A Really Big Lunch: Meditations on Food and Life From the Roving Gourmand

by Jim Harrison

  Well, you see the drift. I admit I spent more money than usual on digestive nostrums. Now I’m on the eve of a French book tour where it will be easy to find brains and tongue, also skate wings au beurre noir, which will help me fly through the cultural sewer of book publication, the photo ops and endless babbling. I have been diverted by an item on television news that described a punishment fad among American parents called “hot saucing,” wherein they dab the tongues of their naughty children with hot sauce. I’ve always considered Tabasco a sacrament so this new practice strikes me as another gesture of the Antichrist, or at least the advent of torture into child raising.

  This is my last day in the Great North. After preparing my simple Spanish chicken dinner dish I’m setting off for a long wilderness hike with the ghost of my dog Rose, who died this summer as a result of my inattention as I convalesced from my book tour. In one of the grand vagaries of the human mind and imagination, I can occasionally see Rose on my hikes. She crisscrosses the landscape, a white setter against the greenery, looking for ghost birds.

  Ducks

  Duck Scaloppine with Dried Cherries and Grappa

  Scaloppine d’Anatra alle Ciliegie e Grappa

  Recipe by Mario Batali

  Duck breast is not typically served this way in Italy, but I find the deep red meat with the fat still attached delicious, as well as easy to prepare. Cold duck fat gets ugly, so serve this immediately, with braised red cabbage.

  MAKES 4 SERVINGS

  1 whole MAGRET DUCK BREAST (about 1½ lb), split

  ½ cup ALL-PURPOSE FLOUR

  SALT and freshly ground BLACK PEPPER

  ¼ cup EXTRA-VIRGIN OLIVE OIL

  ¼ cup DRIED CHERRIES

  ½ cup GRAPPA

  ½ cup DRY RED WINE

  ½ cup CHICKEN STOCK

  2 tbsp UNSALTED BUTTER

  1 bunch SCALLIONS, thinly sliced on the diagonal

  1. Leaving the fat on, slice each duck breast across the grain into 6 equal pieces. Using a meat mallet, pound the pieces into “scaloppine” 1/8 inch thick and about 4 inches long. Season the flour with salt and pepper, and dredge the scaloppine in the seasoned flour.

  2. In a 10- to 12-inch sauté pan, heat the olive oil over high heat until smoking. Add the duck pieces and cook, without turning, until deep golden brown on the first side. Add the cherries, grappa, wine, stock, and butter and bring to a boil. Cook until the liquid is reduced by half, 6 to 7 minutes, then turn the duck pieces over. Cook for 30 more seconds.

  3. Transfer the duck to warmed serving plates, sprinkle with scallions, and serve immediately.

  Ducks

  We tend to eat the avian species who sing less well. No one to my mind has produced a CD called “Summer Duck Songs,” and the wild forms of these species—the mallards, pintails, ringbills, blue­bills, wood ducks, and teal I shot for the table long ago—were equally unmelodious. In ancient times, among many primitive peoples ducks were sacred creatures—albeit readily eaten, which makes them even more sacred. Doubtless part of our current crisis of values in America is that so few of us raise any of a dozen types of delicious ducks for the table. This is not a fashionable time to compare us unfavorably with the French, but driving through the Burgundy countryside I’ve counted tens of thousands of ducks. Perhaps they should be raised on the wide-open spaces surrounding monuments in Washington, D.C.?

  My friend Mario Batali is a high priest of ducks, an intercessor for the less gifted. I will cook everything he writes down, because it makes life far less brutal.

  Wine Strategies

  I’m trying to devise new strategies to counter my postelection melancholy, the sodden lump of emotions settling in the gizzard that on that late evening could be purged only by a good bottle of French wine, a Les Bécasses Côte-Rôtie, if I remember correctly, drunk in full, somewhat sullen gulps. When dawn came it became clear to me on the sofa that national politics were beyond my control.

  Added to this was my recent diagnosis of diabetes so that I could no longer gulp a bottle (or two) of wine a day with my Adam’s apple leaping in victory at each swallow. Medical authorities, such as they are, have promised me that I can return on a more modest scale once this dread disease is under control. The glory days, however, are gone. Hara-kiri was an unsuitable option, but splitting a single bottle between Saturday and Sunday wrenched my heart. After Raymond Chandler had to quit drinking to avoid certain death, he remarked that life had lost its Technicolor.

