Steve gave me a tubular coil of deer sausage a while back when I was in Alabama. It is darker than pork or beef sausage and much leaner. Steve had shot the deer and a friend had made the sausage by hand. Not being a hunter, I have to say, it was a little exotic.
“I eat everything I hunt,” he said. “This ain’t no hobby. Whatever you can hunt or grow saves on groceries.”
I have seen deer all of my life, leaping stiff-legged through fields and desperately sprinting across the road. I’ve even hit one in a rental car. But I have never been much for hunting, so I have never had many opportunities to eat deer beyond a rare strip of deer jerky or deer barbeque here and there. I have never eaten deer sausage. And this deer was hiding in a two-foot link in my freezer.
Real sausage, as I have written about many times, like real biscuits, is best cooked in a cast iron skillet. I have more than a few and they are not Johnny-come-lately chunks of heavy metal. My grandmother seasoned the one I used over 80 years ago, so even if I screw up, it knows what it is doing when the heat comes knocking.
Deer sausage has little fat. Fat, as you know if you are from anywhere south of Canada, is what makes sausage so sausagy. Steve said he and the sausage maker in Andalusia had added a little fresh pork to the mixture so it would not have the consistency of a Slim Jim. At the considerable expense of the deer, these guys know what they are doing.
It was much darker than pork sausage. It was smoked and tasty. It smelled like when I used to stand behind Sonny Bryan’s in Dallas with my eyes closed imagining what my tongue would soon understand.
Smothered in Yellow Label syrup, straight from a shelf in a small grocery store in Covington County, the deer sausage slowly went away after several cookings. Now it lives in my memories, this deer sausage. It is kind of creepy how we get attached to such things.
Example: Last week, I passed the huge Bass Pro Shop on I-95 north of Richmond. I have been in the place a few times and seen all of the taxidermied deer. I hate to even admit this, but my mouth started watering as I looked at the big sign in my rearview mirror. I felt guilty and hungry and conflicted. That is what deer sausage cooked in a cast iron skillet will do to you if you are not careful.