Be honest about the food you eat: Veal and Game

I like guilty pleasures, and I think I covered that with my commentary on foie gras. Veal is one of them, along with Andalusian porn. There is no meat more tender and horrific than veal. Imagine living your poor, truncated life in a cage. Immobilized, you are left to flounder interminably. One day, you are killed, gutted, and parceled off to consumers.

Its tough to think about, but if you love food and understand the origins of the food we eat, you need to accept the raw, bloody, and sometimes cruel ways we raise and process our foods. I am not making a political statement. I eat these things and many other delicacies that would be considered vastly more horrendous, but I am honest about where my food comes from.

I've had this discussion with many people: the culture of hunting. Let me preface this next paragraph by emphasizing I am not a member of the NRA, or somebody who advocates issuing a firearm to everybody from your six year old nephew, to Michael J. Fox. But, I was raised around firearms.

Jews aren't rednecks by nature, but my dad is from West Virginia -another Jewish first- so that carried over into our refined but mercurial, Northern Virginia clique. My first rifle was a piddly Remington .22. Light and nimble, the .22 is the standard introductory firearm to any toddler. I was eight when I shot my first pickle jar. I soon graduated to TVs and refrigerators.

There was never a greater visceral excitement than shooting our rifles in the dumping ground behind my grandmothers house. Yeah, I sound like a hick, but if you think Call of Duty is fun, try popping off a few real bullets at a major appliance. I also happily announce to everyone cringing about this cavalier tribute to shooting and killing...that I never killed anything with a gun or otherwise. Honestly, I loved to shoot inanimate objects, but never had an opportunity to bag anything.

So, stepping aside from commercially processed meat, let's talk about the roots of meat and hunting culture in America.

You use everything you kill.
You do not kill indescriminately.
You do not poach.
You respect nature.

I know how ironic it sounds for someone espousing the rules of hunting to mention "respect nature" in the same breath. However you want to interpret it, hunting is about respecting nature. Don't focus on the singular act of killing. Hunting is about respecting your prey, only killing what is useful for your family, population control and only hunting adult males.

Population control? What kind of wacky euphamism are you selling me? It's wholesale killing! No, population control is a serious issue that can have a deleterious rippling effect to other species if not handled properly. And when I say handled I mean killing.

Think of it this way, as the top of the predatory chain, humans are the last control over a population that has few natural enemies. I will use the example of white tail deer. They are ubiquitous throughout the world, and left unfettered their population will explode like rabbits. This happened about seven years ago when I was leaving Virginia. The natural landscape could no longer handle the population of deer. Starvation set in and carcasses began to pile up in faster rates than usual. This not only spread disease, it brought scavengers.

Trees were dying as the population of buck, who use them to sharpen their antlers, grew out of control. So keeping a population under control that has few natural predators, is up to humans. And that means hunting and eating them.

I know for many who are not exposed to this sort of background, might find this appaling. After all, this is a culinary magazine. Well, meat comes from an animal, and that animal has to be killed and processed. Its no fun. As bare as it may sound, hunting is a natural way to feed your family. Hunting is a family tradition where the men venture into the forest, judiciously following the rule of law, to shoot their allotment of game for that season.

Contrast that to commercially processed meat, which packs millions of pounds of living animals together, to be trotted into disassembly lines of rending factories and hewn apart for our consumption.

I have a healthy appetite for game meats. I've eaten wild boar, buffalo, venison, elk, caribou, kangaroo, ostrich and rattlesnake. What is alluring about wild meat is somewhat credited to a gamey flavor, and the fact that no two dishes will taste the same since each animal let a separate and distinct life.

Contrast the growing trend to farm raise 'wild' animals in an effort to breed out any of the gamey flavor brought about by an uncontrolled diet. To me, this defeats the purpose of eating game meats. Truly, just as most white meat tastes like chicken, all red meat, if farm raised, tastes like beef. Why spend the extra $20 for a venison dish if it tastes like beef tenderloin?

Clearly, stripping away the gamey flavor cleans up the taste and makes it appealing for the masses, but it is also sterilizing the unique quality that makes wild caught game meat special. I feel the same way about catfish and crawfish. Although they've removed the muddy taste, the muddy taste was always a part of the flavor.

So, to my original point (I had one, really). Wienerschitzel. It was something I had been craving ever since going to Tahoe. Bavarian food and snow marry well, after all, and pink fillets of veal that have been caged all their short lives, then beaten down by a chef harboring an excessive and unhealthy internal rage, just beg to be dredged and sauted.

After tanking up on your favorite hefeweisen, boil off your spaetzle or in my cheap case, bow tie pasta. What? Spaetzle? Man, you are high maintenance. Ok, if you are a purist and have a bit more time on your hands after work than I do, you can use this recipe:

2 large eggs, beaten
1/2 cup milk
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg

2 tablespoons butter

1. Combine eggs and milk; stir in flour, salt and nutmeg, beating until smooth.
2. Drop dough by teaspoonfuls into large pot of boiling water (or pass through a colander). Cook 2 to 3 minutes.
3. Drain and toss with the butter, or melt butter in skillet and gently fry spatzle until browned, about 3 to 4 minutes

I stole that from somewhere. Anyway, whichever tiny twisted pasta you choose, boil it al dente (die Schnauze voll haben).

Prepare your mushroom cream sauce. I had the priviledge of a concentrated demi glas, but you can buy a can of beef stock and reduce it. For the sauce:

crimini, or your preference of mushrooms
3 strips bacon
cream
salt
beef stock
vermouth
sage
rosemary

Fry the bacon and remove when crisp. Drain most of the fat, but not all. Sautee the sliced mushrooms, adding salt to taste. When the pan is dry, add a combination of vermouth and beef stock to deglaze the pan. Reduce the stock to almost nothing, barely any moisture inthe pan. When ready, transfer everything to a sauce pot and add 1 cup of heavy cream. Add the rosemary and sage, just a small dash of each. Simmer on low, stirring often. Reduce by half.

Meanwhile, season your flower and dredge the veal cutlets. Shake off the excess and sautee in a pan until done. They cook quickly, no more than 3 minutes a side, until browned.

Plate up the noodles, place the veal on top, liberally sauce since much of it will be absorbed by the noodles. Put on some lederhosen and play some oompah!