Dsmithy70
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Men who kill RICHARD CORNISH July 27, 2010
ON TOP of an old volcano, out west near Ballarat, a cluster of men hovers over hot coals, watching a score of quail sizzle on a grill.
It is late morning and the birds were shot a few hours earlier as the sun crept over cold, frosty fields. Legs tired from silent stalking across barley stubble fields, gun dog pointing the way, we sit around the fire, watching the birds cook slowly.
Chef and owner of city restaurant Sarti and part-time hunter Riccardo Momesso turns the quail with tongs, the juices falling on to coals that envelops them in meat-scented steam. A friend, another restaurateur, can’t resist the call of the land and spends hours hunting each week.
This is a ritual that millennia of hunters before them have practised and savoured. They are the men — yes, mostly men — who shoot the food they love to eat. They do it not for the thrill of the kill but for the flavour of wild-shot meat, a taste that has almost been forgotten in this age of mass production.
Although hunting for flesh is enmeshed in the male psyche, it is not de rigueur.
‘‘When I tell people I love to hunt, they instantly assume I’m a redneck,’’ says Strathbogie winemaker Matt Fowles.
The oars souvenired from Fowles’s private school rowing club, hanging in his shed, tell a different story. He was a lawyer who one day found himself in a Collins Street tower looking out over the suburbs to the country beyond and found the call of the land overwhelming. He gave up his job in a law firm and together with his new wife took up the country life in the Strathbogie Ranges. Partnering with Plunkett Wines to form a new company, he now spends his spare time armed with a .22rifle hunting the vineyards and surrounding hills for rabbit and hare.
Fowles wonders why more people don’t hunt to eat: ‘‘The rabbit is declared vermin. It lives a life in the wild, eating only grasses and herbage. It’s out and about and ‘bang’, next thing it knows is nothing. It’s not tormented by a slaughter yard or fed hormones. And it is simply delicious.’’
We sit at his table in his house among the vineyards. He opens a bottle of his wine, Ladies Who Shoot Their Lunch, a drop he created specifically for game and named accordingly. The range is based on blending aromatic wines with the barest of exposure to oak so as not to overpower but complement the deep but often ephemeral flavours that game exhibits.
Lunch is served: a tray of finely sliced, grilled rabbit livers, served on toast seasoned with the merest nap of salsa verde. ‘‘The flavour of game comes through the flesh,’’ he says, ‘‘not the fat.’’ They are tender and succulent, rich but clean-finishing with a pleasantly livery and grassy flavour.
Plates of golden-domed pithiviers follow, their buttery, flaky crusts filled with slow-cooked hare seasoned with juniper.
‘‘Older hares and rabbits are tough and are better for slow cooking,’’ Fowles says. ‘‘Younger animals are more tender.’’ He keeps looking over his shoulder out the window towards the woodheap where a rabbit has recently taken up digs.
‘‘They also taste different depending on the feed they are on. The rabbits on the flats have a little more fat as they are on better, sweeter pasture compared to the leaner but more mineral-flavoured animals that graze on the harder pastures in the rocky hills.’’
With the older hares and rabbits, he is content to make a stew, perhaps a rabbit cacciatore.
‘‘But with the younger rabbits like the one we shot the other day, we briefly seared the fillets and they were so tender.’’
A dish of confited rabbit legs is served next. More to the tooth than farmed rabbit with denser flesh, it really is in a league of its own.
Colin Wood likes rabbit but prefers venison. He is a man who shoots most of the meat he eats. Rabbit, duck and venison. A part-time farmer and part-time advocate for the Sporting Shooters Association of Victoria, he fired his first gun at 10 while hunting with his father and uncle, and has basically supported himself and his family with wild-shot meat ever since.
‘‘We’d go out and bring back the rabbits and quail, sometimes galah which Mum and my grandmother would eagerly cook into a pie,’’ says Wood, recalling the days when native birds were not protected species. He says it is a misconception that galahs and cockatoos are all tough.
‘‘They can live to 70years old and, of course, they are going to be bloody dreadful, but if you know what you’re doing, a young galah is a tasty, tender bird.’’
When he is not shooting destructive vermin such as foxes and goats on Crown land, deer is his main quarry. Shooting for him is not about kill thrill. He says three-quarters of the shoot is about being in the wild.
He may stalk a deer in the wild for several days before firing his gun.
‘‘It is always remorseful to kill such a wonderful animal. You wouldn’t be human. But you weigh that up against the honour of taking home its flesh that will feed a family for several months.’’
If successful, Wood will field-dress the animal, quartering it and spending perhaps the best part of a day retrieving the heavy carcass, trekking back and forward over hard terrain to bring home the bounty. The next day, he breaks down the beast into kitchen-friendly cuts. ‘‘No one is going to cook a hind quarter of deer,’’ he says.
‘‘So it is important to cut up the deer so that the cook has cuts they are happy to use.’’
He pulls a pack of wild-shot venison backstrap
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