A Doddle to Put Together

There are parts of the country where game is not a rarefied luxury but somewhere between a staple and a nuisance. There are roads around Exmoor and Norfolk that are positively obstructed by pheasants too foolish to be frightened at the approach of a motorcar. Deer in many parts of Britain are not venison but a marauding menace, damaging fences, stripping trees and destroying crops. Rabbit and pigeons, of course, have been rated as vermin for more than half a century.

Pheasants are sometimes so plentiful that they are not plucked but skinned and piled high in chest freezers in gloomy outhouses. The only problem arrives when there is no room for the pheasants because the freezer is already full with the best part of a deer and last year’s pheasants still unconsumed. Farmers complain, like London apprentices in the nineteenth century faced with a surfeit of oysters, at the prospect of pheasant for dinner again.