I learned to draw game from Frau Sophie, my landlady in Germany, who was born in 1900 and lived through two wars and the Depression supporting herself and her elderly parents, in their dotage, on the proceeds of her small-holding. She probably started renting rooms to military personnel during the Second World War, when the Luftwaffe built the fighter base that later became Canadian Forces Europe Detachment Baden-Söllingen.

Frau Sophie was a mistress of peasant cooking, a fact I realized when I poked my head into her kitchen once on a baking day. Her pastry was like linoleum but you could live for weeks on her bread alone, which she made in a matter-of-fact fashion that involved ferocious kneading and absolutely no wastage of flour or, indeed, anything else.

On my way home from work one day, a large hare bounded out of the ditch and brained himself on the front bumper of my car. I stopped -- it was quite a thump -- and picked up the body (it was quite dead). Plump, too; it was late summer. After a couple of days hanging in the byre, Frau Sophie showed me how to turn it into hasenpfeffer -- jugged hare. She also shared her sauerbraten recipe, which involved venison (probably poached) rather than beef.