Cornish clotted cream, Melton Mowbray pies...

How about Highland venison, Yorkshire grouse or Norfolk pheasant? The EU has a scheme to protect traditional and regional food specialities. The latest regional food to gain special protection in this way is Cornish sardines (also known as pilchards). They won their special status because of the traditional way they are caught, and Cornwall's historic link to sardine fishing.

The UK, with 40 products recognised by Brussels, lags a long way behind France and Italy, with around 300.

Are we missing a trick here? Are there regional game specialities that could win special status, recognising the traditional way they are harvested and prepared?

It's Christmas!

Well, not really, but it feels like it - Mark Gilchrist is cooking up a festive treat to feature in our Christmas issue. I haven't seen the menu yet, but that was definitely some pheasants that went into the fridge.

Get closer to nature - eat some

I'm ashamed to say I hadn't heard of chef Georgia Pellegrini before. But having stumbled on this post on her blog, I want to find out more about her work.

"Hunting is not about male bonding in the woods anymore… it’s about understanding how to participate in nature, how to hunt for food, take only what you can eat, use every part of the animal and treat it with respect all the way to the plate..."

A good one to cull

Talking of Mark Gilchrist (as I was in the previous post), I visited him today to get some new photos for his cookery series. We larked about doing some fashion-style shots (check them out on flickr), then got down to business and went off to look for a fallow buck.

Just as it was getting dark, Mark spotted this one - a candidate for culling if ever I saw one. It had a single, dagger-like antler which would have been deadly in the rut. Plus one ankle had been broken at some time. It was badly swollen, and that leg was considerably shorter than the other. All in all, a beast that was better off hanging in the larder.

Fame and rabbit pies

Mark Gilchrist tells me he was stopped by the police on his way back from the Midland (towing a trailer through Kent villages late at night tends to attract attention). Name? Mark Gilchrist. What, the Mark Gilchrist?!

Turns out the copper is a regular Sporting Shooter reader, and reads Mark's cookery feature each month. He's particularly keen on Mark's rabbit pie recipe, which we featured in a recent issue. Can't argue with that, it is delicious!

Game Fair stars

The lads from Rushyford Game saved the day for us on the Saturday of the CLA Game Fair. Without their help, we'd have had a barbecue with no meat - unthinkable!

Long after all the stands had closed up, Harriet and I spotted them clearing up their smart green burger bar after a hectic day dealing venison burgers. "Er, excuse me, I don't suppose you've got any burgers left you could sell us, only the bloke who was supposed to buy the burgers, er, forgot..."

Well, they couldn't have been more helpful. We staggered away loaded down with not just a big heap of burgers and sausages, but tomatoes, onions, buns - even some smart aprons with the "just ask" logo.

It turns out they're subscribers and big fans of the magazine too - all the nicest people are, of course! Oh and the burgers were delicious - 5 stars Sporting Shooter Tried & Tested!

Quick way to skin a squirrel

Now we all know it's a good idea to shoot grey squirrels, and that they can be good to eat. But getting one out of its fur jumpsuit can be quite a challenge. Unlike rabbits, a squirrel's skin is very firmly attached.

Browsing round the internet, I came across this method, which apparently comes from an old book called The Joy Of Cooking.

Has anyone tried it, and can tell me how well it works?

Kill it cook it eat it

Tonight sees the first in a new BBC series of Kill It Cook It Eat It – this series features wild game, starting tonight with deerstalking at Balavil.

Will it be any good, and will it show shooting in a positive light? I watched a previous series, and found the presenter's breathless style rather irritating - milking the situation for every last drop of sensationalism as farm animals were slaughtered and butchered in front of a studio audience, who were then invited to eat the results.

Still, there's a lot to be said for getting the public to face the facts about where their food comes from. Shooting has nothing to hide, and stands to benefit when people compare the life and death of a deer, pheasant, etc, with that of a farm reared animal.

We'll just have to wait and see... tonight, 10.30, BBC3.

UPDATE: And the verdict... Brilliant! If you missed it, you can catch it on BBC iPlayer here.

NOTE: If you're only reading this post on the front page, you're missing out on the lively comment thread here.

Pheasant at Lidl

Lidl is the sort of place I associate with frozen burgers and oven chips - so I was amazed to see the supermarket offering pheasant as part of their 'Luxury for All' promotion.

Great stuff - it shows how far game has come in the last few years, when what is, let's face it, a fairly downmarket retailer reckons it can make a go of selling pheasant to its customers.

At £7.99 a bird Lidl should be making a good mark-up, which I don't begrudge them one bit if it helps to establish pheasant in the urban British diet. After all, it's hard to be anti-shooting and enjoy a roast pheasant at the weekend.

