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Years ago, I watched a hunter skinning and cutting out the breast meat from a drake canvasback. I stood there, mesmerized. It was the first canvasback I’d ever seen in the flesh. Canvasbacks, if you are not familiar with them, are the king of ducks — so prized that it would cost $125 in today’s money to order one in a restaurant, back when this was legal nearly a century ago. Then and now, canvasbacks are a treasure at the table.
You do not skin and “breast out” such a treasure. Standing there, I found myself physically repulsed by what this guy was doing. For a long while I couldn’t even open my mouth for fear of what might come out of it. Finally, I approached him and, swallowing my emotions, asked nicely if I could have what was left after he’d skinned and breasted out his can. “Sure,” he said, looking at me like I was insane. “I was just going to throw it out anyway.”
In the years since, I’ve managed myself as best I could. When I see people skinning and breasting even perfectly shot, beautiful birds, I just look away. I try to forget about it when I hear comments like “the only legs I like are on a woman.” After all, most of the hunters doing this are good people, friends even. And the last thing I want to do is stand there haranguing people about what they should and shouldn’t do with their birds.
I understand why many hunters breast out their birds. If I were raised in a hunting community and everyone around me breasted and skinned our birds, chances I’d do the same thing. inertia and tradition are powerful forces. How a person perceives food makes a huge difference, too. If you view food merely as fuel, eating the animals you shoot becomes more of an obligation than a joy. You do it because you are supposed to, not because you prefer pheasant to chicken, or venison to beef.
But even though I understand why hunters breast out their birds, it does not mean I have to like it. For me, breasting out a bird shows disrespect for the animals we say we love. Consider this: As hunters, one of our strongest arguments when we’re trying to convince non- or anti-hunters that we are not in fact callous killers is that we eat what we bring home. Breasting out birds and tossing the legs, wings and giblets in the trash damages – some would say destroys – that argument.
I’ve heard all the excuses. “Coyotes and buzzards gotta eat, too.” Sorry, but we do not hunt to feed scavengers. I have also heard endless rationalizations about how it’s OK to dump the legs of pheasants, ducks and geese because they’re inedible, which is horseshit.
Even I don’t make duck scrapple, and I am, admittedly, an outlier in the hunting world. I am fond of telling people that I use “everything but the quack” on a duck or goose, but I still toss the feathers, intestines, lungs and head – although recently I have begun saving the tongues to make Chinese dishes.
A stronger counter-argument, however, is the very real truth that what I might view as good eats is another person’s trash. As hunting ethicist Jim Tantillo of the Orion Institute says, “Where one hunter sees pickled moose tongue and stuffed elk heart, another hunter sees food for carrion beetles and ‘the marvelous process of renewal.’” It is wrong to suggest that you cannot an ethical hunter if you don’t happen to enjoy making your own duck stock, or eating liver pate. And, scavenger argument notwithstanding, Tantillo has a point about that “marvelous process of renewal” — but only if you leave the carcasses of your birds in the field. If you toss them into the garbage can, that renewal will only occur at the city dump.
To my mind, this slippery slope of what ought to be eaten from a duck or goose ends at the supermarket. Walk into any market in America and tell me what you see: chicken breasts, yes, but also drumsticks, legs and thighs. Ditto for turkeys and ducks, too.
Make no mistake: Hunting is a privilege that can be taken from us. If society sees hunters as wasteful rednecks who can’t even be bothered to toss skinned pheasant legs into a crockpot with a can of cream of mushroom soup, we are in deep, deep trouble.
I am not saying we all should be required to pluck every bird we bring home, nor am I saying that everyone must eat giblets and wingtips and such. Sure, I do. But like I said, I am an outlier, a freak even. Surely there is some societal norm that we can all agree to about what parts of a bird ought to be kept?
There is, and it’s in Montana, a state with more hunters per capita than anywhere else in America. Montana has a law that requires hunters to use the legs of every bird they shoot larger than a partridge – if you’re not a hunter, that’s about the size of a Cornish game hen. So in Montana, you must use the legs (skinned or plucked, either way) of pheasants, ducks, geese, turkeys and grouse. Most of us would agree that this is reasonable, no?
