[Venison
is the culinary name for meat from the family Cervidae which includes the meat
of Deer, Elk, Moose, Reindeer, Roe, Caribou, Elk and Chital]
Deer hunting season closed in our area yesterday and Elk season opens
in about a week. Neither of us hunt but we do have friends who put in for
the elk lottery every year. One even got drawn last year, but came home
empty handed (unfortunately as she had promised to share!). We were
bummed as we really love fresh venison* and haven't had the opportunity to have more than a few pounds at a time for a
very, very long while.
Come to think of it, I think the last real venison feast we had was
when we lived back east and I bagged a big buck (on the day before hunting
season opened, no less). Here the full story...
"Oh Deer!"
It was the fall of 1987 and my wife, Kathryn and I were living in the
village of Millerton, NY in an area known as the “Tri-State Region” where NY,
MA and CT state lines converge together. We had been working on
renovating an old farm house for several years. Kathryn, was employed at
a terrific old country inn “The Under Mountain Inn” in nearby Salisbury
CT. I was doing some part-time freelance/relief cooking for nearby
restaurants but my main job was to complete final work on the house so that we
could get it on the market for sale. We were down to only 1 vehicle for
the two of us, our Ford F-150 truck we’d named “Plain Jane”.
Plain Jane was less than a year old from when we’d bought her new from
the dealership and there was nothing wrong with her at all aside from the fact
she was, well, plain. When shopping for a new vehicle on a shoe string
budget you can’t do much better than finding a leftover from the previous model
year just when the new ones are coming out. Tack on some extra miles for
being test driven around a few times, and make it a stripped down model with no
AC, no power anything, no automatic tranny, no interior upgrades (it did have
an AM radio though!) or fancy wheels or special paint job or pin striping (this
girl didn’t even come with a rear bumper!) and you can get a pretty sweet
deal. Besides, we were not in a position to be too picky about what we
ended up with having just thrown a rod in our old GMC step-side and needing a
truck right away for hauling materials etc for the house project. Anyway,
Jane, in her plain brown wrapper, was our solution.
Kathryn usually rode her bike the 15 miles to the Inn in the afternoons
and I went out in the truck around 11PM to pick her up. The trip was
always a pleasant one swinging through the picturesque little towns of
Millerton NY, Lakeville, and Salisbury CT before going North through some
classically beautiful New England farming land to the Inn which lay just before
the road crossed next into Massachusetts. Majestic old oaks and maple trees
hung heavily over the road for the last few miles to the Inn and even at mid
day it was like driving through a long dark tunnel created by their
branches. The Inn itself sat on a large piece of property in an almost
too perfect pastoral setting across the road from a large and lovely lake and
surrounded on three sides by woods and corn fields. Although country
charm and quaint scenery was what many out-of-towners came for, the area was
locally well known by outdoorsmen for the magnificent trout that thrived in the
crystal-clear lake waters and the trophy deer bucks who lived in the deep
woods, venturing out to annoy the farmers by feeding on their corn.
One crisp, cool autumn night, on the eve before that year’s deer bow
hunting season was to open, I set out with plenty of time to spare to go pick
Kathryn up from the Inn. I often went there a bit early so that I could
visit with Marged and Peter, the Inn’s owners and operators, usually hanging
out in the kitchen watching Peter, the chef, finish up the last orders and
talking shop. After passing through the slumbering little towns I
continued on. The pitch dark tunnel of trees seemed even closer than
usual.
Suddenly, from the corner of my right eye I saw a wisp of motion,
black on black from the dark void at the side of the road where car headlights
fail to penetrate fully. I reflexively cut the wheel hard to the left as
I jammed on the brakes. The sound of breaking glass and the thick, solid,
thud that reverberated through the truck’s cab told me I had not been quick
enough but I concentrated on bringing the vehicle back into my own lane and to
a stop.
A few dozen feet down the road I was able to pull safely off to the
side. Grabbing my flashlight I walked back along the black rubber course
my tires had left on the pavement. Soon I came to some scattered headlamp
glass shards and bits of amber plastic from my turn signal lens. After
stopping I hadn’t taken time to see what shape the truck was in but I was
getting the idea that it would need more than just a little bit of work.
Looking around, the flashlight caught something on the far edge of the
shoulder. My fears and expectations were simultaneously realized: I’d
collided with a deer - and a big one at that.
