October 28, 2013
This post describes the cherished French history of hunting wild game, and the culinary ties to wild game that remain today.
Check out this great article in the New York Times (yes, the city-scape is Paris, but don’t think the same field-to-table experience can’t be had right in your own backyard): Turning the Hunt Into a Trip to the Market
Article follows in italics.
xo
PARIS — The chef Alain Dutournier was so excited about the first game meat of the season that he transformed the reception area near the Tuileries Garden, his two-Michelin-star restaurant, into a still life.
Then again, “life” may not be quite the right word.
He covered a large table with the leaves of chestnut and plane trees, then grabbed the feet of two 12-pound hares from Alsace and two small rabbits from Sologne and laid them on the leafy bed. After that came five mallard ducks from Brittany and 10 gray partridges from Champagne, whose heads he draped delicately over the table’s edge so their necks stretched long and their beaks pointed outward. For the final touch, he added color: chestnuts in their prickly casings, walnuts in their shells, a platter of cèpe mushrooms, a bowl of seven Italian white truffles, red-orange kuri squashes and bouquets of beets.
We, his guests, were told to ignore the blood dripping from a mallard’s beak onto the plush carpeting.
Autumn signifies the opening of the six-month hunting season in France, a time when hunters put on quaint clothing and go off into the woods with hounds and rifles — and when chefs compete to transform their quarry into gastronomic bliss.
The hunt is a much different affair in France than in the United States or Britain, where the chasing and killing are often as important as the cooking and eating. Here, the point of the pursuit is the journey from fields and forests to the tables of starred restaurants and rural bistros, where menus are built around game — from the tiniest pigeon to the grandest wild boar.
The best venison I have had was from the reh (roe) buck of Germany. They are very small, weighing approximately 60-70 lbs.
“Game cannot die for nothing,” said Mr. Dutournier, who learned to hunt as a child. “You have to invest the time to do something good: to make and to take culinary pleasure from it.”
There are rules to learn, he said:
“Female birds are to be venerated, not killed.”
“A wild hare should be shot in the shoulder, not in the stomach, to avoid giving its meat an inelegant odor.”
“Quality partridge should have the fresh smell of an infant’s diaper.”
Mr. Dutournier lost me on that last one, so he explained more fully. “Milky,” he said.
I pushed that thought, and the image of the freshly killed animals, out of my mind when lunch was served. Happily, I was eased into the meal by a chestnut soup laced with white Italian truffle and foie gras. By the time the wild hare arrived a couple of courses later, I was ready. It was served as a rare fillet and as a classic lièvre à la royale (royal hare) with black truffle and foie gras, braised in Sauternes and accompanied by beets, potatoes and celery.
France has the largest hunting community in Europe, with 1.2 million registered hunters, one-third more than in Britain and four times as many as in Germany. And unlike the traditional English fox hunt (now banned), the practice in France is class blind.
At the start of the French Revolution, hunting, until then an exclusive privilege of the nobility, was opened to all. Today, nearly half of French hunters are workers and farmers. (It is still, however, a male thing — only 2 percent of hunters are women — and for the elite, as important a way to do business as golf is in the United States.)
The country has two satellite television channels devoted to hunting and fishing. Hunting magazines are sold at nearly every kiosk. Nov. 3, the feast day of St. Hubert, the patron of hunting, is celebrated with local banquets and country fairs. In some parts of France, hunters call in sick and shops close when pigeons and ducks fly their way.
Though hunting with dogs or on Sundays has been banned in much of Europe, French hunters have no such hindrances. In fact, obstructing a hunter is a national offense punishable by a 1,500-euro fine. (A political party called Hunting, Fishing, Nature, Tradition lobbies hard for the rights of rural France.)
Still, there are limits. The National Agency for Hunting and Wildlife, a governmental body that studies and maintains animal habitats, determines animal quotas for each region and administers rigorous licensing exams. Would-be hunters have to know details like the reproductive cycle of the rabbit, the number of duck eggs in an average clutch, the tracks of bird and animal species and the construction of rifles. Hunters are not allowed to use handguns, pump-action guns or night-vision equipment.
As in other Western countries, hunting has fallen off as people migrate from the countryside to the cities. Even with an active campaign to recruit younger people, there are fewer hunters every year. Less land is being farmed, leading to a decrease in the volume of game; this is the worst year for gray partridge in 30 years.
But the success of the hunt is only part of its appeal.
“Sometimes the ritual is more important than the result,” said Bruno Mollot, president of the hunting society of Baby, a village of about 80 inhabitants in the Seine-et-Marne region. “Friendship and conviviality are more important than killing.”
So is eating.
In the Marais District, the Museum of Hunting and Nature has a collection of nearly 3,000 hunting-related objects, including paintings, sculptures, weapons, trophies, furniture, taxidermy and culinary antiques like 18th-century ceramic pâté tureens in the shape of boars’ heads. In a mansion next door is the Hunt and Nature Club, which offers its wealthy members round-the-clock hanging, skinning, depluming and trussing service to prepare game for cooking.
It is so patriotic to hunt that when deputies in the National Assembly contributed their favorite local recipes to a recent cookbook called “The Cuisine of the Republic,” several of them involved game. (One, for hare, was discovered in an 18th-century cookbook; it takes five days to prepare.)
At L’Assiette, a bistro in the 14th Arrondissement, on the Left Bank, the chef David Rathgeber got the passion for hunting from his father and an even greater passion for preparing what they brought home from his mother. “I found I liked cooking better than killing,” he said.
One of his signature dishes early in hunting season is a baked meat pie. He molds thick pie crusts into domes the way a sculptor molds clay. He fills them with a stuffing of duck, foie gras, bits of pork throat and shoulder, duck heart and liver, shallots, garlic, thyme and bay leaf that has marinated overnight in Cognac and white wine.
As the season progresses and different game arrives, his creativity soars. That was not the case when he opened Benoit in New York in 2008 for the chef Alain Ducasse. Mr. Rathgeber quickly saw that American diners would never feel as excited about hunting season as the French do.
“There’s just too much Americans refuse to eat,” he said. “We couldn’t do rabbits. Americans are revolted at the thought of killing them. ‘We adore Bugs Bunny,’ they would say to me. And deer? We couldn’t do deer, either, because of Bambi. Such a loss.”