  Can a gulper become a sipper? That remains to be conclusively seen. Part of the diabetic regimen is to shrink the body, throwing away the precious pounds so lovingly added in France, the best restaurants in America, and my own home kitchen where moderation was given only minimal thought. Despite medical evidence there is the primitive idea that we should not throw away our weight when winter is coming. I’ve never needed those wine stopper gizmos because I thought it a sacrilege to let a partial bottle diminish in a long, lonely night.

  Normal people don’t think they have a spare hour a day for walking. They are, of course, free to be as normal as they choose, but for an abnormal wine lover this hour is piffle compared to possibly having a half bottle a day by mid-April, when I expect to look like a male model with my abs rippling in the sunlight. Maybe I couldn’t walk an hour a day for my country, but I can for wine. Down here in Patagonia, Arizona, near the Mexican border, I can see the bottles shimmering at the end of the narrow country road where I huff along diverted by nature but also knowing that fermentation is a central fact of nature.

  I’m currently saving money by not drinking wine, and I don’t want to. The numbers are insultingly obvious when you go from ten bottles a week to one. I’ve always been left-wing and socially aware, and I hate to cut into the income of the vintners of Côtes du Rhône. Even if I make my mid-April deadline for upping the ration to a half bottle a day, I’m a nothing muffin compared to, say, my September book tour in France where when I did a signing at any of a number of bookstores fine bottles would be opened on the spot. This grand French tradition does not exist in the United States, where in a recent thirty-five-day tour I was left with my own slender wallet. Ten years ago in San Francisco I was given a rich, thickish California Cabernet which was delicious poured on my hotel waffles. On one long tour in France I ended up with five cases of individual wines that I was tempted to roll on naked but thought it might be painful. I store these wines in Paris and Burgundy to avoid paying duty. To give my government any more money than the max tax I’ve been paying for twenty-six years is to encourage further bad behavior. I admit that this election I wrote-in Bill Clinton as a protest because one evening during his second term he ate two French dinners, one at six and one at ten. It is wisdom to double up on wine and food when you start too early. I think I read this somewhere in the Bible though not near the chapter on foreign policy.

  Lucky for me, two days after I was diagnosed with diabetes my friend the New York chef Mario Batali arrived to join me and another friend, the renowned wine tutor Guy de la Valdène, for a visit. This four-day event for some hunting and fishing was my inadvertent swan song to a glorious life of excess to which my cowardly body had had a simple-minded reaction. Sad to say the Montana weather turned awful, the worst four days of the late autumn, and we bitterly resigned ourselves to eating and drinking with a small crowd. Mario had sent ahead three cases that included magnums of 1990 Le Pergole Torte by Monte Vertine, 1990 Brunello Riserva by Talenti, 1985 Gaja Darmagi, and 1997 Sori Tilden. We also had an ample supply of Joe Bastianich’s excellent Clerico in addition to a number of bottles from my diminished cellar including a 1970 Lafite-Rothschild, a 1960 Heitz Martha’s Vineyard, and a 1973 magnum of Mount Eden. (I admit I’m prejudiced against most California wines, which can be used to paint a house dark purple, but there are exceptions.) In early October we drank a couple of fine cases from the Rhône Rangers at Edmunds St. John.

 
Naturally you can’t drink this quantity without proper food. The first evening we cooked a simple carton of two-pound Kobe rib steaks, and in the ensuing evenings we had a white truffle extravaganza with homemade pasta and a wild piglet Mario braised with garlic and citrus. Fortunately for our health my wife Linda’s garden was still full of autumn vegetables. The four days constituted my at least temporary swan song to gluttony and drinking wine in proper volume. Back to intelligent strategies for the infirm. When my body and the doctors whisper to me, “Jimmy, you’re ready,” I intend to have on hand a quantity of bottles that I will drink at an austere speed. These, of course, will not include the grand bottles of the past that are mostly drunk by unworthy stockbrokers. Far in the past, remoter than Reagan, I see those magnums of 1949 Latour, 1953 Margaux, Clos de la Roche, and ordinary bottles of Pétrus and Cheval Blanc. Bill Gates could take his company to the top if only he began swilling these wines in quantity.

