Brad Prezant, my friend and fellow Bethesdabakin alumni, shared a culinary secret from his mother in-law in France. It’s a wicked looking wild boar pate that they recently had at his French version of Brads’abakin. Don’t ask me for the exact measurements or procedure. Use your own judgment in trying to replicate it as chances are it’s a secret recipe held by the family. But as  Brad and I are friends, he gladly offered to share with me a highly earthy path to getting it right. And so, dear blog buddies and readers, go on to read one of the most poetic descriptions of hunting, butchering, and enjoying the process of finding one’s food, indeed capturing life!

“Dear Jeremy, you go into the woods in the Fall, spend the morning looking for tracks of the boar, find a few, go back home for lunch, drink a few bottles of wine, go out with the dogs, track through the woods for so long that you think your feet are going to fall off, go back to the barn because it’s milking time, have a few beers, go out again with the farmer, whose son says he “pensez comme un sanglier”, identify where the boar is taking its afternoon nap by sheer intuition, station hunters surrounding the few hectare wood, enter with dogs and gun, flush the boar, shoot the boar, numerous times if you’ve been drinking a lot, cut its throat to make sure it’s dead, cut off its balls, drag it into the back of the vehicle, hang it up “hog tied” with the manure loader/front end loader, eviscerate and throw entrails into the manure pit, steaming, put the carcass in the barn, go home and drink, come back the next afternoon to do the butchering, redefine the meaning of the word “butcher” with a very dull knife and hacksaw, put the head in the freezer, and wait for a call from your son-in-law, who cannot explain why we are going to have so much bread with nothing to put on it. Grind, cook, serve. There it is. Brad.”