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.

Wanting to do justice to the gift and the bird, we turned to the oracle on these occasions for advice – YouTube – and found a chef who demonstrated for the camera how to skin, fillet and cook it.

We set to work. you don't pluck a pheasant - that's too fiddly. You peel its skin, and the feathers come too. It's quick, clean and easy. Oliver nicked the skin on the breastbone pulled it away in a thick coat. It made a curious noise, like fabric ripping quietly. Some people might feel squeamish at that thought. But it’s a noise that connects us to what we’re eating. It reminds us that if we going to eat meat, something has to be prepared and butchered. It’s a noise that our ancestors have been hearing for many generations. It’s a good noise to hear.

Once the bird was bare, Oliver butchered it, carving off the breast fillets and the legs. And then I cooked it, after finding a couple of recipes online and then making up my own version.

I like to cook a dish such as this slowly and thoughtfully. That allows time for the flavours to develop, in the pot and in my mind. After searing the meat, I cooked shallots and mushrooms, added white wine and cream and some chard from the garden, and cooked it all gently in the oven in a cast iron pot for a brief time.

If we’re lucky enough ever to have another pheasant, I’d try a different recipe – with more of a jus rather than a heavy cream sauce. Even so, the dish was delicious, the meat like a cross between chicken and pork, with a good bite but not too chewy, and very flavoursome. We ate it two nights in a row, first with roast potatoes and then with rice.

The provenance of meat is important and we're happy to know this pheasant would have lived a good life in the wild or on an estate. It came to us near-organic and free range. We’re happy with that, and with the chance to have tried it, and cooked it.