Venison Recipes

Today, venison is gourmet fare. Venison is offered largely in the up-scale market of hotel and restaurant trade. Red Deer venison is by far the best tasting and leanest, with only 22% of the meat energy derived from fat, as compared with 35-47% for lamb and 33% for beef. Its even lower than chicken in fat, saturated fat, and overall calories. The ratio of polyunsaturated to saturated and monounsaturated fatty acids in venison is higher than in conventional red meats. Therefore, it has the best attributes of red meat without the perceived health risks.

There are tales of early Saints encountering Stags, (Red Deer males). Some go as follows:

St Eustace, a general under Emperor Trojan, was out hunting and was confronted by a stag bearing a crucifix between its horns and was immediately converted to Christianity. A similar tales is told of King David I of Scotland who when hunting near Edinburgh was attacked by a stag, when he reached to grab its horns, found a crucifix placed in his hand. The Monastery of Holyrood was founded there to commemorate the miracle.

"St. Cainnic of Ireland had a Stag who would hold his book between its antlers as the Saint read. St. Ciaran, who was cast out of his monastery on account of his excessive charity, was led by a stag that carried his wallet of books to Lough Ree where he founded a new monastery. Deer nibbling his newly planted orchard infuriated St. Godric Durham, but when patience was exhausted and he resolved to belabour a stag, it dropped to its knees for pardon and was thus led from the garden. Even though his orchard was again spoiled by deer, he was forgiving enough to harbour a hunted stag for a day and a night in his house." These stories published by Nichola Fletcher, in Venison The Monarch of the Table.

Red Deer became the basis of specialized Mesolithic economies throughout Eurasia. This was the period between the Paleolithic and Neolithic eras, marked by the appearance of the bow and of cutting tools. Persians in the first millennium BC controlled an empire from present day Iran to Greece, and maintained vast hunting preserves called paradises. The Greeks kept animals in small private reserves, called mammal-feeding grounds. The Romans in the first century BC adapted game husbandry. The therapeutic properties of venison were widely known as stated by Plinius Secundus about 116-27 BC. In talking about stag’s, (male Red Deer), "The animal is not liable to feverish diseases – indeed, it even supplies a prophylactic against their attack."

By the year 1200 royal forests covered approximately 20% of England, an army of royal gamekeepers guarded them. With industrialism, urban people had both the means and the time to practice field sports. In the Scottish Highlands hunting became so profitable and popular that deer forests increased from 1,975,209 acres in 1884 to 2, 878,342 by 1911. The same type of pattern occurred in continental Europe, except that the democratization of game came much more abruptly with the French and German Revolutions. Control of wildlife rested in the hands of the landowner

In North America in the early eighteenth and nineteenth century the democratic access to wildlife led to profound wildlife depletion. A system was eventually established that banned most forms of direct commercialization of wildlife and placed control firmly in the hands of the state.