Eccentric game cooking advice

"There are a number of absurd theories on hanging game and my favourite is the suggestion that you hang game by the feet over a silver tray. When the process of hanging (i.e. rotting) has gone far enough, the leg bones separate from the meat and the carcass falls on the silver tray. The noise alerts the butler who sends the under footman to pluck and draw the bird immediately, as it is then perfect."

Some years ago I worked on a different type of magazine that, among other things, advised soldiers how they might survive if they ever found themselves behind enemy lines armed only with a pocket knife and a couple of gold sovereigns. As you do.

"You can do many things on top of a barbecue, it just happens that cooking meat well isn't one of them."

We ran a wonderfully eccentric cookery series by the wonderfully eccentric Simon Mulholland - among his many achievements he lists cooking peacocks for a gathering of Hells Angels, inventing an exciting horsedrawn vehicle, the Saddlechariot (pictured below), and singlehandedly falling out with the entire British horse establishment (those last two are related, and connected with his almost pathological urge to clash head on with any establishment he comes into contact with). Britain used to follow people like Simon into battle; now we treat them like a toxic spill to be contained and rendered harmless by the authorities.


His views on cooking are unusual to say the least - hilariously un-PC reading and an antidote to the self-obsessed fussy foodies who rule nowadays. The series rambles off on various side-tracks, but includes a large section on meat and game.

"Grown women swoon when I tell them I can cook soufflés. This of course demonstrates what a pretentious load of garbage most cooking is."

I thought that the pieces had been lost for ever - but it turns out Simon had kept them, and has now posted them on his blog.

Read Simon's full series here »

RSPCA church service for animal welfare

As someone who only visits church for weddings and funerals, I'm probably not qualified to comment - but I sense something cynical in the RSPCA's attempts to invent a new Christian festival, Animal Welfare Sunday. They've even written their own service for the occasion, which comes with this ludicrous cover from the school of Disney-meets-medieval-hunting-art.

During the service, the congregation are supposed to chant stuff like: "Let us marvel at the little creatures who are innocent in God's sight... the world of foxes playing around their dens..." For some reason, they omit to mention that said foxes are playing with the bones of the ickle cweatures that they ripped the heads off earlier.

Here's one Bible passage that doesn't make an appearance in the RSPCA's service; there are plenty more in similar vein:

"Every moving thing that lives shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things" ( Genesis 9:3)

Squirrel pasties prove popular

We've mentioned various squirrel recipes before. Now it seems one Cornish butcher is doing a roaring trade in squirrel pasties. Story here »

Real Food Festival

I'm looking forward to visiting the Real Food Festival, at Earl's Court in London over the next few days (24-27 April).

Sporting Shooter's chef and game food expert, Mark Gilchrist, will be there as Game For Everything.

The Telegraph, one of the show's sponsors, have put together a couple of videos with Mark, on cooking pigeon and rabbit - watch them here.

Venison casserole recipe video

While we were staying with Andy Richardson in Fife, he cooked up an amazing roe deer casserole which, with his typical wry humour, he called his 'Venison Casseroley Type Thing'. I videoed him making it - here's the result...



Andy commented that the same recipe works well for rook breasts too. And in case you're wondering, yes it really was delicious!

Ferreting again!

Just got back from a great day's ferreting with Mark Gilchrist - Sporting Shooter's game chef. We didn't get a lot of rabbits - four to be precise. Still, it was a lovely bright sunny day and we had a good natter about everything to do with game meat and cookery. Perhaps those two things could explain why the rabbits were so reluctant to bolt!


Mark served up what must be the poshest ferreting lunch ever, with foie gras, brioche, smoked wigeon and dried strips of mallard, which we ate in the field.

And he explained why sometimes my rabbit turns tough as old boots. Apparently, if you cook rabbit for about an hour, it turns like rubber - you can actually bounce lumps of it off a hard surface, like a rubber ball. But if you cook it for 2 hours it goes tender again. Mark says it also helps to soak the rabbit overnight in salt water beforehand, too. So, my next rabbit stew is going to get the full 2 hours, and we'll see if it works!

More photos from our day here.

Jamie Oliver lamping rabbits

Great to see Jamie Oliver on the telly last night, doing a grand job of promoting rabbit as healthy, free-range meat - and showing how lamping is done.

Plus gamekeeper Geoff Garrod was there too, his NGO badge prominently displayed in his hat, explaining why it's necessary to cull deer.

These cookery programmes are finally providing a vehicle for shooters to explain what it's all about. Long may it last!

Filleting rabbits

After a successful day's ferreting, I found myself with a lot of rabbits to process - and by the time I'd fed the dogs and the ferrets, cleaned the guns, hung up the wet clothing, etc, I wasn't too enthusiastic for staying up half the night skinning and jointing all those bunnies.

