I’m not much of a hunter. This admission, coming from a middle-aged man who lives bang in the middle of what used to be called “Sportsman’s Paradise,” will probably strike proper hunters as a crying shame. Because, living as we do in former farming country northeast of St. Francisville, our family spends its days surrounded by woods teeming with perfectly huntable deer and turkeys and doves and rabbits and squirrels, all of which get to meander about the property, grazing serenely on my wife’s camellias, without fear of being fired upon. I’m not a vegetarian or an animal rights activist or opposed to the idea of killing creatures to put meat on the table. In fact it strikes me that, if you are going to eat meat ,you’re probably better off going out and slaughtering it yourself than you are purchasing an indeterminate chunk of grain-fed, super-sized, steroid-inoculated, pre-sliced, shrink-wrapped stuff stacked on a styrofoam tray in your supermarket cold cabinet. Somehow the former seems more honest. And healthier for all concerned—target animal included.
But for some reason, I never got the bug. So we are fortunate to have Cousin Jim living next door. A lifelong outdoorsman, Cousin Jim is an avid hunter and fisher whose skill at harvesting free-range herbivores from the surrounding woods and fields is only matched by the variety of contraptions he has collected to cook them in. Each winter Cousin Jim puts enough of a dent in the local deer population to keep everyone’s freezer filled, and rare is the weekend when clouds of fragrant smoke from his side of the fence don’t betray some bold new experiment involving wild game, pecan wood, some smoke-belching cast-iron thing that looks like a modified steam locomotive, and beer—lots and lots of beer.
For the non-hunter, this is a hard act to follow. So I’m pleased to report that as I write this, there’s a big, juicy shoulder of wild hog simmering away at my elbow. In recent years, wild Russian boar have become commonplace in this part of the state. Not that you see them much; they’re shy and smart, and it’s rare to spot the animals themselves at any time of the night or day. But it’s easy to see where they’ve been. They’re fantastically destructive, doing so much damage to fields and fences and pond levees that it can look as if you’ve had an infestation of miniature bulldozers after a herd of feral hogs have been through. Alarmingly prolific, the sows can produce two litters a year and average five to six piglets per litter. And when you consider that each piglet has the capacity to become three hundred pounds of hairy, betusked, prehistoric-looking, omnivorous bulldozer, it’s a good thing that their meat, properly prepared, is absolutely delicious.
So surely it makes sense to be eating wild hog at every opportunity, right? The answer depends on whom you ask. As a keen cook, I love the thought of feeding the family from the wild pantry. As a failed hunter, I have to rely on the kindness of Cousin Jim to keep me in meat. So I was excited, a few weeks back, when Jim rolled up in the yard pulling a trailer containing not one, not two, but four feral hogs of varying hugeness that had succumbed to the allure of his hog traps. The problem was that my wife saw them, too. And unable to separate the image of the hairy, evil-looking, besnouted dead beasts lolling obscenely in the trailer from the juicy pulled pork dishes that I assured her they were to become, she has been unable to enjoy the spoils to full extent. She swears that this has nothing to do with my cooking, but since I have been banished from the kitchen and relegated to the barn to braise the Mexican pulled pork dish I’m working on this afternoon, I’m not sure I believe her. She maintains that this is due to my insistence on preparing said dish using an ancient crockpot that I discovered in the top of the pantry, that seems like just the kind of contraption you see on the news, getting the blame for starting an electrical fire. Judging by the brown and orange graphics this crockpot may well date from the seventies, but so far nothing bad has happened; and the aromas of cumin, oregano, cinnamon, and cloves emanating from it are certainly making my barn smell better than it usually does. How the pork will turn out, and whether my family will eat it, we’ll have to wait a couple more hours to find out. But one thing’s for sure: if my crockpot does die, the barn burns down, or I manage to mess this dish up in some other way thanks to Cousin Jim there’ll always to be plenty more wild hog meat where this came from.
