How to Tame a Wild Pork Chop

Here, then, were two young people climbing through a canyon in morning half-light, Central Texas, stalking hogs. They were private chefs enjoying a morning free of clients, smelling faintly of the Angora sweater one of the chefs wore and also of last night’s red wine. They were headachy, and trying not to stumble in the scree that tumbled off the canyon’s walls as pigs above them rooted amid low oak and thickets of juniper. They had one rifle between them, and they walked slowly, heel to toe, so as not to make noise.

Jesse Griffiths was one of them. He runs a stand at the farmers’ market in Austin, selling butchered meats and prepared foods, and he has a supper club devoted to the pleasures of proteins harvested in the wild. The other was Morgan Angelone, who works for him, the camp chef for the private hunting classes Griffiths teaches when he isn’t organizing dinners, or curing sausages, or trying to open a brick-and-mortar restaurant devoted to his craft. An account of this hunt appears in Griffiths’ excellent new cookbook, “Afield: A Chef’s Guide to Preparing and Cooking Wild Game and Fish.”

It was a beautiful morning interrupted by the crack of the gun. And this was the future just as surely as it is the past: Texans with rifles and sharp knives, killing and then field-dressing an animal that will offer them 30 pounds or more of chops and shoulders, hams and trim for sausage and stew.

Once they were cowboys with hats. Now they are cooks with tattoos. They return from the field in time for breakfast, and with dinner on their minds. Griffiths brines his chops, and later browns them, then cooks the crisp off the meat slowly, in a braise of sweet onions. The process creates gravy of remarkable depth and complexity, to serve over white rice. You could throw a knot of greens on the side.

That would be nice to do ourselves this weekend, yes?

Or no? These are the great riddles of hunter-gatherer-fantasy cooking, after all: Where do you get the animal, and do you want to, and does it matter?