Game Cookery

Few ingredients are needed for José Souto’s hearty tagliatelle dish, which celebrates the flavour — and abundance — of British wild boar

Wild boar has become readily available in the UK due to large populations in the Forest of Dean but also in Kent and Scotland. These populations have steadily grown due to the boar’s ability to have litters of up to eight piglets twice a year. In many of these areas you are more likely to see the signs of the havoc these animals create rather than the animals themselves.

As a young boy in northern Spain, I remember going into the woods picking mushrooms with my uncles and harvesting leaf litter from the oak forests. Back then this was used as a bedding for livestock. With modern farming practices this harvesting of the leaf litter was phased out, so encroachment of bramble and fern started to take over the forest; this also cut down on the visibility of wild mushrooms and our ability to find them in the dense undergrowth. The now undisturbed forest allowed wild boar populations to grow.

I recently returned to the area I used to frequent as a young boy, finding the open woodland was now an impenetrable wall of bramble and the surrounding fields were torn up, as if a tractor had ploughed through it. According to my uncle there had always been a small population of wild boar in the area but they had been elusive and hardly ever seen. Larger populations started to appear and do damage within two years of the demise of the practice of harvesting leaf litter.

British boar has a fantastic flavour as all animals are shot standing, unlike Europe where the majority are shot driven. Our wild boar meat is not tainted with adrenaline

“British boar has a fantastic flavour, as they are shot standing rather than driven”

and the lactic acid of stressed driven animals, which leads to a much better quality of meat.

You can serve this dish with a classic basil pesto or try it with wild garlic. Remember to wash the garlic leaves and let them drip dry if you want to use them.