  My own modest list will include wines that I can count on to restore my spirit, including Domaine Tempier Bandol (especially Tourtine and Migoua), Châteauneuf-du-Pape Vieux Télégraphe, Tour Vieille’s Collioure, Vacqueyras from Sang des Cailloux (writing novels is like drawing blood from rocks), Hermitage, the Nuits-Saint-Georges I had at lunch at the Confurons’ vineyard, and some Grands Echézeaux I’ll earn by climbing the Eiffel Tower naked in winter. I’m not a white wine enthusiast, but I’ll include Silex, Montrachet, and Meursault for warmish days.

  Now I’m in the realm of the possible. Throughout this long winter I’ll be scaling mountains, or at least foothills, here on the Mexican border with our dogs Mary and Zilpha, who don’t need anything like wine to look forward to. Drinking a fine glass on the sofa while petting the dogs is a pleasure not afforded to us by politics much less by writing novels. Drinking a fine glass while petting Lucrezia Borgia might be even better, but I haven’t seen her in recent years. Not that long ago I said in a poem that our bodies were beautiful women who were never meant to be faithful to us.

  Resuming the Pleasure

  Has anyone ever said, “Let’s fly to London and taste some fine teas”? Flights across the ocean are far too perilous to gamble on anything but extreme pleasure. In all of my years as a commercial pilot flying the biggest birds created by man I was always mindful that death was my true copilot. That’s why when I hit the ground, as it were, I was off and running to a wine bar to hoist down a mag or two. In Paris that meant Juveniles and Le Rubis.

  Of course in actuality I’m only a novelist and poet and have been so since I received my essential calling at age fourteen while reading John Keats. I immediately set about learning the territory which I quickly surmised included women, nature, and wine, a triumvirate virtually forming the spine of literature, not to speak of a vigorous life.

  Returning to earth I recall myself as an eighteen-year-old listening to Berlioz’s Requiem with my sister with a seventy-cent fifth of Gallo and a burning red candle, a metaphor of the hotness of our souls on the verge of real life, which seemed somewhat distant from the rural Midwest. My wine drinking, mixed with other forms of alcohol, began and continued in a rather disorderly fashion until this early winter when I came down with type 2 diabetes. My valves were blown according to the body mechanics, the doctors, my threads stripped bare from purported overuse. For the time being no more wine, pasta, potatoes fried in duck or goose fat, or pomegranate soufflés, and as for alcohol a mere two ounces of vodka a day, the kind of paltry drink a publisher has when bent on cheating a writer. I also had to drop thirty pounds, which meant throwing away the hundreds of thousands of dollars I had spent on my ample tummy that many women in the world considered an objet d’art. But most of all it was the absence of good wine that brought me to tears and occasional sobs. Literary writers aren’t gunslingers or poker players. Our gifts demand fragility and extreme vulnerability to life. I didn’t want to be manly, I wanted wine and her shy handmaiden, fine food, with the intensity that a man marooned on a glacier for four months might desire a Big Ten cheerleader.

  After four nasty months of improbable physical exertion which included pushing back from the table before I was ready, and pondering the mysteries of yogurt which even my dogs scorned, I was ready to return to earth. I invented a project to visit Collioure in France and search for the missing manuscripts of Antonio Machado, one of my favorite poets, who had lost a valise of poems while escaping Franco’s Spain with his family in 1939. Machado was a great poet, and there was an ineffable melancholy about the matter that had troubled me for a long time. Another reason to go to Collioure is that I had seen an extraordinary film about the vineyard of Christine Campadieu and her husband, Vincent Cantié, Domaine La Tour Vieille.

  Fortunately my friend and wine maven, Peter Lewis, had French intentions for writing a wine bar piece, so we decided to travel together as we had done before on what we euphemistically call our “wine and food tours.” Peter has amazed a number of my French friends with his knowledge about their wines. These are not the most agreeable people, as we all know, habitually greeting the most splendid meal with a sardonic pas mal. Peter is a modest fellow and burgeoning novelist, agreeing with my contention that wine criticism bears the same relationship to wine as fustian theology does to God. As a novelist and poet I value the judgment of those who have created notable works. If I were a vintner and Mr. Brunier of the fabled Vieux Télégraphe in Châteauneuf-du-Pape told me he liked a bottle I had created, I would be thrilled, less so by a positive review in a wine magazine.

