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

by Jim Harrison

  Before leaving for home from Paris we made our way to Père-Lachaise to see the graves of Colette and Apollinaire. When I was a teen, reading Colette had suffused me happily in a nondirectional sexuality, and Apollinaire had got me through semi­starving periods in New York and Boston in the late 1950s. After Père-Lachaise we had a wonderful lunch at Le Wepler. Fish soup nurtures my confidence like cocaine does the acting profession. That evening my friend Jean-Claude Boulet took us to Apicius, a posh restaurant that offers the ultimate version of tête de veau. I swooned while eating it.

  Back home at this moment I am eating a health breakfast of sausage, eggs, corn bread, and a modest slab of testa, pig head cheese that Mario Batali sent along after hearing of my near-fatal kidney stone. As the golden morning light rolled down the mountain across the creek, I examined the testa closely as if I were reading a Keats poem, confident that I was seeing a luminous aspect of life on earth. Daily I pray for a huge cash bonus for my poetry to enable me to return to Collioure and find the lost poems of Machado. In the likely event that this doesn’t happen I will offer my support to Sarkozy if he sends ten thousand of his security forces to do the job. In our casita there is a photo of Machado at a table looking out over the tops of an assortment of wineglasses, waiting for his supper like a lunar dog. There is a stable of gold in his lips.

  Close to the Bone

  A number of years ago I found myself sitting on the back steps of a centuries-old church in Aix-en-Provence watching dozens of workers setting up the daily farmers’ market. It was shortly after dawn, and I was enduring the usual jet lag, but with pleasure.

  There is nothing like the sight of tons of food to divert one from banal complaints. Plus, there was the astounding experience of witnessing a young woman as she deftly climbed into the church’s organ loft and began to play Bach at a volume that caused the stone beneath me to hum.

  But of particular interest, despite the early hour, was an immense rotisserie loaded with rows of chickens and ducks. Juices from the fowl were gently dripping downward, bathing the lower tiers and the capacious bottom bin filled with sausages as well as roughly chopped leeks, fennel, and peppers. Even with the resonant and somewhat mathematical beauty of Bach surrounding me, I felt the call of the wild. Naturally, I bought a chicken—thinking that duck might be a little heavy for breakfast—and some of everything else. Growing up in the Midwest, I was taught by wise souls that breakfast lays the foundation for the day, and mine, made complete by a bottle of Domaine Tempier Bandol, left me surging with the kind of energy you don’t get from the French custom of a baguette and coffee.

  The primal urge to cook and consume meat on the bone has been with us since we figured out how to put food to flame two million years ago. Of course, a roast chicken is, in a sense, utterly ordinary, but then, if we’re not careful, so are most of our everyday lives—and also what we tend to eat. But there is something about the presence of bones and the flavor they add that’s not to be found in the relatively sterile and ubiquitous skinless, boneless chicken breast. With proper cooking, even a plain hen can rise to the level of what theologians like to call “the divine ordinary.” The same may be said of porterhouses, all manner of ribs, whole fish, and just about anything else cooked on the bone. You absolutely must pick up the bone that remains and chew on it as your ancient forefathers did around the fire while listening to the trumpeting of mastodons in the distance.

  Perhaps my fascination with this topic is partly genetic, as my father regularly masterminded the roasting of a couple of hundred chickens for church picnics. (A good oven is only an enclosed version of an open fire. Either will work admirably.) It may also be due in part to the technique’s nearly inexhaustible applications, commonplace and otherwise. Beyond the everyday hen—something so simple as not to require a recipe—I have roasted half a prime Hereford steer (with help), whole lambs pierced with sixty cloves of garlic, small wild piglets of twenty pounds and domestic porkers of 100, a beaver (unsuccessfully), hundreds of grouse and woodcock, an immense pig’s head from a recipe I seem to recall reading in one of the early editions of Joy of Cooking, and untold whitefish and lake trout in a basket over an oak fire at our cabin. And more, to be sure.