But let’s face it. No law will prevent those who don’t want to eat the legs of their game birds from tossing them in the trash. Legislating morality is a dangerous game that often leads to zealotry and unintended consequences. The bottom line is that what I think or support doesn’t matter. What matters is what you think.
One of the primary reasons I run Hunter Angler Gardener Cook is to get hunters to want to eat more parts of the animals they bring home, even if it is just in a crockpot with cream of mushroom soup. It’s why I’ve been doing what I’ve been doing for five years now. And let me tell you, one of the things that keeps me so excited about HAGC is the steady stream of email I get from hunters who’ve taken a chance on cooking legs, wings, gizzards, etc., and are writing to tell me how much they enjoyed it. Emails like that make my week.
If you are one of those hunters, here’s the best present you could possibly give me in 2013: Find some skeptics and cook for them – only be sure to cook the legs, wings or giblets of whatever game bird you have in your home. Pheasants, ducks, geese, it doesn’t matter. If you can convince just one more person to save the legs on his birds, we’ve all won.
And if you happen to be one of those skeptical hunters, I humbly ask you to try any one of the recipes for legs or wings that you can find on this site. Just try it. For me. If you do, I’m betting you might just change your mind.
Wow Hank, you lit a fire and everyone has a stick to throw on it.
Hopefully your new book will encourage more hunters to eat more parts of the fowl. (perhaps a book display next to the shotgun shells at the gun shops)
Happy new year!
@Phillip et al,
As one of the “judgmental, pretentious elite” who agrees 100% with this essay, please remember that folks like us are also the ones you want on your side when voting for legislation supporting habitat conservation and hunting gun rights etc. I know that wording sounds like a big threat or that people who think like me are all-powerful, and I know that is far from the truth. But I think it is far more important to the future of hunting to encourage as many positive participants from as many walks of life as possible, than to defend what many of us see as appalling wastefulness and disrespect for the life of a fellow creature in the name of “I’ll hunt as I please and anyone with a contrary opinion is a snotty scolder.”
I’m a huge fan of Hank’s and of this blog; I’ve reposted many of his articles -not just the recipes, but those devoted to the art of hunting- to a crowd of mainly non-hunters who tend to cry at the sight of blood, but who love food and try their hardest to always respect its source, whether from the market or the field. The line someone like Hank walks between supporting what is often a controversial activity, and being willing to deeply comment on it without sounding preachy, but with grace, patience and inclusiveness, impresses me on a regular basis.
A couple of points, I’ll try to be brief:
Mike: You mention “Saying that you shouldn’t tell people they are wasting food because they might quit hunting is not a good enough reason(IN MY OPINION)” I assume was directed at my post. And perhaps I did not articulate my point well enough. I think we should be informing people, and there is no one that I know, better suited then Hank, to do that, so I think it is a great post and topic, but we need to stop short of shaming people.
I agree not everyone should be a hunter, (most of the place I hunt are already over used, so selfishly I’d like to see less hunters), and as to Coyote and PD shooters, I don’t even think mentioning them in this string is appropriate, that is shooting in my opinion, and in most cases no doubt “wanton waste”.
Phillip mentioned the “locavore”/hunting movement becoming trendy , I guess that is what I was referring to when I mentioned people becoming involved with an “uneasiness”. They are already not sure if this is a good fit on many levels, but feel it is the right thing to do. So my point is let people get out, get a feel for it before we insist on eating hearts, livers and wing-tips, and insist that anything short of that is wasteful. I’ll even for conversations sake put myself in the hunting is trendy category, I started over a decade ago, took a break and now I am back, I have a lot of friends who want to start for all the right reasons, if that’s trendy so be it. These folks are respectful, ecologically minded, and the exact kind of people we want to see hunting! And the ones that will feel guilty enough about not eating a wing that it will stop them from doing it all!
