Food that suits a cold day outdoors and a long table indoors afterwards. Nothing here is delicate, and that is the point.

Elevenses

• Gala Pie or Raised Game Pie

Lunch

• Seasonal soup
• Homemade sausage rolls, or sausages in a bun, or pulled pork in a bun

Dinner — main course

• Pheasant Casserole with Cider and Apples
• Oxtail Stew
• Red Poll Beef Bourguignon
• Fisherman’s Pie
• Lancashire Hot Pot
• Lamb Shanks in a Rich Red Wine Sauce
• Chicken, Leek and Ham Pie

Dinner — dessert

• Treacle Tart
• Upside Down Pear Pudding
• English Apple and Blackberry Pie
• Bakewell Tart
• Pear and Almond Tart

Cheese and biscuits

A selection of local cheese, chutney, crackers and savoury biscuits.

Allergens

All fourteen declared allergens are listed against each dish on request, and we ask for every dietary requirement in writing before the tasting. Our kitchen handles nuts, gluten, dairy, egg, fish, shellfish, soya, celery, mustard, sesame, lupin, molluscs and sulphites, so we cannot guarantee any dish is free from traces. (gf) gluten free · (gfo) gluten free on request · (v) vegetarian · (ve) vegan · (vo) vegetarian on request Reeves Events holds a 5-star food hygiene rating.

How a shoot day is actually fed

The menu is the easy part. The timing is what separates a shoot lunch that works from one that holds the day up.

Elevenses happens outdoors, standing, in whatever the weather is doing. It needs to be eaten with one hand and gloves on, and it needs to be genuinely hot when it reaches the last person in the line rather than the first. That is a holding problem, not a cooking problem, and it is the reason soup and sausages have survived a hundred years of shoot days.

Lunch is either a break or an interruption, and the difference is whether it was planned to the length the day allows. Tell us how long you want it to take and we will build it to that. Forty minutes and two hours are both fine; forty minutes served as though it were two hours is not.

Dinner is a different job again — usually the same evening, usually indoors, usually with guests who have been outside since eight and want to sit down properly.

What changes it

Indoors or out. A lunch in the house and a lunch in a barn or a bothy are different menus, because one has a table and the other has knees.

The weather. We plan a wet version and a dry version and decide on the morning. In late season that is not pessimism, it is arithmetic.

Numbers, and whether they move. Guns, loaders, beaters, pickers-up and dogs. Beaters often eat separately and often later, and that is two services, not one. Say so at the start and it is straightforward.

Where the kitchen goes. Some estates have one; many have a room with a kettle. We bring what is missing, the same way we do for a wedding in a field — see shoot lunch catering.

Booking a season rather than a day

Most of the estates we cook for book several days at once before the season starts, which is easier for everyone: the menus rotate so the same guns are not given the same lunch in October and December, and the numbers get sensible rather than guessed.

If you are looking at a single day, that is fine too. If you are looking at a season, get in touch before it starts rather than during it.

Game on the menu

It is not compulsory and some estates would rather not, but if you want the day’s quarry or last season’s birds on the table we will cook them properly. Pheasant and partridge reward slow treatment far more than roasting, and a casserole or a pie made two days ahead is better than either bird served pink and apologetic.

If you want to supply your own game, tell us early. There are rules about handling and provenance and we would rather sort that out in September than have a conversation about it on a Thursday morning.

Rotating a season

Estates that book several days with us have the menus rotated deliberately, so the same guns are not given the same lunch in October and again in December. It sounds obvious and it is the most common complaint about shoot catering anywhere — the syndicate that eats the same beef casserole six times.

It also lets the food follow the season properly. October and February are different months and the food should say so.

Vegetarians on a shoot day

Increasingly common, occasionally treated as a joke, and worth handling seriously. There will usually be one or two, and a plate of vegetables while everybody else has a casserole is not good enough. It should be a dish of its own, and it should be as substantial as everything else on the table, because the day is just as long and just as cold for them.