Wild Game Stew Anchors Monroe County Family’s Annual Hunt Supper Outside Monroeville

MONROE COUNTY, Ala. — In an open-air cook house outside Monroeville, a cast-iron Dutch oven comes out of an old electric oven and onto the counter, and the lid lifts on a stew that the people who eat it call legendary. What goes into the pot changes from year to year. This is the Smith family’s annual Wild Game Supper, held each fall to mark the start of hunting season, and the camp stew is its centerpiece.

Sage Smith, a retired family doctor, does the cooking. The cook house sits on family land in the gently sloping countryside of Monroe County: a tin roof held up by timbers, a massive stone fireplace anchoring one wall, a rustic wood table, and open air on the other sides. Dry leaves cover the ground in November. Several pots are bubbling for the supper, which gathers the men of the family and neighbors from the area.

What goes in the pot

Guests know that the stew can hold nearly anything the woods provide. Rabbit, dove, venison and squirrel often make the recipe card, along with other meats not found at the local grocery. Neighbors help fill the pot. Frank Smith, Sage’s nephew, says friends know the supper is on the calendar and head into their own woods with .22 rifles to bring back game. “Young Agee Broughton will shoot and kill a handful of squirrels each year, clean them and bring them over for Sage to add to the pot. Same for some of the other neighbors,” Frank Smith says.

For the guests, the event is something of a rite of passage. Men trade office clothes for camouflage, and laptops and pens for guns and knives, and they eat meat they would not ordinarily see on a plate. Alongside the stew on the long table are turnip greens, cornbread muffins, stewed pears grown at home and homemade pepper sauce, all made by brothers and in-laws. The table is dressed with an undyed cloth and a clay milk jug holding hot-pink crape myrtle.

The ingredients line up with Alabama’s hunting calendar. State rules list squirrel and rabbit seasons as running from the second Saturday in September through the last day of February, and the dove season has a late-fall segment beginning Nov. 21, according to the Alabama Administrative Code’s 2026-2027 hunting seasons rule. Deer archery season opened Oct. 15, according to Outdoor Alabama. Hunters should check current regulations and license requirements with the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources before heading out.

A family place in the woods

The property is a collection of cabins and houses that have been added over time. Log cabins flank the pavilion. One began as a project for a much younger Sage, who went off to medical school before his father had it finished. The other is a family home from the early 1800s that Sage had moved to the land and re-erected. Other family cabins sit farther up the red dirt drive or deeper in the woods, so each branch has its own place. A small spring-fed pond out front is stocked with bass, bream and catfish, and past it a narrow dirt road runs down into dense woods. The woods, which stretch deep and dense, are the reason everyone comes.

The family’s roots in the area run back generations. Smith practiced medicine in Monroeville, and the town had a Smith doctor for 106 years in a row, counting his grandfather, his uncle and himself. Monroeville is the county seat and is widely known as Alabama’s literary capital because of authors Harper Lee and Truman Capote, who grew up there; the Old Monroe County Courthouse now houses a museum with exhibits on both writers.

Right after the supper, the rest of the family joins the men for Thanksgiving. Everyone brings a dish, and children run free around the swimming hole and trampoline. Together the two gatherings open a busy cold-weather stretch in which relatives flock to the camp for weekends. “I have so many cousins, but we’re all like siblings,” Frank Smith says. “We’re as close as siblings because of that place.”

The supper’s roots

The Smiths did not invent the event. Sage’s father hosted a similar gathering years ago, an idea he took from the Stallworth family in Beatrice, a Monroe County town that Smith says is pronounced be-AT-triss. “The Stallworths would have a wild game supper, and they would have 300 people,” Smith says. At that supper, he recalls, a bonfire burned in a pasture while the men and boys stood around it with the drink of their choice. There were lines of tables, and the women baked cakes and pies. “It was an amazing thing, to see that,” Smith says.

The Smith version is smaller and, in Sage’s words, about the “hearty simplicity of country living.” “It’s no fun just to build a cabin and not have any guests or do anything,” he says. “The most fun is the fellowship and the people that come up.”

Weekends at camp until February

After Thanksgiving week the family settles into a weekend routine of hunting, cooking and visiting that lasts until the season winds down in February. Siblings and cousins drive up on Friday afternoons after work, often with friends, and eat a large supper in the pavilion. Someone lights the fire first, and people drift down from their own screen doors in muddy green boots with cold drinks in hand. A golden retriever greets cousins and other dogs near the table, where someone has set out an appetizer or two. A few wives set up mahjong at a small table, and a couple of children go to check a green field for game. The adults stay by the hearth late into the night.

“I’ll say, ‘Guys, it’s 11 o’clock, we’re going hunting in the morning,’” Smith says. “And they’ll say, ‘How much wine is left?’”

Saturdays start before dawn. The hunters stay out from daylight until midmorning, then regroup at the pavilion for bacon and eggs, grits and biscuits, Bloody Marys and screwdrivers. Smith says that after a 5 a.m. start and a big breakfast, a nap by noon is a given, and then it is back up at 3 p.m. for the deer field. “We’re so blessed to have this piece of land that we’ve got here and to be able to do this,” he says. “This is how we live our lives.” The routine repeats every weekend until the camp kitchen goes quiet in February.

Easy pepper sauce recipe

The homemade pepper sauce on the table makes 12 one-cup mason jars.

Ingredients

• 8 cups white vinegar
• 2 cups chopped white onions
• 4 cups chopped bell peppers (half red, half yellow or orange)
• 2 cups sugar
• 5 to 6 hot green peppers, sliced into strips
• 12 one-cup mason jars

Directions

Sterilize the mason jars. Combine the vinegar, onions, bell peppers and sugar in a pot and boil for one to two minutes. Spoon the solids into the hot, sterilized jars, then fill each jar with the liquid. Add one or two strips of hot green pepper to each jar and seal tightly. As the hot liquid cools, the lid will seal.

For other South Alabama stories from Monroe County, see our recent report on final Hurricane Isaias debris pickup in Monroe and Wilcox counties.