Sensual, earthy — and cheaper than a kebab: why Britons should be thankful for game

I am lucky enough to live around the corner from the superb family-run Baldwins Butchers at 469 Green Lanes in Harringay, where they sell game at amazingly good prices. Last year I bought five partridges for a tenner — admittedly unplucked, which gave me an interesting hour in the garden, but I do believe in properly getting to grips with the food you eat. That’s because I was brought up on a farm and don’t have urban sensitivities about a lot of things: sorry.

Perhaps the disparity between the availability and price of game here and elsewhere is yet another barmy legacy of our historic class system, whereby shooting is an expensive, formalised sport, often completely detached from the actual consumption of the game. Notoriously, King George V shot more than 1,000 pheasants in a total bag of 3,937 in a six-day period in 1913, in a competition with a friend. Not very nice. The saying in those days was ‘Up gets a guinea, bang goes a penny-halfpenny, down comes half a crown’ — but a pheasant now is worth much less than half a crown was then.

You can even buy a grouse, a real gastronomic thrill, tasting so miraculously of the heather, for about £8 — a bird that certainly cost the person who shot it a great deal more than that. If you look at the firms selling a day of grouse-shooting, the price can be thousands of pounds per gun, with ‘overages’ (shooting more than a certain limit of birds per day) at £150 plus VAT per brace. The shooters have no desire to keep and eat all the birds, so they are sold off wholesale, almost as a by-product of the business. Coupled with a lack of demand, this means almost ridiculous retail prices. Around the corner on Green Lanes, I can buy a carefully prepared young grouse for the same price as a kebab. That’s nuts — but nuts entirely in my favour, not that I’d say a word against Green Lanes’ kebabs.

Ever since my student days I’ve been a devotee of game, making the most of the season every year (1 September to 1 February for partridge; 1 October to 1 February for pheasant), and then stuffing as many birds as I can into the freezer for the months of deprivation. I even take frozen bundles to France for weekends in my hand luggage, never having found them in shops there.

And it’s more than just indulgence. Game is good for you: it’s lean, it’s wild, it has foraged for itself (admittedly, this is less true of intensively reared pheasants). Moreover, no two birds are ever the same, even if I wouldn’t go quite as far as the great gastronome Brillat-Savarin, who claimed in The Physiology of Taste (1825) that ‘the flavour of a red partridge from Périgord is not that of one from Sologne; and while a hare killed on the plains outside of Paris makes but an insipid dish, a young one born of the sunburned slopes of Valromey or the upper Dauphiné is the tastiest of all four-legged game.’ There’s terroir for you!

To cook it, you need to know the bird’s age, whether hen or cock (very different in pheasant) and how long it has been hung. Maybe consult the many excellent books on game cookery, by Patricia Lousada and Julia Drysdale, for example. The wonderfully named Lilli Gore starts her Game Cooking by rhapsodising: ‘Game is beautiful. You cannot can it, dehydrate it or factory-farm it successfully. In a plump game bird, you can taste the memory of the fragrant woodlands and fresh fields from which your bird flew.’

Partridge, simply roasted, eaten fresh rather than hung, is where to start, one of the easiest things to cook in the world. The wholly wild grey partridge is rarer, gamier, better and more expensive than the reared red-legged variety (I once cooked the two beside each other as an experiment to establish the difference — it was dramatic), but the red-legged is fine.

Clean it, season it, put a little thyme or sage in it if you like. Melt some butter in a ceramic roasting dish, turn it over in this, drape with some thinly cut unsmoked streaky bacon or pancetta, and put it in a hot oven for 20 minutes in all, turning it now and then to brown it all over and make sure the bacon crisps rather than burns. Let it rest a few minutes. Put it on a plate, pouring the juices over. Then just take a fork and an ultra-sharp knife, preferably a Laguiole, to it. The perfect meal, for the price of the muck in the staff canteen.

And there you have such a great dish for so little cost, almost making you welcome the arrival of autumn and winter. In this way you will find that our historic class system, the fact that we never had an egalitarian revolution, has certain advantages after all.