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

by Jim Harrison

The grand thing about wine is that it’s something you get to do with other people, along with the noble sports of fishing and hunting. When your “eye is in fine frenzy rolling,” as Shakespeare would have it, you forget that you are a tribal creature and need the company of others. There is a grand pleasure in opening a good wine and cooking with friends. In fact, opening fine wine is as near to the sacramental as I get, having abandoned organized religion in my teens after a Baptist minister told me that Mozart’s music was “satanic.” Everywhere we are witness to the extreme confidence some people have in their stupidities.

  As the years have passed you might say that I sought my spirituality through food and wine, a pleasant place to look for spirituality along with the natural world. Just the other day I was floating on the Big Hole River trout fishing with a friend. About a half hour from our destination and the end of a good fishing day we anchored in an eddy and opened a bottle of chilled Bouzeron. The wine seemed as mysteriously delicious as the flowing river. We drank in silence, watching clouds of swallows and bullbats swoop after the late afternoon insects. There isn’t a three-star restaurant in France that offers a better location to drink wine. Just before finishing the bottle we suddenly had to move on because a mother moose and her baby plunged through the wild roses on the nearby bank. This is like being rousted by the world’s largest bar bouncer, about a thousand pounds to be exact.

  This has been a time of reconsiderations for me. Only last year it would have been unthinkable for me to have a bottle of white wine in the drift boat. I connect hunting and fishing with the color of blood. With type 2 diabetes, however, two bottles of red wine a day became inappropriate, a euphemism of course. One bottle a day is possible with a proper morning walk with the dogs, or rowing a drift boat for four hours in a fairly heavy current.

  My true, personal revolution came in Parma, Italy, last autumn. I discovered that I could have a glass of Prosecco di Valdobbiadene and then continue on with the hard work of tourism. Naturally I prefer markets to cathedrals. When I have a glass of red I mostly want another glass of red. I spent hours in the splendid market in Modena on a single glass of prosecco. I even discovered that when you drink prosecco while cooking you don’t blow the recipe. When I explained my discovery to my friend Mario Batali, he said, “Everybody knows that.” He’s a big fellow to say the least and regularly drinks prosecco while he cooks. When we got home I ordered a number of cases and my cooking has improved. The red arrives when the game birds are properly roasted, not before.

  I find that I often discover things that many people know. It reminds me that when we discovered the Grand Canyon there were already a thousand Havasupai Indians living within it. When I talked to a number of sophisticated friends about how appalled I was after seeing the film Mondovino, they lectured me on my innocence as an immature hermit, which is the essential trajectory of the novelist and poet.

  Mondovino somewhat bruised my sacramental feelings about wine, but not for all that long. I quickly realized that the wine world shares a specific silliness with the worlds of art, literature, and food, not to speak of religion. At times all of these are a microcosm of the boxing world with a dozen Don Kings at the top. It is the silliness of myopia, the frog at the bottom of the well pit that thinks the well pit is the world. When I’m told that Napa Valley is the new Vatican of the wine world I say that it reminds me more of a fiefdom of Pat Robertson. To be fair and since I know them so well I have to say that for pure shabbiness compared to the worlds of art and literature, which is to say galleries and publishing, wine takes third place.

  My bruises from Mondovino healed rather quickly when I realized yet again that taste is idiosyncratic. There is no Monoethic Palate to guide us, no numerical Ten Commandments to guide us with a steely embrace. Of course this is a paint by number world. Learning the world for most of us is a permanent elementary school. If you need to know what refrigerator to buy, check out Consumer Reports, and any amateur with a chunky wallet can concentrate on the hundred best vintages in the world. It’s the next ten thousand vintages that are up for grabs. Around here in Montana there are eco-ninnies who love the natural world with a severely limited and prescriptive guidebook. Everywhere we go we also meet wine-ninnies.

