The wild gormets

wadashot

Well-Known Member
Just watched a new series about the food that can be gathered from the countryside, what a great programme and lots more great stuff to come. Well done channel 4, keep it up. Not like left wing BBC. Make sure you watch it and support this type of television.
wadashot. :D :D
 
The idea was good, but it lacked depth.

Cutting bits of loin out of a rabbit whilst still in fur, whats that all about? How about cooking up a decent meal, why does it have to be fancy and three course!

Fishing with snails, whats wrong with worms! :eek:

Me and the wife go on hunting/fishing, camping holidays all the time and eat very well. I was waiting for those two to pull out the best silver and bone China. :lol:

I'll still watch it though, as long as matey doesn't spend the whole series showing the camera his naked hairy arse crack :eek: !
 
Don't know how many of you are watching the new SKY Horse & Country channel ? It was mentioned here before. I watch it quite regularly and there are some reasonable programmes in the mix.
Last night they had Dave Stretton, who runs the deer park at Donnington, culling a fallow, then tagging calves.
They did a good, if somewhat over dramatised , programme on grouse shooting earlier in the week.
Apart from a claim in a badger programme that 2000 badgers are killed by badger baiters every year, which imho is complete bollocks , everything shown is reasonably accurate.
 
Only 2000 badgers :rolleyes:
Some-one who had never seen a badger in the wild reliably informed me that all those badgers on the side of the road where from badger bateing.
Very neat dog they must use.

Mark
 
The Horse and Country Channel (Sky 280) is quite good. The programme in question is Heart of the Country Goes Wild and it will be repeated several times during the week. On the same channel you will find some Johnny Kingdom programmes with good footage of red deer on Exmoor and a few fishing programmes together with a load of horsey programmes. Another programme covers the BASC Gamekeepers Fair.

There are good cooking programmes on the UK Food Channel (Sky 259) and the one to look out for is Heaven's Kitchen (and Heaven's Kitchen at Large) which is based on a pub called the Pot Kiln at Frilsham, near Newbury. Mike Robinson the chef/patron shoots, stalks and fishes and you will see him shoot a range of game and deer including muntjac, roe, red (and a failed attempt at boar) together with rabbits, pigeon, duck and pheasants. He then prepares them for the oven and cooks them. In his cookery school the first thing he does is to give each student a rabbit in the skin and go from there and at the Henley Food Fair he took a deer in the skin and prepared it in front of an audience. I think this is great as people need to realise that the food in plastic packets in supermarkets was once a living animal that often has a worse life (and death) than the deer and game we shoot and that game that is shot is eaten.

I've eaten there and if you live nearby or are passing I can recommend it - the muntjac terrine is excellent.

Gordon Ramsey did go deer stalking on the F Word (Channel 4) but couldn't pull the trigger, however in the several series you have seen him rear turkeys, pigs and lambs in his garden and then have them slaughtered and eaten.

On the Great British Menu you saw Nick Nairn go out with a stalker to get the roe for one of his recipes.

Finally, on Hells Kitchen there was some edited footage of Marco Pierre White shooting a roe buck, not one of his many Gold Medals but a decent cull buck. They did edit out the shot of the deer being hit but there were shots of the just shot animal being dragged out with plenty of blood about. Given that this was "prime time" terrestrial TV it is quite a bold move.
 
The point i was getting at really, was that it`s good to see these type of programmes on the tele, and yes, we have had other similar progs like Gordan Ramseys F word and Hugh Fearnley Wittingstall, which i do personally enjoy, as well as the other cookery programmes showing where there ingredients come from, but channel 4 in my opinion don`t seem to shy away from the gory side, "if you like" as much as the beeb. Whatever happened to Clarisa and the countryman, maybe not to everyones like, but showing countryside issuse and traditions none the less. I used to watch a programme after school, well over 20 years back now, this series was called Brendan chase, about three brothers that ran away to the woods, lived in a tree, and survived on what they shot with an old .22 and snared etc. This programme has never ever been repeated, unlike lots of other kids shows, maybe this programme is a little too close to the knuckle nowadays for some of our nanny stated kids.
 
You are right Wadashot, I just think that all these programmes miss the point. Hunting and foraging was the way of life for thousands of years. The perverse state we find ourselves, in today's Britain should be better understood and more credibility given to the life style we gave up in order to live in our 'civilised' country.
We as hunters have the respect for the wilds, but to many this 'living off the land' is a fashion. Next week it will be Mongolian food, the week after African.
I suppose their will be some converts, it was Hugh Fearnley's programmes that changed my out look on life and reminded me of the 'Out of Town' programmes that Jack Hargreaves presented when I was a child.
Happy care free days! :)
 
Beowulf said:
.....and reminded me of the 'Out of Town' programmes that Jack Hargreaves presented when I was a child.
Happy care free days! :)

You can get all of the Out of Town series on DVD - I've rented them all recently and they stand the test of time superbly well.
 
