Embrace the Chaos

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about things that are out of our control.

Some of those things are obvious — we live in unsettled times — but one source of commonplace chaos is the very protein those of us who hunt and fish bring home to sustain ourselves. I thought about this recently as I seared a venison steak from a seven-year-old buck I’d shot in Oklahoma this past season. How different it was from the yearling deer I’d shot in 2023! Eating my steak alone at my kitchen table, a flood of similar experiences washed over me, and I remembered what I used to tell every aspiring fish and game cook:

Embrace the chaos.

Mastering the cooking of wild foods requires a set of experiences with meat and fish so vast it dwarfs even that of a Michelin starred chef. Don’t believe me? Look at this one example: I want to cook this duck breast, can you tell me how? Sure. Let me ask you a few questions first:

• Skin on or skin off?

• What species is it?

• How fat is the bird?

• Where did you shoot it?

• What method are you planning to cook it?

I could go on, but you get the point. All of these things matter. Let’s say the duck still has its skin, and has a decent layer of fat underneath that skin. Species really matters here. Goldeneye? Blech. Skin it, and remove every iota of fat. Pintail? You hit the jackpot. Gadwall or wigeon? Well, where did you shoot it? In some places, these birds are fine table fare. In others, they stink so bad they’re called gagwalls.

One day I was hunting the the Grasslands, a vast warren of marshes in California’s San Joaquin Valley, and shot a pair of mallards. This was unusual because the Grasslands is normally the domain of fat, tasty green-winged teal, not mallards.

The moment I picked up the birds, I felt a tremor of unease. Something was off. The drake's head hadn't fully molted, and the legs on both birds were strangely washed out and covered in lumps bird biologists call bumblefoot. And both ducks were impossibly lean. Hunger strike skinny, to an extent I'd only seen in crippled birds before. What had happened? Were these hybrid mottled ducks, flown up from Mexico? Escaped park ducks? Other than their odd feathers and extreme leanness, they did not look sick.

Maybe they were just very old? When I snipped their tails off to gut them, the bones in their pelvis were unusually thick and hard. And their feet certainly looked heavily walked upon. Clearly these birds had a story, and it was a tough one well before it ended in a hail of flying shotgun pellets.

What had they been eating? There was nothing in their crops, so no telling in a proximate way, but longer term, what had these mallards subsisted on? Mallards can literally eat anything, from grain to grass to tadpoles, dead fish and clams. As one British writer noted, they can range from dodgy to sublime.

Pigs and bears are the same way. They too are omnivores and will taste strongly of whatever it was they had been living off in the weeks prior to you shooting them. I've encountered bear fat that stunk like low tide in August, and have seen wild hogs as skinny as those mallards. I've also seen gloriously fat wild pigs that might as well have been a Duroc or Tamworth, and bears so laden with snowy white fat that it yielded a supply of bear lard lasting a full two years.

Anglers face this problem, too. Bluefish in the Northeast normally eat menhaden, where in North Carolina they will often eat cleaner, less oily fish. Salmon caught in the early season in NorCal will have eaten krill, while late-season chinook will be eating oilier sardines and anchovies. A krill fish is notably superior to a 'chovy fish. Crappies caught in warm water will be softer and blander than those caught in cold water, or through the ice. And catfish can be all over the map.

In general, it all boils down to a few major variables.

• Age. I've shot mallards that were 21 years old, down to young of the year. A spike elk and a dominant bull can be a decade apart in age. A 40-pound striped bass will be exponentially older than an eight-pounder, as will a 10-pound bass caught in Wisconsin versus a 10-pounder caught in Southern California. In general, the older the animal, the tougher it will be, although there are ways to mitigate this, such as dry aging.

• Condition. Wild animals work for a living. Sometimes you can catch them when they are (or were, considering they're dead now) fat and happy, and sometimes, like with these mallards, you catch them in times of stress. I've shot multiple wigeon on the same day, and some were plump, others rail thin. A fat, alfalfa-eating doe is not the same as a wise old matriarch of a mule deer clan. Nor is the same buck shot before the rut versus after; a pre-rut buck will always be in better condition for the table than one shot right afterwards.

• Species. Think about how many species we come home with, as opposed to what a non-hunter or non-angler might. There are nearly four dozen species of waterfowl alone that we hunt in North America, and each has its advantages and disadvantages in the kitchen. A sagey mule deer won't be the same as a cornfield whitetail, and a chinook is most definitely not a pink salmon.

• Region. A cottontail from California's Central Valley may be cute, but it will be tiny and thin. The same species shot in Montana or Minnesota will be a full pound heavier and downright plush. A Coues deer and and a buck from Alberta are both whitetail, but the Canadian deer can outweigh the desert-dwelling Coues by 200 pounds or more.

• Diet. I've mentioned this one above, but it’s worth repeating. I would much rather eat wigeon from the California rice fields than from the coast of Oregon, where sea lettuce makes them legendarily stinky. Ditto for seaweed-eating Atlantic black brant, which are repulsive, versus the ethereal-tasting Pacific brant, which eat eelgrass rhizomes. Snow geese eating peas in Saskatchewan grow morbidly obese, while those eating marsh “salad” in NorCal are as skinny as Kate Moss. And I'd much rather eat a pigeon pillaging grain than one with cigarette butts and Doritos in its crop.

Taken together, all this presents a challenge to the cook. But it is not insurmountable, and can be a fascinating problem to solve. Each animal you bring home is that figurative special and unique snowflake, a gift from nature to be unwrapped and enjoyed on its own terms — an honor few animals eaten by other animals ever get.

Try dancing with this chaos instead of ignoring or fighting it: Make your dish fit the animal, not the animal fit your dish. It’ll make you and those you choose to nourish far happier.