I approached and cautiously checked the poor crumpled thing. It
was apparent that he was absolutely dead. (Thank goodness for small
favors. If he had "only" been seriously injured I would have
felt compelled to find a safe and suitable way to dispatch him as humanely as
possible.) Equally apparent was the fact he was indeed a buck - and one
with large and lovely full rack of antlers as well.
It had been several minutes since the impact and still no other vehicle
had come along in either direction. On that road, at that hour I was not
surprised. As I looked up from the deer I saw a flashlight bobbing
towards me from up a nearby dirt road. I went to meet the light and met a
man who lived just up the road, which was actually his driveway. He had
heard the impact (and no doubt the accompanying screeching tires) and had come
to see if anyone was hurt. I assured him I was fine and asked to use his
phone.
I called Kathryn at the Inn and told her that I’d hit a deer just down
the road, I was OK, the truck was damaged but I thought it would run and drive
OK but I’d have to call the state police and file a report for insurance which
would take a while and I’d be a little late picking her up. By now I was
feeling the hit of adrenaline pumping through me in the after effect of the
accident. I was kind of jittery and my mind was going a mile a
minute. I was having to work a bit to speak into the phone and breath
normally so I wasn’t sure what I’d heard when she spoke to me. I asked
her to repeat herself.
“What are you going to do with the deer?” she had asked.
Do with the deer? Wasn’t running over it good enough? What
was I supposed to do with it? I told her that it was off the road and
that the highway department or somebody would eventually pick it up if I filed
a police report, I didn’t have to do anything with it.
“But don’t you WANT it? For the meat?” she came back.
It hadn’t even occurred to me to keep the deer. Was that
legal? Was it possible? Did I really want to eat something that had
been tenderized by a truck? What if its guts had all busted open and the
meat tasted disgusting? I was sure that I’d heard that it was really
important to gut and hang a dead animal as soon as possible so it doesn’t go
bad or something. I had no clue what would have to be done.
“I don’t know.” I told her. “I haven’t really thought about it.”
“Well…” she sighed, and hesitated, trying to read my mood, “It sure would
be a shame to waste it if it’s still good”.
Her words cut through my adrenal fog like the bright beam from a light
house. The old stingy, waste-not-want-not New England country boy in me
hated to see waste and she knew it. I may not have been thinking too
clearly but Kathryn surely was.
“Let me call the police and see what I need to do.” I told her,
brightening to the idea. “I’ll either see you or give you another call in
a little while.”
The State Police were efficient and helpful on the phone. They
got all the pertinent info from me about the what-and-where of the incident and
said they would send a trooper out my way in the next hour. I made
arrangements for them to have the Trooper go to the Inn to get the report so I
could continue on my way. When I told them that I was possibly interested
in keeping the carcass they said that it would have to be inspected by the
responding officer who would verify it to be a car-strike death and properly
tag it. I was truly surprised that was that easy.
Well, almost that easy. There was still the matter of getting the
deer into the bed of the truck but how hard could that be? I asked the
Good Samaritan who let me use his phone if he’d be willing to help but I guess
he thought he’d done enough for one night. I was on my own.
I got the truck and backed it up close to the body. Flipping on
the truck’s rear-mounted spot lights that I had installed for night work around
the property, I went around for my first good look at the deer. My he
looked big! Really big! I’d had no idea I’d hit such a very large
animal. My closest examination so far revealed that, aside from a bit of
blood pooled around the mouth and nose, there was no outward sign of trauma, no
big gaping holes in the flesh or awkwardly twisted limbs. I figured this was
a good sign, indicating that we really might be able to get some good usable
meat off him.
I struggled for the better part of 30 minutes getting him in the truck
using brute force, ropes, even some stout branches I found used for leverage
like pry bars - in short, every trick of which I could think. I
wished I'd paid a little better attention in physics class. Irresistible
force meets immovable object = venison steaks?
Eventually I was successful and got my filthy and exhausted self back
on the road to the Inn which was just a mile or so further along. Kathryn
and Marged and Peter all came out to see how I was, see my “catch” and admire
my handiwork to the front of Plain Jane. In the bright lights of the Inn’s back
door it was clear that the truck would need extensive front end body work but
at least it seemed to be running alright. In the truck bed the dead buck
was still an impressive sight with his respectable 8-point rack.
Plain Jane with her Boo-Boo
“Some bow hunter is going to be very disappointed tomorrow.” Peter said
with typical English understatement.