Maybe it is a crappy analogy, but if your neighbor planted a garden, but heaven forbid used some herbicide or even wasted some tomatoes, would us trendy locavore types shame them or say, “hey great garden, let me know how i can help”. I know I would be happy to see a garden regardless of how they chose to operate it. In summary lets not let “great” get in the way of “good”?
(Clearly brief didn’t work out for me, appears there are 2 Seth’s on the string, I was the second and long winded Seth)
I agree with you 100% Hank, but IMHO what it really boils down to is learning how to cook. You touched on it a bit by mentioning those who eat the game as an “obligation” and from my (limited) experience and exposure to hunters these nice folks constitute the majority of the hunting crowd. Basically get the breast (or backstrap or whatever) wrap it in bacon with a slice of jalapeno and cream cheese maybe and grill or bake it. A couple of hunters I was on a guided trip with recently were shocked that I planned on taking the whole ducks home and pluck most of them! Although the younger of the two was very intrigued of what I would do with cooking a whole one or the legs (I pointed him to this site, so who knows…).
Of course the fact that many Americans are so out of touch with the importance of food and cooking to most of what we do in life is a much bigger topic and education starts at home. I “preach” to my two kids and try to ingrain in them early on the principles of good food, proper cooking and respect to the animals we eat. Hopefully that sticks 🙂
First of all, I’m not a hunter, but have family members that are so I get to benefit from their love and work when I go home to visit them. My family tend to be the “breasting out” crowd, so I read this article with interest since I would love to make stock, use the legs and fat for confit, etc. if I didn’t live 3,000 miles away from them. They have no interest in that level of cooking and have done enough plucking in the past to determine it’s a bit too much work for the bits they use and haven’t pursued it further. I was hoping to be able to send this article to them as a prompter to try something different, but as some have pointed out, the tone of the post is a bit unusual for HGAC. There is a definite edge to the writing which I think is hard to curb when you are so passionate about a subject. I felt the disbelief and horror of breasting out, rather than the inspiration to change behavior, so I didn’t feel like it was something I could pass on to them without them being offended. But I did find the link in the comments to plucking and using parrafin, which was really interesting, so I will send them that video link, and continue to send them links to various recipes hoping to inspire them to change. Thanks for all that you do with your blog. Overall, I do find it inspirational and of great interest, even as a non-hunter. Happy New Year!
I’d never begrudge someone for breasting out their birds, especially waterfowl. Breasts are quick and easy to cook. The other parts, not so much.
And let’s face it, when poorly prepared, legs and thighs and whole birds can be an outright gag-o-rama, the kind of meals that make you never want to try them that way again — or any wild-game meal for that matter.
Hank, maybe someone with your culinary background hasn’t had this experience, but I sure have.
I’ll never forget my first goose I shot with my dad when I was 12. It was opening morning and I knocked down a beautiful speck. When I got home, my dad and I spent what felt like three hours plucking it and gutting it, giving it the royalty treatment. We wanted my first bird to be something really special.
My mom, who’s normally a great cook, baked it just like she would a store-bought chicken. Of course, she overcooked the living beejeebers out of it, probably giving it a few extra minutes in the oven to kill all the swamp microbes she conjured up in her well-meaning mind. She turned the rib-eye of the sky into a livery, chalky, sinewy hunk of shoeleather. I’ll never forget trying to pretend like I wasn’t about to gag as I gnawed on a hunk of speck vinyl.
That’s what I thought all whole ducks and geese and their legs and thighs were like up until just a few years ago. And it’s why up until then I breasted out my birds for things like jerky, bacon-wrapped barbecued poppers and stir-fry, stuff that even the most inept cook could make taste OK. Cutting the breasts and tossing the rest also was what my hunting buddies did. Like me, a few had bad experiences with plucked birds. But, for most, the only cooking they’d ever really done was tossing steaks on a grill. Breasts are the closest thing to a steak on a duck. I can’t imagine what some of my redneck friends would have tried to do with sinewy leggy bits. No doubt, they’d have ended up in the trash one way or the other.