So I invented a 'quick and dirty' method which is the rabbit equivalent of breasting a pigeon or a pheasant. Basically it lets you get 95% of the useful meat out of a rabbit, with no need to paunch it or even take the skin off fully.


You can probably see all you need from the photo (click on the picture to see a larger version), but just in case, here's how it's done...

1. Take your rabbit, and make a slit in the skin about half-way along its body. Tip: make the slit over its back, not its belly. The skin here is looser, so it's easier to pinch a bit to get the knife point in - and there's no chance of digging too deep and breaking the gut open. (Regular readers will spot that I'm using my Karesuando knife which I ground a new edge on recently - it worked brilliantly).

2. Slip your fingers into the slit, and tear the skin all the way round - separating the rabbit's jacket from its trousers, as it were. Unless it's a tough old buck, the skin should tear quite easily.

3. Pull the 'jacket' and 'trousers' apart to expose the body and legs. No need to pull the skin right off.

4. With the rabbit belly-down on the table, slit along one side of the backbone, from the base of the ribcage down to the pelvis. Don't cut too deep or you'll break through into the gut area.

5. Use the knife point and your fingers to tease the fillet away from the backbone. Once it's free, cut at each end and simply lift the fillet out.

6. Repeat on the other side of the backbone.

7. Now the back legs: cut in towards the hip joint (marked with green lines on my photo), then turn the knife and follow the leg-bone, removing the meat in two chunks.

8. That's it - you now have six nice bone-free chunks of meat that will make a lovely stew, pie, etc. The rest of the rabbit can be thrown away with a clear conscience - there is hardly any meat wasted.

Hunting on TV

Imagine my surprise when I turned on the TV last night to see a handful of British teenagers hunting wild boar with a pack of dogs and spears - on the BBC no less, and at prime evening viewing time too.

The boar was chased with dogs and brought to bay at the top of a waterfall. Eventually it was goaded over the edge and splashed into the pool below, where one of the intrepid lads stabbed it to death with a sharpened bamboo pole. The proud hunter carried his prize home, where it was roasted and enjoyed by the hunting party and their friends and relatives.

Most surprising of all was the tone of the programme. The teenagers were praised for their enthusiasm and determination. The narrator pointed out that this was healthy, natural food. Nobody asked the animal rights nutters for their opinion.

This is Can Fat Teens Hunt? a programme that takes ten "dangerously overweight" teenagers to live the hunter-gatherer lifestyle with the Iban tribe in Borneo - in the hope they will discover a new respect for food, and for themselves and their own bodies.

I'm torn between hating the crassness of the theme, and loving the idea of the BBC showing hunting in such a positive light. Not long ago, political correctness would have stamped on the very idea of this type of programme. Now it's just a logical extension of "extreme reality" programmes and the growing fad for "getting back to nature" by killing your own food (demonstrated by Jamie Oliver, Wild Gourmets, Roadkill Chef and many more).

In fact, the BBC's obsession with animals being killed to eat is becoming almost morbid, with Kill It, Cook It, Eat It tracing an animal's journey from farm to plate. Along the way "a group of specially invited people, from vegetarians to meat enthusiasts, will witness the slaughter," gloats the press release.

Still, it demonstrates a refreshing honesty about where food comes from, which in my experience is stimulating a new interest in shooting and other aspects of the countryside. Shooters should not just welcome this new trend, we should be jumping on the bandwagon!

Fish filleting made simple

I've been catching, preparing and eating fish for years, so goodness knows why I haven't come across this trick before.

Basically, it's a quick and easy way to remove the bones and leave the flesh and skin intact, ready for cooking.

First, gut the fish and trim off the head, tail and fins. Now put your knife down. You don't need it for the next bit - honest! Place the fish stomach-down on the chopping board with the tail end towards you and the head end away. Spread out the flaps you made when you slit the stomach, so it stands up on its own.

Now the clever bit. With your hands on either side, use your thumbs to press down hard on the backbone. You'll feel it give, as if you have squished the fish flat. Actually this is the backbone coming away from the flesh. Repeat all down the backbone.

Then pick it up, find the head-end of the backbone, and pull it away from the flesh. It will come away easily, taking most of the bones with it.

You can then fold the fish back together, cook it flat, or cut the two halves apart, depending on how you want to cook it.

I tried the technique with herrings, and it worked brilliantly. I wondered if it would be possible to slice through the flesh at the head, but leave the backbone intact. That could make it even easier to remove the backbone in one piece. I ran out of herrings to experiment with, but I'll try it next time.

Eating squirrel

Vikki brought a sample of her 'squirrel popcorn' into the office - well, I had to try it...