Just in time for the pheasant season – it begins officially on 1 October – I've been reading Bird Brain, a good new novel by Guy Kennaway, which tells the peculiar story of an old-school landowner – he is the kind of man who takes a perverse pleasure in the stink of an ancient Barbour – called Banger. Shot in the head in the very first chapter, Banger is promptly reincarnated as a pheasant, at which point he discovers just how dumb the birds really are.
It sounds odd, and a bit cute. And yes, it is full of dogs that can talk, even if only to each other. But I loved it. In a way, it's a book I've been waiting for all my adult life, for it feels to me like nothing so much as a rather adult version of that other great pheasant story, Roald Dahl's Danny, the Champion of the World.
One thing I have noticed is that, these days, no one seems to be terribly fond of pheasant. Game snobs prefer grouse and woodcock (a bird that requires both contacts and a fat wallet; the hardcore serve it à la française, with the head on the side, sliced through from brain to beak), and game phobics prefer chicken.
Both sides talk of pheasant's tendency to dryness, and the fact that one bird will feed only two people. As a result, it has become surprisingly cheap and, on restaurant menus, almost extinct.
I, though, am devoted to it, and around this time of year I start getting excited. In part, this is because I've discovered the perfect way to cook it (I'll come back to this). But it's a nostalgic thing, too.
When I was a girl, my father, the mushroom expert, used to earn pocket money by working as a beater on one of the Derbyshire estates. I remember that he used to come home from these day-long outings in a state of what I can only describe as euphoria: high, I think, on a combination of pheromones (beating is hard work) and the bizarreness of the scene, socially speaking (though I grant you that a hip flask may also have been involved).
Like the other beaters, he would attach a white flag to the end of his thumb-stick, the better to flush out the dafter – or perhaps I mean the wiser – of the birds. Except on his was written in black magic marker the words: "ONLY A LOUSE WOULD SHOOT A GROUSE".
This was a class observation, you understand, not some loony veggie protest. My father had no objection at all to the mass killing of grouse, partridge and pheasant. It was the people doing the shooting that he disliked.
No surprise, then, that the book of mine he liked most was Danny, the Champion of the World, in which a boy and his father get revenge on the weaselly local landowner, Mr Victor Hazell, by poaching hundreds of his pheasants shortly before the day of a big shoot (this, you will recall, they do by stuffing raisins, for which pheasants are extremely greedy, with sleeping tablets; the birds fall out of their roosts, and Danny and his dad have only to gather them up) – and, thanks to his tutoring, I came to love it the best, too.
Even today, I have only to think about its closing pages, in which the victorious Danny and his dad plan what they are going to cook in their new electric oven (pheasant first, and then roast pork, roast lamb and toad-in-the-hole), to feel, you know, all warm, etc etc.
Anyway, the upshot is that I have always liked, and been interested in, pheasants – whether they are strutting preposterously across a field, or on my dinner table. But how to cook one?
I have two fail-safe suggestions. If you're a stewy kind of a person, then try Margaret Costa's rich and retro pheasant with cider and apples, the recipe for which is in her classic Four Seasons cookbook.
My absolute favourite method, though, is Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's pot roast pheasant with chorizo, butter beans and parsley, which is in River Cottage Every Day (his best and most useful book).
You cook the pheasant in a great pool of stock, which keeps it moist, and the chorizo adds a pleasing note of heat. Even better, though Hugh doesn't tell you so, the leftovers make for an effortless soup. Shred any remaining meat, add it to the juices, onions, herbs and beans and, if necessary, add a little boiling water.
If I were a beater, or even (dream on) a shooter, this is what I would put in my lunchtime flask.