  Only a few weeks ago we grilled a cabrito, a young goat, over a very hot fire. Both goat and lamb find true companionship in a basting of olive oil, garlic, and thyme. The ten-year-old daughter of a friend chewed on a bone until it was white, which shows that all of us—even elegant little girls—can be primitive sometimes.

  Food, Finance, and Spirit

  I have heard that in our current recession the rich are washing and carefully drying their used tissues. Americans have endured another major financial swindle, likely the largest in our history, and as I write we sit around dumb as dogs on hot August afternoons. Of course dogs are smart up to a point and many of my friends who crave a natural state envy the spontaneity of dogs. However our dogs, Mary and Zilpha, love to eat green apples despite the ensuing stomach distress. Zilpha will also swallow deer hooves and live gophers. She hails from northern Scotland, hence is a Celt, a group not known for moderation. It is fair to say that our hunger and greed have brought us to a sad state. The free-market economy is a leashless Labrador who will eat anything.

  Out of sheer repulsion for the low-rent chiselers who run the world I have been tempted to become cosmic rather than natural but this also presents problems. I’ve read that the lightning storms on Saturn are ten thousand times as powerful as our own and that solar winds reach two million miles an hour. You could cook a steak in a split second but the act of eating it would offer discomfort.

  As a boy I only wished to reach a point where I always had five dollars in my wallet. This has now proved an insufficient amount. Certain things like fire, air, electricity, water, and money have always proved difficult for me to comprehend. At our rural agricultural high school we peasants were poorly educated. Our science teacher often slept through class, his stinking stockinged feet propped on the desk. We took chemicals from the chemistry cabinet, poured them in the aquarium, and perceived the mystery of death. When the teacher would awake and mumble about the solar system our star quarterback would keep bellowing, “Bullshit.” A whole new world opened to me one afternoon when school was out and a friend showed me how to make love to a heifer by standing on a milk stool. Suffice it to say my fellow students voted en masse for George Bush sixty years later, but then the world has long since learned that America can be a brutish place. I predict that within a year you’ll be able to couple with a pretty girl by buying her a McDonald’s Quarter Pounder.

  Perhaps I’ve already spoken enough of high economics and politics. Our recent leaders are the same ones who used to blow up cats by stuffing them in rural mailboxes with firecrackers and gang-rape virgins at the swimming hole in the flooded gravel pit. If not politics they went into banking and real estate.

  A pure form of economic understanding came in my mid-­twenties when I was a hod carrier for two bucks an hour. If we could afford to have protein with our beans or noodles, life was good. If not, not. Later in life economics become more complicated. In my salad days in the 1980s I made a couple of million but now there is no evidence of this money. I have questioned my wife and long-term secretary about the matter and they are also puzzled. The operable principle here is that sheep are shorn and it’s impossible to stay ahead of the shearers. Again we have the recurrent metaphor of the artist as boxer. The rough-and-ready heavyweight Mike Tyson made a hundred million and now he’s penniless. No one could directly get at this skilled boxer’s wallet, but those in the financial community with the collective morals of a Mexican drug cartel are devious indeed and can evidently swipe your money with lasers.

  Ultimately finance is no more interesting to some of us than lazy bowel syndrome, and certainly far less intriguing than the godlike intricacies of a toad or the sprightly roach in the pantry. It is far more sensible to send your kid to a c
heapish community college than one of our vaunted Ivy League universities that will cost you fifty grand a year that could be better used for food and wine. Ultimately all that is learned at these so-called best institutions is to wear a necktie, which is a characteristic the financial evildoers have in common: they wear neckties. On a trip last year to the gated community of Manhattan I saw a tie in a shop window for sale for three hundred dollars. If you fail to figure out this satanic connection I can’t help you.

  Yes, our prayers and bestiality can emerge from the same neural cluster. A certain amount of money buys food and shelter, not to speak of the drip-drop leakage of wine into a particular portion of the brain that consequently leads to the world of the spirit and arts. And a tent in the woods is not enough when winter arrives. I recently pointed out that the millions of foreclosures coming from the subprime scandal will lead to suicides far outnumbering the 9/11 death toll. Those in banking and real estate in America are better at filing their teeth than members of al-Qaeda.

