biscuit in the air.

  Then a distinctive howling sound fills the woods. In a few swift movements, biscuits are gulped, engines roar, and the four-wheelers are hiccuping and jerking through the woods toward the baying dogs. “This is NASCAR hog hunting,” the Commish yells above the thundering engine.

  You don’t know what you will find when you arrive at a standoff between hysterical dogs and a 300-pound boar with needle-sharp tusks. Sometimes you will find an injured dog and a boar running away through the woods; sometimes you will find a dog with its jaws on the neck of the beast; sometimes you will find them face to face, working each other into a lather; sometimes it will be a dance of all three possibilities, changing and transforming by the second.

  When we arrive, three dogs surround an angry boar. One dog has a firm grasp on his neck, and the others jump forward and back, yelping and seeming a touch unsure about what to do next. More dogs emerge from the woods now, attracted to the noise, and Beau comes forward and looks on at the scene, coolly impervious to all the fuss.

  Lonny and Jack thrash through the woods toward them all and begin to yelp, too, and as they do, the boar tears loose and runs for the brush. The dogs follow until we see that they are under a dense patchwork of branches fallen over a ditch and overgrown enough to serve as a stable floo
r. I climb onto the floor of branches, walk toward the center, and look down through the cracks. In between the space in the branches is a mess of flesh and growling and stench. Lonny draws his long, glinting Rambo knife that makes a whistle as he pulls, kneels down on the floor, and thrusts his hands between the cracks to try to stab the boar. When he pulls his knife out, it is dressed in a thin layer of blood.

  “I don’t know if that was a dog or the boar I just got,” he says.

  As I stand on the floor, the grumbling in the cracks below me becomes more violent, sticks snap, and the Commish and old wise Beau look on stoically. Jack holds a pistol without purpose.

  The boar suddenly breaks away, tearing through the floor, which shakes beneath me. Snorting and wheezing, he runs through the tall grass, but the dogs overtake him once more. Jack and Lonny stumble and run after them until they can reach the dogs to pull them off. When the Commish and I catch up, the dogs are beside themselves with excitement, and Jack and Lonny are sitting on a prostrate hog. I stand looking down at him, big and long haired, with a tubular snout and miniature tusks. He emits steam into the air in small bursts and chortles. I hear the ring of the Rambo knife coming back out of its holster and someone say my name. When I look up I see the red-stained knife in the air and a look of curiosity on Lonny’s face. “Do you want to do it?”

  It is true that in addition to guns, four-wheelers and GPS systems are also luxuries not afforded to our ancestors. But there is also the matter of practicality. Today’s Western humans are more starved for time than for food. There isn’t time to put on a suit in the morning and hunt by foot with a knife in the afternoon. And so there are two shortcuts that we can choose from—the meat section of the grocery store; or the gun, the GPS system, and the deer stand. How often do humans in this age use a knife and their bare hands to bring home their food from the woods? But more so, how often do humans become this entangled with nature? Hunting, after all was a physical endeavor for our ancestors; it was about bringing home food but also living close to the land. There is no doubt that some hunters are attracted to it for that reason, for the physicality of it. But, in a sense, this most primitive act brings our role in the cycle of life back to its most basic level: We eat animals, animals eat animals and plants, plants feed from the dirt, and we turn to dirt. The opportunity to participate so honestly and physically is rarely offered to us anymore.