  I do, however, value the experience when Peter speculates aloud why I like a particular wine so much. It’s really not adequate at times for me to merely say “yummy” or “mother dawg.” It’s fun to talk about wine without saying, “There’s a chiaroscuro of flavors here reminiscent of the colors of a fledgling finch, or perhaps the saddle of Lucrezia Borgia.” After a few hasty days in Paris, the high points being the seafood at La Cagouille and everything possible at Lulu’s Assiette over on rue Château, we had two mediocre days in Lyon until Thierry Frémaux who runs the esteemed Institut Lumière and also runs the Cannes Film Festival took us out for an extraordinary meal at Le Passage.

  Our intentions, however, were elsewhere. As we drove southwest toward Collioure, the only problem was my feet. I’m a country boy who only rarely walks at length on cement and the formula the doctor concocted of walking two to three hours for every bottle of wine was mildly punishing though it is fun to feel like a faux marine.

  In this remote corner of France it is easy to slide into the realm of the senses where we quite comfortably belong. I felt quite at home in Collioure and I was in my hotel room for an entire ten minutes before I sipped a glass of La Tour Vieille. From the balcony I could see the rooming house where my hero Antonio had perished, and I had a splendid sense of freedom from the Roman Empire that the United States has become. An hour later we were at the house of Vincent and Christine eating Christine’s wonderful home-cured anchovies (Collioure was the center of the French anchovy fleet) and then some rice and tiny squid in their own ink covered with a layer of the best langoustines I had ever had. As we drank a number of vintages of La Tour Vieille I reflected that the wine felt as if it emerged from the local earth in the same manner that Domaine Tempier belonged to Bandol. For several days we wandered the area, including the nearly vertical vineyards which explained why Vincent and Christine are both handsomely slender. Another evening Christine fixed a stewed rabbit and a bowl of fresh favas with blood sausage, the splendid food of the earth from which the wine had sprung. The third night we visited Le Cabaret, a restaurant owned by Antoine Delmas, an old friend of Cantié’s, and were served, among other things, a four-kilo loup de mer en gros sel, one of the most pleasurable fish dishes of my life.

  In a curious way the true nature of our trip only became apparent a month later when in a complete slump I made a round trip between Montana and Michigan and on the way home on a route through northern Wisconsin I saw a sign for
Redwine Road in a remote rural area. Under this blessed road sign I semi-dozed and relived my trip, the gorgeous eel stew at the home of Jean and Nicole Meurice near a salt marsh (frankly I’ve had food in a number of French homes that exceeded in quality anything at a half dozen three-star restaurants), the bottles of Château La Roque of Pic St.-Loup I drank in the Montpellier region in keeping with the theme of terroir. I find Montpellier an engaging city and we were lucky to discover a relatively new restaurant manned only by Chef Jean-Christophe Blanc and his wife Whitney. The food here is simple and direct but utterly elegant. One day at lunch we raised our glasses of Pic St.-Loup to a woman having her hundredth birthday party. She smiled at us and drank deeply from her glass of red.

  We had a fine dose of the natural during a day in the Ca­margue, then made our way to Anne Igou’s Nord-Pinus in Arles, my favorite hotel in the world, bar none. Arles is a splendid walking town and has a marvelous market with a tinge of the proletarian absent in high-rent areas such as Avignon. There’s a dearth of Texas women in five-hundred-dollar sunglasses carrying their dogs that are crossbred from monkeys and rats. In Arles I’m close enough to the territory to confine my wine drinking to Domaine Tempier’s Bandol. In fact, Lulu Peyraud’s vineyard was our last stop before we returned to Paris. This completely private restaurant is my favorite place to eat in France along with Gérard Oberlé’s fabled kitchen in Burgundy. My obnoxious, self-administered blood test in the morning revealed that I had passed again, having failed only one day in twenty when I missed my three hours of walking, certainly a small chore compared to the pleasure of wine.