  I often wonder if my obsession with language strangled me early and I’m speaking through bruised tubes like my recently deceased friend Hunter Thompson. Many years ago I had won a basketball bet for a thousand and Hunter grabbed the cash off the coffee table and bought cocaine. This was the easy camaraderie of artists at the time. I had wanted to make dinner, for which cocaine is a severe interruption. My failure as a drug addict had its source in my preference for eating over derangement. The real point here is to illustrate how fast your dollars can disappear.

  By now I have given you as much economic wisdom as you can readily retain. Abstract wisdom is as evanescent as one of those five-second rainbows. Read a half hour’s worth of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, then segue to a chapter of Apollinaire’s pornographic novel, The Debauched Hospodar, and see which you remember better. We are earthlings indeed, as our vestigial tailbones indicate.

  I was so fatigued after a day of economic thinking and another day of cosmic conscious that it was a relief to turn to food when my friend Peter Lewis arrived. Peter is the ex-owner of Seattle’s best restaurant, Campagne, and had accompanied me on last November’s brutal trip to France in search of Machado’s lost poems. Incidentally these lost poems have created such a lacuna in my life I have taken it on myself to re-create them under the name of Jim Machado.

  We started our nutritional binge slowly by grilling some wild salmon from British Columbia, where I’d move if I weren’t so decrepit. Along with the salmon we had a Sicilian fish salad made of fresh mackerel and a half dozen bottles of simple Friuli because the weather was so hot. A cooling trend allowed us to gather energy for a gauche peasant dish I demand each time Peter visits. He cooks fatty country ribs in a marinara laden with fresh herbs and sixteen cloves of garlic (I counted them) and then poaches meatballs made of beef and pork sausage in the sauce. To balance these somewhat violent flavors we visited my much diminished wine cellar in the basement of my studio, pushing away three rattlesnakes with a broom left there for that purpose. My vision is on the wane but Peter managed to find a 1958 Barolo, which was fine if a little thin, a 1970 Lafite Rothschild, which was more than drinkable, and the prize of the evening, which was a 1994 Domaine Tempier Bandol Migoua. Why drink such great wines with peasant food? Why not?

  The next day Peter prepped long and hard for a paella while I continued writing the memoir of a retired werewolf. Such projects allow me to live an imaginary tactility that is largely absent from a writer’s life. After my hero at thirteen has his neck chewed on by a wolf pup in Chihuahua and the wound suckled by rare carnivorous hummingbirds, he is able to make love to a white woman fifteen times in a night and eat fifteen pounds of venison.

  The paella was splendid, made with shrimp, clams, chicken thighs, and Balboa chorizo. We had a half dozen good Spanish wines the names of which I have forgotten because I partook in all of them plus some fifty-year-old tequila sent to me by my urologist-surgeon, Alfredo Guevara, who is concerned with my health.

  The next morning we fished hard and well and good as the ninny Hemingway would say while my wife prepared a big roast of wild pig and a cocotte of Cuban beans. We had marinated the pig meat in olive oil, lime juice, garlic, and fresh sage. We ate it with many wines including a not-so-simple Chassagne Montrachet.

  Such food is to drink from the Great Mother’s breast. After taking Peter to the airport I had a half dozen naps in the next two days. My prodigious napping is caused more by my love of unconsciousness than fatigue. It has occurred to me that our nitwit presidential candidate McCain might better spend his remaining days eating and napping rather than leading the putative Free World, which is only a soccer ball for satanic economic forces. Thirty years ago one super mogul I know was obsessed with animal fats and teenage prostitutes. He still is. He’s untouchable in his forty-room condo in Dubai from which he zaps the world’s poor with his electronic bullets.