The state trooper soon showed up, as promised. He took some notes
in his little book, looked briefly at the truck and the carcass in the
back. He then wrote out a game tag for the deer and tied it to one of the
rear legs, then left. Kathryn got off work soon thereafter and we headed
home but not before Marged called out her customary “Watch out for deer.”
caution. (Marged says “watch out for deer” to departing guests the way
most people say “good bye” or “see ya later”). She was kind enough not to
say “I told you so” but her cautions were a bit overshadowed by obviousness
that night.
On the drive home we debated just what to do next. I’d worked in
restaurants with plenty of big cuts of meat before and was comfortable with the
butchering aspect of working with the carcass but neither of us had ever taken
a whole, big, dead animal with fur and head and guts and all and processed it
into food. We didn’t know where to start and really didn’t want to screw
it up and ruin the meat (if it wasn’t ruined already). We then had a
thought; My Uncle Paul used to do a lot of hunting and regularly took several
deer in a season. If anybody could help us out it was him. The only
problem was that he was at his cabin in Vermont.
After arriving home, we decided to give him a quick call up in Vermont
to see if he could at least give us some general directions on what to
do. Although the hour was quite late when we reached him, he was more
than game (so to speak) to help. He described to us what we had to do,
while we took furious notes as he spoke. We moved the truck off the
driveway and nearer the house so that we could take advantage of a flood light
there. With my Uncle’s dictated help-guide in hand we went to the bed of
the truck and hefted the beast all around in every direction, trying to locate
the body’s “landmarks” Paul had described as starting and ending places for the
various cuts. This was the first piece of meat I’d ever worked on that
had those particular places still attached to it. Even the whole sides of beef
I'd worked with didn't have heads, let alone "navels" etc. I
had more than a bit of trouble wrapping my mind around instructions like “…then
just cut completely around the anus…” but we got through it somehow.
Paul had insisted on the phone that this wasn’t a difficult job but
also stressed strongly that, we should exercise extreme caution not to nick the
gall bladder with the knife during the gutting procedure or it would leak bile
into the body cavity and probably ruin the whole carcass. Well, sure, of
course it would, wouldn't it?. But how the heck was I supposed to know
what the gall bladder looked like? Besides, this wasn’t your nice,
normal, keeled-over-from-a-clean-shot-to-the-heart kind of carcass.
It had been slammed into by a couple of tons of steel at 45 MPH so some of the
things inside were a bit scrambled and busted to start with. Anyway,
after a few false starts and a couple more phone calls for clarifications we
actually did managed to gut the beast out nice and clean, finishing in the wee
hours of the morning with lots of “help” from our 3 cats. I can tell you,
we were SO glad to be done. Paul had also given us instructions for
properly hanging the animal to age-out in our shed for several days before the
skinning and butchering could begin.
My trophy buck hanging in the shed
When it was time to butcher we knew
that we didn’t really have the space or facilities for doing a good job at the
house so we decided to bring it into the commercial kitchen of the local resort
where I worked from time to time and process it there. We removed the head and skinned the body at home,
wrapped it in a sheet and brought it in through the restaurant’s loading dock
late one night, well after the kitchen crew had all left.
The processing went smoothly, though
it took several hours. Because of
limited freezer at home, space we opted to de-bone every last scrap of meat to
save room. By the time we were done, we
had just over 100 lbs of boneless, steaks, roasts, stew meat, sausage and
ground venison all wrapped in neatly labeled packages to take home. The only waste we had in trimming up from the
collision was a part of one thigh that was badly bruised into the meat and a
section of the belly (not much meat there anyway) that apparently absorbed the
bulk of the impact of the truck.
With a yield of over 100 lbs of
boneless meat from the animal we calculated an approximate live weight of
something over 300 lbs. No wonder I had
trouble getting him into the truck!
Anyway, that meat lasted us almost a year and was some of the best meat
of any kind we’d ever had. With such a
bonanza available to us, I was able to perfect some really special venison
recipes I’ll be sharing soon including my Grandmother's
Mince Meat, Medallions
of Venison with Port and Blackberries and my Venison version of Swiss Steak.
(As an aside, our insurance paid for all the repairs to the truck minus
our $200 deductible so we figured we got all that boneless meat for about $2.00
a pound. They also suggested I install (and paid in full for) a set of
"deer whistles" that are supposed to alert/scare deer out of the
vehicles path. The original ones on Plain Jane's bumper had been destroyed by
the impact. We never did install the new ones)
