Jenny Nguyen-Wheatley is a prolific author of wild game recipes. Through her website Food for Hunters she has established herself as one of the leading wild game cooks in the country. She’s the author of Hunting for Food: A Guide to Harvesting, Field Dressing and Cooking Wild Game which won a Wildlife Honor Award from the Nebraska Center for the Book in 2016. Nguyen-Wheatley also works as associate editor for Nebraskaland Magazine, America’s longest running outdoor publication. If that isn’t enough, she regularly contributes to a variety of national publications including Game & Fish, Bowhunter, North American Whitetail, and In-Fisherman. When it comes to people who really “know their stuff” concerning wild food she is near the top of the list.
What I particularly like about Nguyen-Wheatley is her focus on simple, seasonal ingredients, and straight forward preparations. Around ten years ago, when more people were starting to seek a direct connection to their food, there were only a handful of places to find recipes and information about wild food from people who actually hunt and fish. Nguyen-Wheatley was putting out recipes that were both delicious and accessible to home cooks. She was the link between chef and hunter exemplifying all the best things about field to table cooking.
In a recent interview, I asked her how she became interested in wild food.
“I grew up watching a lot of PBS cooking shows—Jacques Pépin, Lidia Bastianich, Martin Yan, Rick Bayless,” she remembered. “I found those cooking shows mesmerizing. The actual cooking was fascinating, but when a chef created a sense of place through their dishes, that’s what I found most intriguing. My best recipes are ones that accomplish that.”
Nguyen-Wheatley soon paired her fascination with cooking and her love of the outdoors. On a backpacking trip in the Sierra Nevada with the Venturer Scout program, an outdoor program Nguyen-Wheatley avidly pursued during high school, she had her first experience with wild food. When the trip leader killed a rattlesnake, she helped him cut of its head, skin it, and gut it. Together, they breaded it in cornmeal and fried it.
“I was 16 years old,” she recalled, “but it fascinated me.”
Although she grew up watching her mother cook, it wasn’t until she left home to attend college that she began cooking on her own.
“My mother is an excellent cook, and it took being out of the house to get me to learn for myself. All those years of watching PBS and my mother paid off,” she laughed.
Nguyen-Wheatley initially pursued a degree in wildlife biology, but soon switched her major to English with the intent of becoming an outdoor writer. When she met her now husband, Rick, he introduced her to hunting. They began going on hunting trips together, bringing deer, ducks, and whatever else they could manage back to California.
“I learned how to cook using wild game,” she told me. “We cooked together on the weekends when I was home, and during the week, I’d take some meat with me and experiment at my apartment near UCLA. We created our website, Food for Hunters, to chronicle our experiments. It started as something we did for fun, but it led to my current position at Nebraskaland. Since then I’ve written a cookbook and had several freelancing opportunities. Wild game has become a part of my professional identity.”
It’s those in-between moments that made Nguyen-Wheatley the cook she is today. Cooking with wild ingredients nearly every day, she soon built a skill set few others possessed. While many wild game chefs engage in an escalating competition to use the most esoteric ingredients and elaborate preparations, Nguyen-Wheatley swerved in the opposite direction, forsaking the trappings of haute cuisine to demonstrate what cooking with wild game on a daily basis could be. She focuses on cooking things in season, treating them simply to highlight their inherent qualities.
She describes her approach to wild food as “varied”—inspired by her Vietnamese heritage, her husband’s Mexican ancestry, as well as the Nebraskan landscape.
“I’ve done a range of things from bacon-wrapped wild game to venison phở, to tartare and confit. I usually stay away from dishes that are too ‘cheffy.’ I prefer cooking things that can be replicated by people at home. I cook what I like to eat, and that’s usually fresh, seasonal, comforting, and straightforward food.”
With dishes like pan-seared wild duck with cherries, herb and citrus roasted quail, and rabbit rillettes, who wouldn’t want to eat and cook like Nguyen-Wheatley?
Nguyen-Wheatley’s food is also born out of passion. After returning from a recent trip to Scotland, she was inspired to recreate the traditional Scottish dish of haggis with wild ingredients.
“It took a bit of research,” she said. “It’s next to impossible to find sheep’s stomach in the United States, and we’re not equipped to clean a deer’s stomach in the field, so I settled on beef bung cap as a substitute for the casing.”
For the filling, Nguyen-Wheatley used venison heart, liver, and forcemeat.
“It turned out beautifully,” she smiled. “We served it for Burn’s Night (a celebration of the of Scottish poet, Robert Burns) and had friends over for a dinner party. Rick read Burns’ ‘Address to a Haggis,’ and we served it with neeps (mashed rutabagas) and tatties (mashed potatoes). Everyone brought their favorite whisky to share. We had cranachan afterward—which is a Scotch-infused cream and raspberry dessert that Rick and I first tasted on the Isle of Skye. One of my friends, who is a talented Irish singer, sang ‘The Bonnie Banks O’ Loch Lomond’ for us. We ate by candlelight. There was a lot of whisky that night. Those are the best dinners. Not only was the food important, but we were able to recreate an unforgettable experience for everyone at the table.”
Clearly Nguyen-Wheatley is committed to using every part of an animal to its fullest potential. Her cooking goes beyond mere recipes, her dishes are ingredients in a larger experience, one that celebrates seasonality and place. When I asked her what dish she was most proud of she hesitated and then described a spring meal of venison round steaks in a morel sauce with wild asparagus from when she first started cooking.
“It’s not a real ‘dish,’ she said modestly. “I never wrote a recipe for it, but I’m particularly proud of it because for the first time, our hunting and foraging efforts came together so perfectly, and we were able to pull together a meal where all the ingredients were wild. It was simple, but I couldn’t help but admire it. It was one of those dinners that made us feel extremely thankful for the wild abundance available to us.”
In recent years, wild food has caught on, both in the outdoor media and within ‘foodie’ culture. People like Nguyen-Wheatley have been doing it longer than most, and I asked what keeps her going.
“The hunting community and industry has woken up to the fact that hunting for food is what’s going to carry hunting into the future. It all goes back to evoking a sense of place for me. What a person cooks is a culmination of their culture and experiences. What we eat makes us who we are. As the latest generation to hold the baton, we should strive to do right by the ingredients and traditions that have been passed down to us.”
Ryan Sparks is the Strung Magazine Wild Foods editor and provides the feature selection for Rations & Intoxicants with well known chefs and mixologists, natural foods and other tasty topics.
Follow Jenny Nguyen-Wheatley on Instagram @foodforhunters and check out her website www.foodforhunters.com for more recipes and information. See Jenny’s Venison Birria Recipe.