It was only when I really started to become a confident cook that I began experimenting with whole birds and their legs and thighs. I confess I still only really like whole ducks smoked (canvasbacks are pure bliss). But whenever I try to do them whole any other way (including some of your recipes), they’re either bloody raw, way too strong tasting or dreadfully overcooked. I just don’t have a knack for it.
And I hate — HATE — killing something and spending all that time prepping it for the table only to feed it to the dog or throw it away because I ruined it.
Now, if I don’t plan on smoking my birds, I still go for the easy stuff. But I no longer toss the legs and thighs. They most likely get tossed into the meat grinder for burgers, soups, meatballs or chili. Either that, or they head to the crock pot for a nice overnight beer braise.
I try to encourage my hillbilly friends to do the same.
Actually, I have saved the heart and liver of my pheasants. I am hoping the livers might make a nice pate.
Hank, honestly, your URL reads “wanton waste breasting birds” and not “this is how I do it, you should try,” so I cannot imagine that you were caught unaware that such a reaction would occur here. I, too, found that several of the comments above are pretentious at best, though I wouldn’t have mentioned it if you hadn’t sort of disagreed with that fact.
I can see your frustration in this issue – once a bird is in hand, 99.9% of the effort has been completed-successfully!!! Why throw away significant meat just to save a few minutes? I get it. I, myself, am growing to appreciate the “other cuts” such as they are.
But there are many other factors at play…namely TIME. TIME to prepare special dishes. TIME to break legs off of the hip, and TIME cut off the feet with heavy duty loppers. I don’t take my deer to the butcher because I’m lazy or because I’m scared of blood. It’s because I don’t have time to process it all myself, and myself is all I’ve got.
I can’t believe I have to write this again because of Hanks’s CAPTCHA code thing but here goes:
I was lost on the point you were trying to make in your original post but now I think I’m hearing you. Some of those comments were judgemental and overlooked by me and some I don’t believe were so harsh as to turn someone away from the site. Maybe I’m wrong. Food is a subject many people have strong feelings and opinions about. So is hunting. Saying that you shouldn’t tell people they are wasting food because they might quit hunting is not a good enough reason(IN MY OPINION). Honestly there are some I’d rather not see hunting because I believe them to be poor examples of hunters. I know many persons of Asian and Latin descent that would say you were wasteful as well if you didn’t use all you knew to be of use. And they are not hunters at all. Just makes sense to us.
I guess in the end I didn’t see the post as you saw it but I am grateful for your insight. When I try and teach someone, hunter or not, to use more than the breast, backstrap etc. I will choose my words more carefully. This has been very helpful to me.
Hank, Amen.
And heart is about the only organ meat I regularly enjoy… so I’m all over that jaeger schnitzel. We just need to make it happen.
I breast out my ducks…..but I have saved legs from great big flight Mallards. They are delicious. I have always thought I was wasting something when I threw out the rest of my ducks. I will reconsider. Here is another tip. I harvest the “CDC” or oil gland feathers off of all my waterfoul. If you tie trout fly’s and buy commercial “CDC” wait till you try the real stuff.
Steve
40 years of hunting and I still don’t get why they do that. Here in NY I hear turkey hunters say the same thing
Chip: Yes, if you go here on this website, I have a bunch of instructions videos: https://honest-food.net/wild-game/duck-goose-recipes/
Phillip: I think we are basically in agreement, more or less, on the big picture. I will never stop being the guy who says, “this is how I do it and it’s good. You should try it too.” It is by far the best work I can do on this subject.
That said, I wrote this piece because I felt a deep need to. You of all people know I rarely discuss this sort of stuff in public forum, so you can appreciate that it is a big deal for me to put pen to paper, as it were. I actually rewrote this article several times to ratchet down the “preachiness factor” after I’d spoken about it to a bunch of people, all of whom brought up good points.
