Pheasant for dinner

One of our customers gave us a pheasant for dinner. We had to google how to prepare it.

There’s a tradition in rural Tasmania of swapping foodstuffs. It’s the edible black market in things from the river, the land and the larder. Over the years we’ve dealt in eggs, pork, salmon, venison, wallaby patties, Riesling and sausages. When we became artisan food producers and joined a farmers’ market everything went up a notch, and now it could be craft beer, sourdough bread or kombucha.

Now, we have been gifted a pheasant. The benefactor is a customer, a man who likes Oliver’s bacon so much he buys a whole side at a time. He takes it on holiday with him to far flung islands and invites friends along for epicurean feasts. This man went on a pheasant shoot in Victoria and shot more than his own tastes required, so gave us a bird.

​I collected it from the drop-off point, a Launceston providore where the girls were a little freaked out by the sight of a fully feathered dead pheasant, and had popped it on the floor of the cool room in a corner, with its head tucked under a cabinet.

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