Sage Smith pulls a cast-iron Dutch oven out of the old electric oven. Where another stove might have a backsplash and walls of cabinets around it, this one is open to the dry November air. Timbers hold a tin roof overhead, and a massive stone fireplace anchors the side wall of the outdoor pavilion where the Smith family prepares their annual hunt supper. With dry leaves underfoot and a rustic wood table ready to celebrate the start of hunting season, the cook house at the Smith property in Monroe County is as welcoming as the stew, although perhaps less mysterious.
Sage sets the pot on the counter and opens the lid. It bubbles around the edges, the comforting aromas of gravy and game filling the outdoor kitchen and gathering space. It’s one of several pots the Smiths have made in preparation for the Wild Game Supper, an annual fall gathering for the men of their family and area neighbors to mark the opening of hunting season.
The stew is legendary, and guests know on any given year it might contain any number of unknown quarry: rabbit, dove, venison and squirrel often make the recipe card, among other meats not found in your local Piggly Wiggly. Frank Smith, Sage’s nephew, says neighbors and friends know the supper is on the calendar and will venture into their own woods, .22-rifle in hand, to help supply the game. “Young Agee Broughton will shoot and kill a handful of squirrels each year, clean them and bring them over for Sage to add to the pot. Same for some of the other neighbors,” he says. It’s a wild game most have never tasted, and it adds to the larger-than-life persona of the stew that is served to usher in the season.
For this annual event, men exchange their corporate suits and ties for camo, their pens and laptops for guns and knives, their store-bought meats for something more unexpected and unknown. The stew is a wild-game rite of passage.
The Smith family property sits in the gently sloping countryside outside Monroeville. Log cabins flank either side of the pavilion. One started as a project for a much younger Sage, until he went off to medical school and his dad had it finished out. The other is an old family home dating back to the early 1800s, which Sage had moved to the property and re-erected. A handful of other family cabins and houses sit a ways off, up the red dirt drive or down farther into the woods. Each family has a place to call their own, while the central cook house and its smells of grilled meat and bubbling Dutch ovens are the siren’s call that brings everyone back together: for meals, for a beer and a tall story of that day’s adventures, for a card game or board game that lasts well into the night.
There is a small spring-fed pond just out front, stocked with bass, bream and catfish; beyond the pond, a narrow dirt road winds down and away into the woods, which stretch deep and dense. This is why they’ve all come. For the woods.
Sage’s roots on this land extend back generations. Now retired, he made his living as a family doctor in the nearby Monroeville. Between his granddaddy, his uncle and himself, the town boasted a Smith doctor for 106 years straight.
He places the pot of stew among the rest of the dishes on the table: tangy turnip greens, cornbread muffins, stewed home-grown pears and homemade pepper sauce, all prepared by brothers and in-laws. The pavilion’s big dining table is laid with an undyed tablecloth, decorated with a clay milk jug filled with sprays of hot-pink crape myrtle.
Right on the heels of the Wild Game Supper, the rest of the family will join the men for Thanksgiving. Everyone will bring a dish to share and the kids will run free, splashing in the swimming hole and jumping on the trampoline. Together, the supper and Thanksgiving kick off a busy cold-weather stretch when everyone flocks to the hunting camp for weekend getaways full of food and fellowship.
“I have so many cousins, but we’re all like siblings,” says Frank. “We’re as close as siblings because of that place.”
The Wild Game Supper was inspired by a similar gathering that Sage’s father used to host back in the day. “He got the idea, really, from the Stallworth family up in Beatrice (pronounced be-AT-triss),” says Sage. “The Stallworths would have a wild game supper, and they would have 300 people.”
At that fabled dinner, the Stallworths would set up a bonfire in their pasture, and all of the men and the boys would gather ’round, keeping warm with their beverage of choice. “They had lines of tables, and all the ladies would make cakes and pies. It was an amazing thing, to see that,” he says.
Today, Sage’s supper celebrates the hearty simplicity of country living.
After the marathon of Thanksgiving week, the Smith family settles into a regular weekend routine of hunting, cooking and visiting. “It’s no fun just to build a cabin and not have any guests or do anything,” says Sage. “The most fun is the fellowship and the people that come up.”
Various siblings and cousins will drive to the camp on Fridays after work, friends in tow, and eat a big supper on the pavilion. Someone will build a fire first thing, and then people will begin to make their way from their own screen doors down to the fireplace, a cold beverage in hand and muddy green boots on their feet. A golden retriever will wiggle like spaghetti as he greets his cousins and fellow dogs near the table, where someone will have set an appetizer or two. A few wives will set up mahjong on a smaller table while a couple of kids head off to see if there’s any game at a green field. Afterward, uncles and cousins and aunts will linger late into the night, warming their feet on the outdoor hearth.
“I’ll say, ‘Guys, it’s 11 o’clock, we’re going hunting in the morning,’” says Sage. “And they’ll say, ‘How much wine is left?’”
The next day, they’ll hunt from daylight until midmorning, then regroup at the pavilion for a breakfast of bacon and eggs, grits and biscuits, Bloody Marys and screwdrivers.
“Like in most Southern places, if you got up at 5 o’clock, and you ate a big breakfast and had a drink or two, at 12 o’clock you’re going to take a nap,” he says. “So, go take a nap, get back up at 3 o’clock, and go to the deer field.”
Rinse and repeat, every weekend until February, when hunting season winds down, the trees start thinking about spring, and the camp kitchen goes quiet once again.
“We’re so blessed to have this piece of land that we’ve got here and to be able to do this,” he says. “This is how we live our lives.”
Easy Pepper Sauce
MAKES 12 JARS
Ingredients
8 cups white vinegar
2 cups chopped white onions
4 cups chopped bell peppers
(1/2 red and 1/2 yellow or orange)
2 cups sugar
5-6 hot green peppers, sliced into strips
12 1-cup mason jars
Directions
Sterilize mason jars. Combine vinegar, onions, bell peppers and sugar in a pot. Bring to a boil for 1-2 minutes. Spoon solids into hot, sterilized mason jars. Fill each jar with liquid. Place 1-2 strips of hot green pepper in each jar. Seal tightly and allow hot liquid to cool; this will seal the lid.
