About 12 or so years ago, I and a friend of mine went to do some wild boar hunting in a pretty rural part of the former east Germany with a family friend of mine. Prior to me organising the trip he introduced me to several other hunting friends of his , and as a result we then met up with them and hunted wild boar on their Christmas driven hunts while we were there on that trip too.
One of the extremely nice people invited us back to have a meal and some drinks after a very cold yet productive day of driven wild boar hunting at his neighbours farm.
It was Amazing food , a truly German winter meal, simple and extremely tasty. The meal consisted of really good Sauerkraut with fried onions and pineapple in it , and well salted waxy boiled potatoes with parsley and never ending plates of sweet and very juicy spit roasted wild boar with stunningly soft yet slightly crispy fat on it. The fat tasted like the slow roasted fat on some really good barley fed four rib beef. With it there was a beautiful rich chestnut brown sauce made from the spit roasted drippings that had been finished with apple schnapps and cream . I’ve never been able to replicate it , despite trying hard to do so.
They had had a big Richtfest the day before ( a German tradition to celebrate the completion of the roof structure on a new building- in this case a timber frame barn ) and they still had this one young Frischling left over, so we were all involved in a big old spit roasted meal. There were about 20 to 30 people there, half of us from the hunt ( all friends of his) and his wife and grandchildren etc.
Anyway, after the meal we were all chatting away having the odd Schnaps and sing song and the old man who’s new barn it was and I were talking about the new barns construction. He told me that the old barn that they removed to build the new one had been nice yet old, but, because of a large rat infestation one wall had partially collapsed and so he decided it would be easier just to build a new one it’s place. He then went off on a massive tangent to the conversation and started telling me about some young lost Frischlings he had found in his forrest . I was wondering what the relevance was up until he told me he had caught a few , taken them home with him ( highly not allowed) and shut them in the old barn . He said he’d t just given them a fenced run by one of the doors with a big muddy spot / mini pond he’d made and some straw bales to play in . He’d hardly ever fed them as they were always more interested in grubbing out and eating all of the rats in the barn . Within a matter a few months they had dug out the foundations and clay and straw floor to the point that whole sections of the barn were in danger of collapsing and the Frischlings were all very fat. So, he took them out, fed them on for a bit then slaughtered them all and froze them down and had been eating them. Needless to say, the one we had been eating from the spit roast was one of them too.
a few people I’ve told that too thought it was disturbing, but, make of it what they like, mice and rats and all sorts of other creatures form a big part of a wild boars diet. Moreover , that was a very tasty meal, one of the more memorable ones too.
Kindest regards, Olaf
