Wild Game Dinners: Hunting Camp Cookbooks We’d Buy

This is the anchor of the whole list. Steven Rinella’s book runs through recipes and techniques for every hunter and angler, meaning it deals with the parts most cookbooks skip: what to do with tough cuts, how to handle fish you caught yourself, how to keep venison from tasting like liver. Random House is a trusted publisher and this copy is sold by Amazon with Prime, currently down more than half from list. At rank #3 in this batch, it is moving fast enough that I would not sit on it long.

DK’s Modern Pioneer Cookbook comes at food from the traditional foods side: fermenting, curing, cooking from scratch with what you actually have. That skill set overlaps hard with game cooking, because both start with an ingredient nobody handed you in a plastic tray. It pairs well with the MeatEater book, which handles the animal, while this one handles everything you serve alongside it. If your reading tastes run this direction, the homesteading books we rounded up for beginners cover a lot of the same ground.

Best of the Best from the Mid-South pulls selected recipes from favorite community cookbooks of West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee. That is church supper and fire hall food, which is exactly what a camp kitchen runs on. It is the cheapest book on this list by a wide margin and the one I would hand to somebody who says they don’t cook. Our full West Virginia cookbook roundup has more in this vein if regional recipes are your thing.

More than 700 slow cooker recipes in one volume, which is the practical answer to feeding a camp. The Fix-It and Forget-It series is not fancy and does not pretend to be, and that’s why it works here: dump, set, walk out the door at dawn. Swap the beef in most of these recipes for shoulder or neck meat and you’re in business. This Avon edition is a fundraiser tie-in, so the pink cover is doing double duty.

The Essential Instant Pot Cookbook is the cheapest entry point on this list for pressure cooking, and pressure is what turns a stubborn venison roast into something you can cut with a fork in about an hour. Recipes are written for electric pressure cookers generally, not just one model. It sits at rank #2,152 here, lower than the big names, but the price is the argument. We went deeper on this category in the Instant Pot cookbook roundup.

Sous Vide at Home is the outlier pick, and I’ll be honest that it is a home kitchen book, not a camp book. But lean game meat is unforgiving on a grill and very forgiving in a water bath, so backstrap is one of the best arguments for the method. If you already own an immersion circulator, this is a solid reference from Ten Speed Press. If you don’t, start with the beginner sous vide titles before spending here.

The Southern Living Annual Recipes 20th Anniversary Edition is a doorstop of a reference, and that’s the point. Annual Recipes volumes collect a full year of magazine recipes, so you get breadth rather than a single cook’s point of view. At rank #435 with Prime shipping, it’s a reasonable pick for the person who wants one big book on the shelf instead of six small ones.

Danni’s Juke Joint Comfort Food Cookbook is bold Southern comfort food, modern versions of old school flavors. It’s the most personality of anything in this group, and it’s the one I’d cook from on a Saturday when the hunting is done and there’s time to make a real meal. Rank #201 with Prime. If soul food is the corner of the shelf you’re building out, the vegan soul food list approaches it from a different angle.

Ree Drummond’s Super Easy is 120 shortcut recipes built for weeknight dinners, and shortcut is the operative word at camp. Nothing here requires an ingredient you’d have to drive to Morgantown for. It’s a number one New York Times bestseller sitting at rank #7 in this pool, sold by Amazon, and the discount is over half off list.

The Skinnytaste Air Fryer Cookbook is 75 recipes, which is a modest count, but they’re tested and the portion guidance is clear. Crappie fillets and venison cutlets do fine in an air fryer without a quart of oil, and that’s a real advantage in a small camp kitchen. It’s the lowest priced book in this group after the Mid-South collection. Skip it if you don’t have the appliance, because there’s no workaround in these pages.