  Back to Bouzeron and the spirit of wine and the fact that I didn’t discover this affordable wine earlier because I was basically a red wine snot. Of course on occasions I liked Puligny-Montrachet, Meursault, Sancerre, Silex, Domaine Tempier rosé when my wife and daughters would share their well-guarded horde of the latter. My first Bouzeron came with a meal of poulet estragon with roasted vegetables. I was a little dumbfounded by how much I liked the wine and immediately consulted my Wine Master in Seattle, Peter Lewis, who explained de Villaine’s Aligoté thus: “It is utterly pleasant and unassuming. You don’t need to stretch or strain to appreciate it. It is uncomplicated; but that’s not to say that it is simple. Just that the experience of it is not cerebral; it’s sensual without being hedonistic.” After describing certain technicalities Peter goes on to say, “It’s a quaffer, lovely to drink; in fact, at times it seems a little too easy to drink. It’s one of those wines that seem mysteriously to evaporate from your glass—you weren’t aware that you were drinking that much.”

  And there you have it. In any event, Bouzeron reminded me of my discovery of Domaine Tempier Bandol so long ago, a wine still guaranteed to counteract the weariness brought about by the corrosive parsimony of spirit found everywhere in America today. A wine that you love haunts you by ordinary means. I was struck dumb by my last bottle of 1968 Château d’Yquem in my diminished cellar, but when you find a wine you truly love under twenty bucks you should bow down and give thanks to the gods.

  I have had reason to be quite embarrassed lately, a rare emotion for me. I have long poked fun at the pathetic attempts professional tasters make to characterize wine in terms of fruit other than grapes. I was caught severely off balance when Kermit Lynch sent me a case of mixed whites to dabble with. I felt immediately trapped by the ineffable mystery of taste. A ripe peach tastes exactly like a ripe peach. A fine porterhouse tastes like nothing else in the world but a fine porterhouse. Brouilly tastes like Brouilly, which I have drunk dozens of times at Café Select on Montparnasse. Good flavors are described in a general atmosphere of pleasure. Bad flavors are easier to describe because of the immense world of shared experience. So this case of varied white wines trapped me both in my own limitations as a writer and in the rather obvious limitations of language itself. I make countless aesthetic decisions when composing a novel but am far less comfortable making critiques of the work of others. With wine it is especially difficult because you must approach the bottle at the level of the vintner’s intentions, just as it is pointless to say that Stephen King isn’t as good as William Faulkner.

  So here I am hoist with my own petard but still refusing to introduce my case of white to the local fruit market. Here are a few favorites, leaving a number of them in silence.

  Domaine de la Tour du Bon 2004: Pretty good but a little sweet for my taste. Acceptable on a warm twilight watching birds from our patio in Patagonia, Arizona. One of the thousands of wildflowers I can’t name even though I like them all. Naturally had to open a red for the rather musky buffalo shank stew I had made for dinner.

  Philippe Faury Saint Joseph 2004: My father was an agronomist who with eyes closed could name the weeds and grasses he smelled. Naturally I can detect a herring egg sandwich when I bite into it. In this wine I can taste the stones of the Rhône Valley. The place suits me and so does the wine.

  Condrieu 2004—Faury: This wine was easy because I drank it with a sauté of pike, perch, and bluegill fillet Fed Exed to me as a gift from Minnesota. There was an edge of tartness I revere in expensive wines and it was very friendly with the fish.

  Ermitage du Pic St. Loup: This was also easy because I love the terroir, and had pleasant memories of drinking it in a café in the grand square of Mon
tpellier while watching the prettiest woman in France walk by. This wine tastes as soft and pleasant as the back of a girl’s knee after she has taken a dip in the Mediterranean. I drank it with the light-breasted scaled quail I had shot, then downshifted to the mighty Vacqueyras, Sang des Cailloux, for the shoulder of wild pig.

  Château la Roque: I’m served this frequently in France while I’m waiting impatiently for the red. I have learned to like it and turn to it when I find a bistro list flimsy. I love odd menu items like beef snout in vinaigrette (the best is at the wine bar Rubis in Paris) and the la Roque can stand up to it.

  I have not betrayed my first love, red wine. I have only tried to balance my unbalanced taste. White wine has offered me a specific equilibrium on my travels and at home where I try to mind my manners. Since I have leavened my wine drinking with white I haven’t had a single gout attack which in the past was a regular event. It’s hard to be on a book tour in France when you’re walking like Joe Cocker. Being an idiosyncratic man with idiosyncratic tastes I still won’t drink white wine after dark. The darkness beckons red.

