You can keep your kobe beefburgers. Muntjac is the best meat I've ever tasted. It's a species of small deer not indigenous to these shores, but quite common in Oxfordshire, by my reckoning more common than roe and red deer, our two native species. I spot one every couple of weeks scarpering through a hedge or dashing off through the trees. They're about the size of a sheep, and they thump along quite heavily, close to the ground. Farmers think of them as a pest, but actually, unlike other species of deer in Britain, they don't do any damage to crops. If they do cause problems it's by eating conservation plants in set-aside land - the strips left uncultivated by landowners for the benefit of the ecosystem as a whole.
I'd be willing to pay handsomely for wild muntjac, although they don't seem to change hands for money. I've never seen it in the shops. I don't know that it's farmed at all here. The meat probably tastes so good because muntjac are selective feeders, nibbling at small morsels of a wide variety of plants. The feral ones get the pick of the very best forage going. People just don't realise how delicious they are.
In this country, farmed animals don't have such a varied or interesting diet. It's difficult and expensive to recreate. Pigs were traditionally fattened in orchards. Some farms, such as Treflach in Shropshire, are starting to reintroduce these practices and it's worth paying more for. Feeding cows beer, as is the kobe way, seems wrong to me. It would be even more expensive to cultivate muntjac to taste the way it should, though. It feeds by taking its pick of a range of endangered plant species.
My appreciation of muntjac is well known around the parish. A neighbour called midweek saying he had one for me, he'd skinned it, too, which is a grisly business. But it was hanging in his shed and would be ready for the weekend. All week I was excited about it.
Wild meat does tend to be more difficult to cook on the whole - I've never managed to make the local rabbit delicious, but venison seems to be quite hard to ruin, however you do it. I went to sleep thinking about it, thought maybe I'd build a bonfire and spitroast the thing whole, but then the weather looked dodgy and I decided to hedge my bets: bone and roll the legs and rotisserie-barbecue those; slow-roast the shoulders; and I thought I'd grill the fillets, whole.
I went to see the butcher and asked if he'd show me how best to attack it and also how to bone the legs, which was fine with him as long as it was skinned and I came back at the end of the day. So off I went to collect my deer with a big smile on my face.
As is often the case in the country, my neighbour's front door was wide open, but there didn't seem to be anybody at home. I eventually attracted the attention of someone mowing a lawn. After a brief game of charades he took me to a shed where a man was sawing wood. He'd done his best on the deer as well.
He led me to a freezer in the corner and produced a crinkly carrier bag that was full to the brim with a whole muntjac. It had been hacked to pieces that had frozen into a big round lump. I couldn't take it to the butcher's like that, so I let it thaw out and had a go at boning the leg myself in the morning. It looked a bit rustic, but that's what it is. Rustic venison. Farmer's perk.