Paul,
I used to watch the Out of Town programme when I was a kid ! A couple of months ago, I was browsing in a second hand bookshop in Weymouth and found a copy of a Jack Hargreaves book. I took it up to the counter and the old boy there looked at it and said when he was a boy, he used to see Jack driving his horse and cart round Bere village where he lived !
 
Roger said:
Paul,
I used to watch the Out of Town programme when I was a kid ! A couple of months ago, I was browsing in a second hand bookshop in Weymouth and found a copy of a Jack Hargreaves book. I took it up to the counter and the old boy there looked at it and said when he was a boy, he used to see Jack driving his horse and cart round Bere village where he lived !

One programme which shows just how old some of these programmes are was of a horse training centre in Andalucia. During the sequence Jack was driven to a horse fair at the local bullring in a team of six and I thought that the bullring looked familiar. It stood alone surrounded by farmland as far as you could see but I was sure that I recognised it. I wound the DVD back and looked again and it was the Puerto Banus bullring now surrounded by villas and apartments as far as the eye can see - times change!!
 
i used to be glued to the tv when brendan chase used to be on after school.all these years i have been trying to remember the name well done wadashot. :D i remember them shooting then salting a boar and burying it by there tree
 
This is it! I've been spoilt. Years and years of Jack Hargreaves! I would hear the Anglian TV music and rush in from whatever I was doing to watch it.
Some times I'd be rather disappointed, as 'Sale of the Century' came from Anglian TV too. So the music would come on, the silver Knight would go round on the horse; then a pause. Sometimes Jack Hargreaves, sometimes Nicholas Parsons!! :evil:
 
The wild gormet

Yes, tika.308, "brendan chase", it was great stuff when we were kids after school. I wonder if it could be purchased on video or dvd from anywhere. I will have a look on youtube, you never know. But I, along with others was also glued to the tele watching Jack Hargreaves aswell, sat in his shed giving good detail of the countryside, the old fashioned ways. Didn`t he also do a series called "Old Country"?.

I`ve just been coming back from work this evening and was listening to radio 2 with Chris Evans, Thursday are his foody days when he gets a guest in talking about "food", low and behold he was talking about Venison, his guest mentioned, munty, fallow, red, and roe deer and was really bigging it up as to how available it was, and also went a little bit into shooting them. Maybe a bit of useless piece of info but none the less another mention. wadashot.
 
I heard Chris Evans too Wadashot. Very good!
We also have a regional programme called 'Country People'. The Game Keeper from Eastnor Castle Estate was talking about his Red Deer herd and the Duck, Pheasant and Partridge shoots helping to make some of the much needed money for the estate's up keep.

Brilliant! Maybe the worm is finally turning?

I've just prepared two huge saucepans full of Roe Buck off cuts for my three Lurchers and two Jack Russels. :lol: You can hear a pin drop as they took in, just the occasional 'slurp'! Brilliant!!
 
Brendan Chase by BB, is available as a paper back book on Amazon for £3.59. Still searching for the DVD.
 
Nice one Beowulf.

I had a look on ebay and found absolutely loads of the "out of town" series
but nowt resembling "brendan chase". But like you I will keep looking.
wadashot. P.S I will consider buying that book.
 
The Wild Gourmets

Here I go again.
The Mention of Brendan Chase brings back memories of my schooldays. I was Seven or eight when our teacher read the book to us over several lessons. I couldn't wait for the next lesson.
The passage that sticks in my mind was when the older brother (I think) tried to shoot a deer uning the gun he borrowed from the charcoal burner, Smoky Joe and the cartridge failed to fire.
I wondered for years who the author was and stumbled acros it when reading one of BB's books in later life.
I may be drifting off the thread but, another favourite of mine was the schools nature programs on the radio.
 
The penny has just dropped! I've been thinking, 'I've never heard of this programme, how old are these chaps'?
Now you mention the charcoal burner, I remember! I think he had a little terrier and a fat purple nose? :lol: The charcoal burner had the big purple nose not the terrier!
 
I found the music to Brendan Chase on YouTube.
The Jack Hargreaves DVD's were released thanks to a petition by the 'Countryman's Weekly' readers. Maybe we should do the same for Brendan Chase!
 
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