By Mike Templeton
Like many people my age, I grew up being told about how my parents made it through the Great Depression and the food rationing that came with WWII. Both my parents grew up eating rabbit as a food staple. My urban Appalachian grandfather hunted rabbit, and my Cincinnati-German grandmother turned it into Hasenpfeffer. The culinary mixed message is just part of life in Cincinnati. Wild game has always been central to Appalachian life and culture, and urban Appalachians continued to hunt even after migrating to the cities. As one of the signature features of Appalachian foodways, wild game has historically provided part of the basis of survival long before anyone hunted for sport. Appalachian foodways is a recurring theme for the Urban Appalachian Community Coalition blog, and so we now explore the place of wild game in Appalachian life and culture.
For a great many urban Appalachians, deer hunting season is a yearly event met with tremendous excitement. Youth gun hunting season in Ohio in 2024 is November 16-17 with adult gun hunting allowed December 2- 8 and December 21–22. Archery and muzzle loaders have different seasons. Many of us grew up with hunting camps in Ohio’s Appalachian counties, and the yearly event of bringing home the venison is a happy time. Wild game has historically played a central role in Appalachian foodways, and for many people, deer, rabbit, and even squirrel remain common features of the diet. With the migration of Appalachian people to urban areas, the practice of hunting wild game remained a part of life. While we can now find venison in upscale restaurants, urban Appalachians were once met with scorn and derision for their love of wild game and for the work taken to obtain it.
Some might be surprised to learn that hunting was not known to the earliest European settlers in the Americas. Hunting was an aristocratic privilege in Europe, and to hunt on a “gentleman’s” land would get you hanged. Early American settlers were farming people, and they learned the intricacies and arts of hunting from the Indigenous people of this continent. Still, the earliest settlers of the Appalachian Mountain region quickly learned to hunt, and the trade in deer and bison hides among Europeans in the region can be traced back as far as the 1560s. Appalachian State University maintains an archive of research on the topic of hunting in the Appalachian regions. Their Special collections archive of Hunting in Appalachia provides a long list of historical accounts of how hunting developed and came to be an integral part of Appalachian life and foodways. In the earliest days, hunting and foraging were the only way to survive. As the mountains became home of subsistence farming families, hunting became the primary source of food beyond that which could be derived from a small farm.
Since the wilderness areas of the Appalachian region is so abundant with wild game, the Appalachian people learned to make use of just about everything that was available. Wild game in Appalachian cuisine has been one of many ways people have made fun of mountain people. Eating squirrel and racoon is held as proof of the backward nature of the people of the southern mountains. In fact, mountain people learned to eat these kinds of wild game from the Indigenous people who had learned to utilize what the mountains provided long ago. In an article aptly titled “From Shame to Acclaim,” writer Ashlie Stevens explains that much of what made up the Appalachian diet was seen as “trash food” by urban dwellers who tended to look down on Appalachian people for just about any reason they could find.
As Appalachian people migrated to urban areas, they held onto their mountain culture as best they could, and hunting remained an important part of life. Hunting was particularly important to urban Appalachians who often lived on low incomes and needed to supplement with things like wild game. The escape to the woods for a yearly deer hunt became an integral part of urban Appalachian life both as a way of preserving the culture of the homeplace and as a method of survival. Appalachian foodways have always included wild game, and people to this day include things like venison and rabbit as features of their ordinary diet. The hunting camp remains a central part of family life for a great many people in greater Cincinnati, urban Appalachian and otherwise.
While city dwellers once scoffed and made fun of the Appalachian foodways which included wild game, they now seek these things out with the same sense of discernment as all other fine foods. A Whole Foods blog post explains that you can pare venison with “a floral, deeply colored Tempranillo” as a way of perfectly accentuating your plate. If that don’t beat all… Rabbit is available in many butcher shops. We in Cincinnati can find fresh rabbit in places like Findlay Market. The arc from rural trash food to high-end specialty meat took a few generations, but it has definitely happened.
Hunting is, of course, closely regulated in our time. Wild game and their ecosystems are regulated to preserve the wild populations and for general safety. We no longer live in a time of the solitary hunter who simply wanders into the woods. Hunting is still a crucial part of life in greater Cincinnati. Ohio issued over 360,000 hunting licenses last year. Many urban Appalachians could not imagine life without venison. It remains a central feature for urban Appalachian cooking. People may not eat beaver tails or racoon as much as they once did, but the Urban Appalachian Community Coalition nevertheless deems it worthwhile to recognize wild game as a central element of Appalachian foodways.
Michael Templeton is a writer, and independent scholar. He is the author of The Chief of Birds: A Memoir published with Erratum Press and Impossible to Believe, forthcoming from Iff Books. He is also the author of Collected Apoems, forthcoming from LJMcD Communications and the awaiting of awaiting: a novella, with Nut Hole Publishing. Check out his profile in UACC’s Cultural Directory. He has published numerous articles and essays on contemporary culture and works of creative non-fiction as well as experimental works and poetry. He lives in West Milton, Ohio with his wife who is an artist.