Goodness knows where the recipe came from but it was a good one and made a king-sized batch of biscuits (cookies) that helped keep the lads going. Always being one to add my own touch to a recipe, I would split the dough into three or four lots and add some extras to each - dried fruit, nuts, chocolate chips.
The lads would head across to the South Island on the ferry and head for the hills. A week or two later they would return, much fitter, unwashed and unshaven, generally with a wealth of tales to tell. And, with a bit of luck, with a few joints of venison.
Venison was a rarity then. Unless you shot it yourself, or had hunter friends, you were unlikely to get a chance to taste it.
These days, it's a different story. If I fancy venison, I need go no further than my supermarket.
Deer were introduced to New Zealand from England in the late 1800s but numbers grew and they became a problem and deer culling was introduced. In the 1960s entrepreneurs started shipping the meat to Europe and hunting became lucrative. The deer population dwindled to the point that deer farming became economically viable. In 1970 the first deer farming license was issued. Today, there are more than two million deer on 4500 farms throughout New Zealand - the farms easily identified, when the beasts aren't visible, because they have taller, more robust fences than dairy or sheep farms.
A handful of specialised venison marketing companies have been licensed to use the Cervena® natural tender venison appellation. In order to qualify as Cervena the animals must be three years of age or under, and raised in the most natural ways - free range, grass-fed and given no hormones or steroids.
"Cervena" comes from a combination of the Latin, Cervidae, meaning deer, and venison (which originally meant "hunting" in Latin, but over time has come to mean deer meat in general.) Now if I fancy some venison, I need go no further than my supermarket. I often use the meat as a change from beef in a winter's casserole. The wild venison my friends brought back from their expeditions was generally in chunks of unidentifiable geography, so casseroling was safest. I would marinate the meat in red wine with some aromatic herbs and then add onions and celery to the casserole. Venison tends to be a lean meat and the celery seemed to stop the it from seeming too dry.
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