An Adventure in Appalachian Cooking

September wasn’t an easy month, but we ate well.

We almost didn’t because things have been so difficult. At the beginning of the month we were still behind on rent and in serious trouble, but thanks to a series of lucky breaks, we broke even at zero about halfway through, and then we had to put every penny towards trying to replace my catastrophe of a ten-year-old Nissan– and we’re still not quite there yet. I wondered how we were going to stretch out the grocery budget. But a neighbor did us a huge favor by cleaning out her freezer.

I knew that bow hunting season for the white tailed deer was coming up in three states, and I asked in the Buy Nothing Group if I could have a little deer meat if anybody hunted more than they were going to freeze. The honest-as-sod Northern Appalachians don’t call it “venison,” which is fancy fare for rich people to eat in restaurants. They call it “deer meat,” which is sustenance.

It happened that a neighbor on my block had just been cleaning out her freezer ahead of her husband’s planned hunting trip. A whole deer is hundreds of pounds of sustenance. The hunters process it and keep it in the deep freeze all year, eating their favorite cuts first. She still had quite a few packages of the cheaper deer meat left, but they were going to get fresh meat. She didn’t see my post and made her own, asking if anybody wanted it.

I said I did, and I got it: I  received a huge pile of deep purple cylinders of ground meat, plus a package of vacuum-sealed appendages– I think they were shanks. She apologized that some of it wasn’t even labeled and I’d have to figure out if it was sausage or just crumbles.

I thanked her with all my heart. This might have cost a fortune if I’d bought it at a meat market. Ground deer meat sells for twelve dollars a pound, if you call it “venison” and order it online from a fancy food distributor, and this was six or seven logs of meat weighing well over a pound each. I was rich.

But then I paused, because I didn’t actually know how to cook venison. I’d had it a couple of times. My very first landlord when I moved to Steubenville was an avid hunter who kept his meat processing equipment in a corner of the laundry room, horrifying me one night when I came down in my pajamas to find him cutting up a great big shank with the leg and hoof still on, and the next day his sister brought me a dish of pulled meat for sandwiches.  But that meat was already seasoned and cooked. I didn’t know how to cook it on my own.

The first attempt was miserable. I made burgers, anxiously. Some people can make a delicious deer burger, but I cannot. Ground venison is 90% lean, so it won’t stick together like ground beef. Even though I mixed in beaten egg and shaved in a lot of cold butter, the final result was a mouthful of sand, a horrible dinner.

I tried again. The next pound of venison went into the pressure cooker instead of being browned on the stove, which made it more tender. I added a lot of olive oil, mushrooms, seasoning and broth, and made a stew. That wasn’t bad.

The next package turned out to be sausage, which in this case was flavored like country sausage. I flinched, because I hate sausage. The grease is so slimy, it makes me feel like I’m licking the bottom of a deep fryer. But I cooked up the sausage with a little oil in the pressure cooker, and I tasted it.

It was delicious.

Venison sausage is not a wad of grease the way pork sausage is, since venison is so lean. We had venison sausage with eggs for a few days running, and I thought I was in Heaven.

After that I cracked the code. We have venison tacos over the weekend and I wish we could eat venison tacos forever. We had venison sausage gravy over biscuits– I had mine over a keto-friendly chaffle waffle to keep my PCOS from flaring up. It was the best sausage gravy I’d ever had. Last of all I made a big pot of chili, the very best chili I ever had. That was the end of the ground deer. I put the legs in the fridge to thaw for a mushroom stew.

The culinary adventures have made a difficult month bearable.

And meanwhile my neighbors are thanking me for passing around the glut of heirloom tomatoes last month, I’ve got the Baker Street Irregulars asking me when I’m going to come over with a new batch of muffins, and I realize I’m part of an ecosystem. This is how a neighborhood of humans, a family of humans, a community of humans is supposed to work. Humans are supposed to hunt and gather or farm our food as best we can depending on the biome we’re in, and then we’re supposed share it with one another.

Sharing your food is one of the corporal works of mercy, but it’s also just wired into us. It’s how we’re supposed to survive. And it’s fun.

I can’t wait until the hunters clean out their freezers next year.

Life is good.