  Eternity and Food

  At my age every word I write may be my last. In my late teens while I was suffering from a nearly fatal disease, the doctors, Bob and Bob Jr., gave me fifty years to live. I’ve always loathed the notion of “living on borrowed time” even though I’m confident that God wears a watch as big as the moon and with no dials. Unlike nearly all intellectuals I have no problem chatting about God though I’ve never connected with Him on my cellular like George Bush. I recently spent time with a physicist-inventor who has devised a clock that will last ten thousand years to be installed in a cave at an elevation, not incidentally, of ten thousand feet on a mountain in Nevada.

  The big question this morning is, Did I have a prequel? And will I have a postquel? Is there an end to eating? Are we all mere mortals or are there exceptions? Apollinaire said that Jesus held the world’s high altitude record. To the contrary of a recent Sony movie Jesus never married Magdalene. Their relationship went kaput when he spent his forty days alone in the wilderness. Women aren’t biologically structured to wait forty days according to Kinsey who interviewed ten thousand grocery delivery boys during the Second World War when so many husbands were away fighting for freedom. One can imagine the scene repeated countless times. The boy puts the bags of groceries on the kitchen table, his skin tingling with premonition. He half turns and she leaps on him like a mountain lion jumping a fawn.

  Eating is a race against time. This morning I shot yet another crotalid (rattlesnake) near the steps of my study, its writhing body finally slumping into a question mark. No more rodentia lunches for this Republican sucker whose relative killed my beloved English setter, Rose. I pitched the dead snake to the pigs, and the big sow, Mary, ate it with the evident pleasure of a hungry man before a plate of foie gras. She smiled at me as if to say, “Thank you, we’re on Earth together. When you eat my big hams I’ll be turned loose in heaven in a field of ripe sweet corn and muskmelons.”

  All of my jobs have required considerable fuel. During the few months I worked as a contortionist for the Cirque du Soleil I astounded kings and presidents, not to speak of hordes of riffraff, by my ability to stand on a forefinger, the finger made improbably muscular by writing longhand so that it looks like a buffalo turkey wing. Big jobs demand immense meals.

  Writers need to be a little cynical about their motives and I have noted that certain of my vaunted ancillary projects tend to take me to countries where I wish to eat. I call this activity “eating the country.” How can you pretend to understand France or Spain unless province by province you eat what they eat, thus making your empathy a matter of biology. Last fall’s zampone (stuffed pig’s leg) eaten in Parma and Modena has entered my neurons and increased my sympathy for Cesare Pavese, just as eating dozens of different game birds in quantity made me a better bird-watcher.

  Let’s get utterly serious, whatever that might mean. We simply have no evidence that we’ve had a prequel or will have a postquel. Years ago in a tavern (I’m a student of taverns) in Dannebrog, Nebraska, on the edge of the Sandhills, a group of very old farmers welcomed me home insisting that I had left the area in 1938. Frankly, I don’t look like anyone else what with buckteeth and a blind eye. Nothing I could say would dissuade them that I wasn’t the local young man who had hit the road just before the Second World War when in fact I was only a few months old. Of course as an artiste I was daffy enough to give the conviction of these geezers some credence. Maybe this was why I felt so comfortable in the Sandhills during all of the months I was researching my novels Dalva and The Road Home. Of course I was mildly frightened, having occasionally convinced myself of Rimbaud’s dictum, “Everything we are taught is false.” Luckily food kills fear and I drove north to the Peppermill in Valentine where a three-pound porterhouse and two bottles of red returned me to the accepted earth. This area produces the best beef in the United States and I especially like the well-aged Chianina-Angus cross. Sad to say this much beef at one sitting will give you Arnold Schwarzenegger dreams of being someone like Pelle the Conqueror swinging a bloody ax and mating bulbous-butted women wearing soiled opossum skins. Specific foods cause specific dreams.