Bottom line: When I come to your house and we go hog killing, I’m serving you boar heart jaeger schnitzel! 😉
Hank, as a non-hunter, but serious gardener(and a serious lover of duck,), I’d be appalled at the idea of wasting so much of something that I’d work so hard to get. It seems to me that breasting out a duck or goose is sort of like growing 10 bushels of tomatoes and throwing out 5 because I already had enough of them canned. It just doesn’t make sense to me. If any hunters out there want to send me their unwanted legs, I’ll be happy to take them off their hands!
Let’s see Mike.
Should I quote Seth? “it disgusts me when people mistreat their game by just breasting it. it’s so wasteful and the animal deserves better than that”
Or Joel? “Use it or don’t shoot it. Any hunter that doesn’t want the fat from the bird, the bones for stock, or the legs for confit are missing out and wasting a natural resource.”
And then right after I posted, there’s Sarah. “I couldn’t believe people wold be so lazy and wasteful.”
Or I could quote the verbal comments I’ve heard for years from other people… but that probably doesn’t count since it’s not on the blog.
Point is that there’s a two-way street here, and Hank’s blog has for the most part managed to stay in the middle. I don’t think Hank is particularly “holier than thou”, much less pretentious or snobby (I think I know him well enough to say that). But a couple of these comments certainly do cross that line.
I don’t think people who are trying to learn more about using more of the animal are a bad thing. Learning is good. I’ve certainly picked up a thing or two from Hank, and I’ve changed some of my own behaviors as a result… which is exactly what I think he’s trying to accomplish here. But I do think folks need to go easy on the judgements.
And Hank. Thanks for the kudos. I’ve a tendency to say nothing or say everything that’s on my mind. Lucky you, today you got the everything. No need to get defensive, though. This isn’t the attack it may appear to be.
I don’t really want to go point-by-point through your rant, but it was you that brought up the defense of hunting argument when you wrote: “Consider this: As hunters, one of our strongest arguments when we’re trying to convince non- or anti-hunters that we are not in fact callous killers is that we eat what we bring home. Breasting out birds and tossing the legs, wings and giblets in the trash damages – some would say destroys – that argument.”
What destroys that argument is not some duck hunters tossing giblets in the garbage, but the legions of guys out there shooting prairie dogs, ground squirrels, coyotes, and so on. So sure, you eat what you kill, but every hunter doesn’t. You’re propping up an argument on a fallacy. Of course I realize that this blog post isn’t about building pro-hunting arguments, but this is a pet peeve and you trampled it. I’m a hunter who happens to cook. How people defend our sport is far more important to me than whether or not they toss the duck legs in the crock pot. Sorry for the aside… and that’s all I’ll say about that.
Last, I’ll point out that you travelled the country promoting a book about eating what you kill to people who were interested in the topic. Of course you found lots of hunters who agreed with you. Nevertheless, I’ve never said that there haven’t always been people who use everything. I’ve known some of them my whole life, and I deeply respect their commitment. The ones I respect most are the ones like yourself, who aren’t overly preachy about it but simply say, “this is how I do it and it’s good. You should try it too.”
But you can’t argue that the trend has only recently come into vogue, along with the locavore thing. It’s fashionable now. For better or worse, you’re in the vanguard of a “movement”. That’s not a judgement of you or anyone else, but a reminder that folks are still learning what you’re trying to teach. I think you’re doing a fine job of it, but the moment this begins to look like an elitist party, folks are going to start to tune out. Keep it grounded.
Right on, Hank. I have only been hunting for about a dozen years, but my husband has been hunting his whole life. After my first successful turkey hunt, I was taken quite aback when my husband (a German butcher who makes his own sausage and lunchmeat every day at work) proceeded to breast it out and cut off the legs. We threw the rest of the carcass back in the woods. Since I had never killed anything before I was surprised that we “weren’t supposed to” cook a wild turkey like a Thanksgiving turkey.
Let me now state for the record that after that incident, we have never done that again. We do make the whole bird and use the carcass for stock. It was just the tradition of not eating the “tough” parts of the bird that had been passed down through his family.
