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Venison and Wild Boar
Appears in
Published 1989
The three types of venison most readily available in Great Britain are the Red deer, Fallow deer and Roe deer. The Red deer is the largest of the three and tends to have the strongest, richest flavour. The Roe deer (chevreuil in French), is a small delicate animal that is the most tender of the three. The Fallow comes somewhere in between in both flavour and size.
Ancient Egyptians, Israelites, Greeks and Romans all kept deer, and we can thank the Romans for introducing the fallow deer, like so much else, to this country. In Medieval Britain there were numerous deer parks - almost 2000 at one time in England alone - which were partly maintained for sport but primarily to stock the table. The Civil War in the mid-seventeenth century put an end to many parks, while the few that remained became merely decorative. There was always a certain amount of hunting, both of wild and carted deer (those taken by cart to a starting point for the hunt), and deer also graced the parks of grand houses. But there was little or no farming of deer.