  To be sure it is a little easier to feed the body than the soul. Eating is an admission of mortality. Thirty years ago I was having dinner with a model who was thought to be the most beautiful woman in the world at the time. As she feasted on a single oyster and a single shrimp, I errantly told her that her lovely body would lose the argument with a five-buck Chinese wristwatch and that her future wattles were genetically ordained. My sharp tongue didn’t further our friendship. If more writers would restrain their wit and simply talk about spirituality they would be far more likely to reach home plate. The idea of “reaching home plate” troubled me when young as I hadn’t detected anything in a woman’s physiognomy that resembled baseball.

  Writers should be meteorologists of the soul, or spirit, whatever we may wish to call the unshakable core of our being. The absence of certain things reconstructs our reality. If you’re without wine or toilet paper or have lost your spirit you are skewered like a pullet. Last winter during a number of physical difficulties I called my surgeon, nicknamed Che, to make sure I wasn’t bleeding to death through my pecker during post-op. He kindly said it was unlikely. A few weeks later I was in San Francisco having an atomic MRI where they inject searingly hot radioactive fluid into your veins and slide you into an immense metal doughnut the innards of which are whirring at the speed of sound, perhaps, I thought, to see if I had caught heartworms from my dogs, one of many zoonotic diseases nature inflicts upon us.

  It is hard to maintain your spirit when you’re in the state of fear brought about by the medical profession. I had a setback when I took a walk the day after my kidney procedure. My morning stroll in wild surroundings is a central part of my hodgepodge religion. I hadn’t read the post-op instructions just like I hadn’t read a pamphlet when I was penalized two hundred and fifty dollars for smoking a cigarette in an expensive room at a Marriott Hotel. Fear and extreme penalties are industries in the United States.

  So I take my morning walk, which is comforting because I’m nature too, meditate for a few moments, and read—most recently ancient Chinese poetry where the poets not surprisingly do a lot of wine drinking and walking. One day years ago I had only rice for lunch but nothing special happened.

  Oddly Great Britain came to my rescue. Two recent superlative books are Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places and Roger Deakin’s Wildwood. These books took me by the scruff of the neck and slowly lifted me out of the despondency of flunking every single medical test of dozens. (Could it be that gluttony, alcoholism, and heavy cigarette smoking have ill effects on health? I’ll look into this at a future point.) Both Macfarlane and Deakin write superbly and I was once again amazed at the difference between English English and American English, noting that the Canadians have staked a claim in the stylistic sense to the middle ground between the two. I love the eccentric density of the prose in these two books, the way the prose imitates the delicate but profligate nature of nature, revealing the mysteries sought by Blake, Smart, and Clare. Our own prose more and more imitates the hygienic sloppiness of our collective punditry. Sad to say Roger
Deakin died prematurely last year, a literary failure of major proportion.

  You can have a soul if you want but it’s easy to lose it. I suspect that only a few physicists comprehend the inconceivable vastness of the universe and the rest of us are left to perceive clues. If the universe has chosen to have ninety billion galaxies then I am obviously welcome to have a soul. It is fragile indeed and requires extreme care when we are molting. Meanwhile we must be careful about the androids who have chosen to abandon their souls and have accepted the predominant reality of television. For a while we seemed well behind the bleaknesses of Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World but our dismal plutocracy has leaped ahead. It is clear that the brokers, bankers, and realtors who wrought our current havoc figuratively live in those underground palaces we ascribed to Saddam Hussein. They are anyway blind to the rest of us.

  The Body Is a Temple

  Everything is going along fairly well except for my health and behavior. I am struggling with a half dozen fatal diseases but it is clear to me that my suffering doesn’t equal that of half the world’s population. It is popularly supposed that we do battle with our diseases but nothing is more inept than the military metaphor when dealing with the improbable complexity of the body. I’m arm-wrestling my brain tumor today? Give me a break, fools! Incidentally I am not concerned with the violence done to my modest retirement fund by low-rent chiselers. Only recently I lost interest in money when I truly perceived the limits of what it can buy. In contrast a renowned medical specialist recently said to me over a glass of pomegranate juice (seriously) that only the human body makes him believe in God. I asked, “What about the ninety billion galaxies?” and he replied, “That’s peanuts.”