At the deer camp I used to frequent near Crystal Springs, Mississippi, we called it "the autopsy": In an open-sided shed, the deer would be hoisted up by their hind legs on a gambrel and inspected by our camp butcher and amateur forensic expert, Bill Peavey. An irascible man, tough as a camp skillet, Peavey always took meticulous care in showing us precisely where and how our bullets had penetrated the deer and, more importantly, where we should have aimed those bullets to avoid damaging the meat.

Lesson completed, he'd begin butchering the deer by slicing out the entrails, along with the heart, liver, kidneys, and other organs, letting them all drop into a 25-gallon plastic "gutbucket" that he'd later haul off on his four-wheeler to a distant fenceline—a gift to the local coyotes.

Once, watching a gorgeous purple liver hit the bucket with a forlorn splat, I voiced a meek protest, but Peavey would hear none of it. I might as well have asked if I could steam an antler for breakfast. To him, the organs weren't meat: They were scraps. Away went the gutbucket, and with it the gorgeous liver.

The Swahili, however, have a saying: "Every meat is meat." The backstraps, roasts, steaks, and other assorted muscle cuts may be delicious—and for me and many others, a primary reason for hunting—but they're only a start. Inside that humble Mississippi gutbucket, amidst the inedibles, was a wild set of eating pleasures.

For some folks, this is hardly news—eating the heart remains a post-kill tradition in some deer camps, and there are those who still celebrate a successful hunt with a plate of venison liver and onions. But these hunters, mostly old-timers, are becoming scarce. As offal — an all-encompassing title for the edible organs of an animal, otherwise known as "variety meats" or, more nobly, viscera — disappeared from household supper tables in the last century, so too has it faded from the dinged-up dinner-and-poker tables of this nation's deer camps. Perhaps the American culture's squeamishness has spilled over into the hunting world, maybe laziness is to blame, or it could just be the benign neglect that comes from living in a prepackaged, vacuum-packed age. No matter: The hunter's loss is the coyote's gain.

But as Americans are slowly rediscovering the joys of eating offal—in recent years, cheeks, tripe, brains, and marrow have become staples at chic urban restaurants (at New York's Babbo, celeb chef Mario Batali offers an innards-only tasting menu)—so too should hunters, who have access to the freshest organs and, in the case of venison, to some of the rarest and most prized.

"It seems only polite to the animal you've killed," says Fergus Henderson, the legendary London chef widely credited with rescuing offal from the culinary gutbucket, and the author of The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating (Ecco Press), a cult-classic cookbook that just recently became available in the United States. "And it's all fantastic," he says, "the brains and tongue and liver and kidneys and all the other bits. There's a texture and unctuous flavor to them that nothing else can quite match. And it just makes so much sense to eat them, especially if you're a hunter. At my restaurant, people can't get enough of venison offal. They munch it up happily."

If there's delicious irony in the idea of London diners paying top prices for cuts that many of us wantonly leave for coyotes, the deliciousness, I'm afraid, belongs solely to those lucky scavengers. What Henderson calls nose-to-tail eating is, like hunting, about encountering the wilderness in all its visceral glory, and it's about the wild adventure lying at the big red heart of carnivorousness. Consider the recipes that follow, then, as a kind of field guide to the adventure that begins only after your deer is down.