The problem with most game and fish cookbooks, somewhat paradoxically, is that they are written by guys who hunt and fish.
That is to say, they are written by guys whose primary interest in hunting and fishing is the hunting and fishing part.
Their cookbooks, as a result, tend to be filled with a disheartening collection of half-considered recipes that take more or less successful stabs in one direction — at a kind of down-home, open-fire manliness — and more or less unsuccessful stabs in the other direction, at complicated fine-dining sophistication. All the while, their authors give the impression they would much rather be at the tiller of a 14-foot Lund, or sitting 20 feet up in a tree stand with a .30.06 across their laps.
Jon Wipfli is a former sous chef at the Bachelor Farmer, today a caterer and personal chef, and a teacher of whole-hog butchery classes. He's cooked, formally and informally, with many of the best chefs in the Twin Cities.
Wipfli is also passionately, if secondarily, a deer hunter and North Woods outdoorsman, and has written a nose-to-tail venison cookbook, "Venison: The Slay to Gourmet Field to Kitchen Cookbook" (Voyageur Press, 176 pages, $25), which arrives in bookstores in time for this month's Minnesota and Wisconsin firearms deer openers.
It's a beautiful book, for a start, with richly textured photos by Matt Lien.
It's also a practical book, guiding the reader in a conversational style through the successive steps from field dressing to skinning to butchery.
But the heart of the book is its recipes, and the heart that beats on those pages is that of a chef — someone who is not simply grasping for recipes or merely passing them on, but who has sweated at the stovetop and the prep station, and, in Wipfli's case, before the furnace of a 96-inch Fatboy smoker-grill, for hours, trying to get a stock, a sausage mix, a shoulder, a brisket or a rack of ribs just right.