And now that tradition has been broken- my kids understand that you need to respect the animals you kill for food and do not let valuable parts go to waste (we even save the feathers for archery shafts). That goes for the store-bought rotisserie chicken and pork loin and everything else, too. You can say what you will about nose-to-tail and trendy eating, but I think if we can just change a few attitudes we’re on the right path.
Can you recommmend a link(s)for recommended “how to” videos on the skinning, plucking, preparing of game birds?
I truly appreciated the comments as I have never felt comfortable with how I have gotten the birds from the field to the kitchen.
Thanks in advance,
Chip
My first reaction to the idea of breasting out a canvasback was to be horrified by the waste of animal life. Five minutes later, I’m remembering the amount of grocery-store meat (grass-fed, humanely raised, free range, etc., etc.) I’ve had to throw away over the years because it was already rancid when I bought it. I’m recalling that we waste 30 million tons of food in this country every year. We Americans are, as a whole, incredibly cavalier about our food and our resources generally. And so I appreciate your nudging anybody in the direction of using more of what they’ve taken. I also appreciate that what hunters waste is a drop in the bucket of what apartment-dwelling fast-food eaters waste, personally and vicariously. So even though I don’t hunt I’m taking this as a reminder to use up the chicken hearts and the scraps of bacon.
Seth: In terms of this discussion, I don’t really see it too much as an “us versus them” thing. You should know that Phillip is a friend of mine who never fails to keep me sharp.
But you are absolutely correct in noting that writ large, the hunting community has a bigger fish to fry in terms of habitat loss. That is the No. 1 issue for hunters AND hikers/birdwatchers/etc alike.
As for recruitment, however, it has actually gone up in the latest survey, and at least part of that is due to newcomers coming to hunting specifically for the food aspect. So that at least is some good news.
And you are right: As a food person, this is the hunting issue on which I feel I can have the most positive impact. And remember: I am not asking for “everything,” just maybe some braised goose legs now and again. 😉
I don’t really do the “blog thing” but I find myself here almost daily and have made numerous recipes from HAGC and your book over the past couple of weeks. I refer to “Hank” around around my kitchen as if he is a buddy, trying to entice my wife to eat critters from afield with limited success, baby-steps but we are getting there.
I think your work deserves awards and many of them I am a huge fan.
That said I think I am with Phillip on this one, I have been thinking alot about this topic lately, and the discussion even came up over a pile of collared-doves last week as me a couple friends field plucked our critters. I agree with the sentiment of everything you said, I pluck when I can, and feel bad when I do not. My first snow goose hunt in the NoDak back in the 90’s ended with me excited and saying “How do we cook them?” only to be met with laughter, they were cut open and fed to the barn cats. Appalled doesn’t get close to the emotion i felt, not to mention they were feeding cats, feral CATS! arguably the most ecologically destructive critter out on the landscape (at least if your a bird guy like me, any good cat recipes?).
I understand and sympathize with the argument, but i submit that the sporting community has bigger fish to fry, like habitat, and recruitment issues, I am not for waste, but where and how do we draw the line? I don’t save my feathers to tie flies? People already have an uneasiness about the sporting community even people within the sporting community, “Well i’m not like those guys” but folks we need to keep it together here, there are real threats to hunting. I live a state where trapping is illegal, i had a colleague post the day of the CT tragedy that I, as all gun owners do, have “blood on there hands today” regardless of the reason we chose to own guns even if justified by the “reptilian desire to hunt” as it was put. Yea that happened, and I’ve bit my tongue until now. Again appalled does not come close.
I guess Hank for what you do maybe this is the sword you choose to fall on, I just hope that the stigma of someone not using everything keeps them from getting out and hunting at all? Especially folks new to the lifestyle, I’d rather see more people Hunt, Angle, Garden and Cook and not do it up to the utmost highest ethical and moral standards then not at all. Is a wasted duck wing worse then a factory rotisserie chicken from a box store that comes over packaged on a semi from hundreds of miles away, only to get half eaten, the thrown in the trash? Thanks as always for the thought provoking discussion and Happy New Year all!