Bow Season in the Mountains of W. Maryland

Deer Hunting season is a big thing here. Kids get a week off school to go hunting with the folks, there is deer corn and salt licks for sale for luring the beasts within aiming distance and all over are establishments for butchering and dressing your kill.

I hate hunting, but I do recognize there are way too many deer around and as long as the hunters eat the quarry rather than hang it on some wall I guess I'm okay with it. Here at the inn we bought a salt lick and deer corn to try and lure the deer closer to the property so that they are protected. We have especially been enjoying a pair of twins as they grew up over the summer. But it is the season for laying up the winter provisions and I came across this article in one of my favorite blogs all about the origins of "Humble Pie"

The Mighty and the Offal: Humble Pie - From the blog "The Austerity Kitchen"

Some carried long bows and forked arrows; others harquebusses, muskets and Lochaber axes. They wore thin-soled shoes, tartan hose, knotted handkerchiefs, sky-blue caps, and garters fashioned from wreathes of straw. Thus equipped and adorned, they, the Irish nobility of Braemar, ventured into the Highland countries to hunt deer.

Numbering fourteen or fifteen hundred, these noble hunters would rise with the sun to consult on the particulars of the day's enterprise. After deciding the best place to herd their quarry, they dispersed in all directions. Sixteenth-century Londoner John Taylor, ferryman by trade and chronicler by avocation, relates the details of one such hunting party. The participants were intrepid. No obstacle proves too formidable to overcome. They waded "up to their middles through bournes and rivers" in search of cover. Upon a signal from scouts charged with spotting game, the "tinchel," or circle of sportsmen, would close in, driving the startled ruminants toward other hunters lying in wait, who greeted them with hundreds of snapping Irish greyhounds and scores of "arrows, dirks and daggers." In less than two hours' time "fourscore fat deer were slain" for the noble hunters "to make merry withal."

The choice cuts of venison went to high-born hunters and were baked into a pastry served on the manor lord's dais. Seated lower because a few rungs down on the social ladder, the master of the hunt and his fellows received their due in the form of a pie containing the heart, liver and other inward parts of the deer. Known colloquially as "humbles," "umbels" or "numbles," these ingredients have since come to be associated with acts of mortification and obeisance. An old saying goes, "Whence, as the haunch and neck were for 'Lordings' and the umbles ... for the yeoman."

Victorian writer George Sala insists, however, that humble pie's reputation is wholly unearned. "He who first decried Humble Pie, and libelled it as a mean and shabby kind of victuals," he observes in his 1862 tome The Seven Sons of Mammon, "was very probably some envious one who came late to the feast, and of the succulent pasty found only the pie-dish and some brown flakes of crust remaining."

If you wish to secure yourself a piece of savory humble pie, the recipe below, which also appears in Sala's work, should, despite its fragmentary character, spare you any unwarranted culinary humiliation.


Humble Pie

"Take the humbles of a deer," says the recipe, – you see, there is venison for you to begin with, – and then it goes on to enumerate slices of bacon, condiments, buttered crust, and so forth.