  A certain small group of basic nitwits knows that to be a literary novelist and “minor regional novelist and poet” (as I have been called) is to spend a lifetime walking across freshly plowed fields. In other words, lumpy. However, I have no complaints because when not actually writing I get to be outdoors doing important things like hunting, fishing, bird-watching, roasting a wild piglet, studying the sources of creeks, or driving ornate mandalas around the entire country. By profession I collect memories. Once in Toronto after eating a stellar tongue sandwich I saw a woman slip on a banana peel and fall to the sidewalk. I turned away, having been taught by Christian parents not to look up a woman’s legs unless invited to do so. When I helped her up I thought she might say something sexy like “Buy me a villa,” but she looked in shy distaste at my Quasimodo face. l quivered at her dandelion scent. Her blouse was in disarray and when I caught a split-second glance at her belly button I knew she was a human being rather than an android.

  On a recent trip to Europe I had an accidental insight into my postquel. The trip began poorly in cold rainy Paris in March when thousands of malcontents were busy marching to and fro and burning cars, the acrid smell of which is off-putting to the appetite, but not as much as the giant Salon du Livre, what is known euphemistically as a “book fair” but in reality is a giant Walmart packed with book vendors and their largely tawdry wares. Three times I fainted from torpor and tipped over to the floor as old people are wont to do. I might have perished without the best tête de veau of my life one evening at Apicius. For mental and physical well-being I recommend eating the head of a calf. One becomes playful and innocent. And the next noon I had the wild-pig rillettes at La Taverne Basque, a regular hangout of mine on Cherche Midi. A woman is lucky indeed to meet a man who has eaten wild pig rillettes in the last twenty-four hours. Her partner will paw the air and snort loudly.

  In Paris I gave a speech to a mass of students advising them to take drugs, drink as much as possible, and stay on strike forever, after which I flew down to Seville on my necromancer’s project called “Pilgrimages,” the same project that took me to Collioure to visit Antonio Machado’s grave and search for his lost poems that likely were eaten by Falangist goats. In Seville I walked daily on the banks of the Guadalquivir with Christine Campadieu, the famed French vintner who keeps me from tipping over in front of cars and also speaks many languages while I’m limited to Michigan English, a perverse gibberish, though in most countries for some reason I’m totally informed in food and wine terminology.

  I was in Seville to walk where Federico García Lorca walked. He loved the Guadalquivir. By chance this day in June is his birthday and were he alive he would be one hundred and eight, which is old indeed. Unfortunately in Gran
ada, a few hours after visiting Lorca’s execution site at the Barranco de Viznar, I became quite ill so that on the way home I ended up in the emergency ward at the Resurrection Medical Center near O’Hare Airport in Chicago. My tentative consciousness at the time whirled with Spanish dreams as the IVs in both arms attempted to return me to “normal,” also a somewhat tentative state. I thought of Lorca, who it is said was shot in the ass repeatedly with a high-powered rifle because he was “gay,” a term not used at the time. I had also stayed in a room he favored at a hotel in Granada but there I mostly had thoughts of Miguel Hernandez dying in prison in Madrid.

  Frankly the hospital was reassuring because I had been without food and wine for four days and felt like Dondi Gandhi, a comic-strip waif. In the hospital I was back with Machado wheeling his eighteen-year-old wife around the hills of Castile as her TB-ridden body lost its ability to breathe, and also Machado carrying his old mom across the border into Collioure on a cold rainy night. He died a month later and in the hospital it didn’t seem like a bad idea but more of an adventure that you wouldn’t be able to write about. As a poet I hope for an epiphany every day and this would be a whopper.

  Back to the postquel. On the last leg of the return trip to our winter casita on the Mexican border I dreamed I’d be reincarnated as a scraggly elm tree out in a pasture against which cows would rub their itchy fly bites. This seemed a grand idea what with the sensuosity of having one’s bark rubbed by mammals, skin to skin as it were, and even more important, it meant that there would be eating after death. Trees, of course, eat not with their roots, which are nutritional conduits, but with the millions of infinitesimal root hairs that protrude into the soil from the roots. In short I would continue a form of existence by eating through my hair. What a relief. It was too much to imagine that Manuela the flamenco dancer from Seville would ever visit and rub against the homely elm but as many of us have noted, we can’t have everything.