Customer Reviews

Wild Game Cookery: Down-Home Recipes for Foods from the Wild

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

After reading this cookbook, I felt like the graduate of a low-key cooking course. The mystery of stocks and sauces is solved in this practical, yet sophisticated guide to the preparation of fish, fowl, wild game and natural foods. Vance leads her readers ever so gently and enthusiastically from foraging for wild cattails, to toeing for clams, to building your own smoker, to preparing diving duck. In the process, she makes everything sound easy! I found this cookbook to be a particularily refreshing guide to the preparation of natural foods from scratch ... the poaching liquid becomes the base of a soup, the scraps and bones go into a pot for the stock ... this is real cooking for real people. I found it worth reading just for the newsy notes, comments and tips on how to make food preparation easy and simple. I don't fish or hunt, but I am an avid cook who is always wants to try something new. Most grocery stores offer an ever-widening selection of fish and game, but I am often not as "adventurous" as I'd like to be because I am unsure how to prepare & serve them. Vance's cookbook solves this dilemma and encourages me to be as "wild" as I'd like to be! If you are a hunter (or love someone who is), I would definitely include "Wild Game Cookery" on your Christmas wish list.

My husband has been bringing venison and partridge home for years...but I never really knew what to do with it until I got this book. Now I make gourmet meals like Venison Scaloppine and Pheasant Breast Margarita! It has lots of easy recipes too, and even some vegetarian ones like Dandelion Salad and Wild Rice with Mushrooms. Bon Appetit!

The third edition of J. Carol Vance's Wild Game Cookery includes recipes for large game, fowl and small game, fish and seafood, wild greens and edibles, and side dishes to go with your hand-harvested goodies.

The recipe layout is clear and easy to read, and we didn't encounter any mistakes or errors in the recipes we tried. Although I tend to be more forgiving of the lack of photos in cookbooks than some people, it's a bit of a shame that there aren't any in this book, seeing as plenty of people haven't worked with venison, duck, etc. and would probably love to see some mouth-watering photos.

Some recipes have notes such as "low fat" under them, although I'm dubious, seeing as I don't think I'd call any duck recipe low-fat (it tends to be a very fatty meat in my experience). There are some very handy tips, however, such as how to tell when your venison steaks are done to your liking.

No one was terribly impressed with the potato side dish we made from here, which had virtually no seasoning or flavor to it. Many of the dishes are minimally flavored, or use pre-blended flavorings such as Old Bay or packaged spicy ketchup. Sometimes this works out well with a given ingredient, but sometimes I was left wondering why one would need a cookbook to tell them to put some of these ingredients together.

I do recommend Wild Game Cookery if you aren't sure what to do with a duck, goose, venison steak, trout, etc. Most of the recipes are easy and delicious. If you're a well-seasoned cook looking for new and exciting things to add to your repertoire, however, there are probably better choices out there.