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

by Jim Harrison

  In truth we are migrants who were never told where we came from and have no idea of our country of destination. The eternal question is that though a hundred thousand people came to Dostoevsky’s funeral did he know it? It is altogether natural that we invented a future life because our minds are insufficient to imagine not being. Death is omnipresent and it comes as no surprise to soldiers, cops, rural people, and those in the medical profession. Recently Julian Barnes was strikingly original in writing about the fullness of his fear of death. Lucky for him he collects wine, which is a far greater palliative for fear than religion. I could not imagine going off on a crusade to the Holy Land if I had a good cellar back at the castle.

  Back in the mid-1940s when the world was trying to recover from World War II and we were living in a peasant village in northern Michigan, we were forced to go to Daily Vacation Bible School after a full nine months trapped like fishing worms in a can by our education. In a democracy we are forbidden the word peasant, but that’s what most of us are and I don’t mind it a bit. I wasn’t Vlad the Conqueror in a previous life, but the peasant boy who got his head cut off for stealing a drink of water.

  Anyway, Daily Vacation Bible School was the first major injustice of my life, when I wanted to be at our little cabin on a remote lake built by my father and uncles. I can still burn with anger sixty-five years later over this matter. One June morning the florid blimp of a preacher tried to teach us that our bodies were holy temples and should be treated accordingly. I was seated next to a boy who had a purple face because his heart was bad. His nickname was Purple Face. On the other side of me was a pretty girl who would show you her bare butt for a penny, my first exposure to pure capitalism and the mystery of the negative space that signifies a butt crack.

  As Emily Dickinson said, “To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.” Which of us miserable tykes in the fetor of the church basement classroom could comprehend the biblical lesson that a body is a holy temple? On the way home I conversed with a number of yard dogs about the matter while picking flowers to ingratiate myself to my savage mother who was vexed that I had broken a dozen eggs under my sister’s bed, an inexplicable act. It was obvious that if the body is a temple the mouth is the front door and the emergency exit or back door is the butt hole. The preacher was a real big temple with a bulbous paunch below his belt who disapproved of alcohol, dancing, sex, and movies. My dimwit friend Bob had been caught playing with his weenie in the choir loft, and the preacher told him he would go to hell if he played with his weenie. Bob wept piteously. I wondered what part of the temple is the weenie?

  This theological quandary has followed me for sixty years even into the precincts of my Zen studies. Are the bodies of our fellow mammals holy temples and what of the famous question “Does a dog have Buddha nature?” Our lives are permeated with a haunting atmosphere of lingering dread. This phrase was used to describe a movie I decided not to watch for obvious reasons. As an elderly peasant from notably unsuccessful farm families on both sides of my parentage, I’m giving up nearly everything, especially my vain interest in abstractions. Along with Ungaretti I ask, “Have I fragmented heart and mind to fall in the service of words?” (Ho fatto a pezzi cuore e mente per cadere in serviti di parole?) The answer in the American language is “Yup.” Is religion an abstraction? Our bodies aren’t. Of course it’s the doctrine that is abstract and the practice far less so. The practice of religion reflects like a vastly distorted fun house mirror our mammalian nature. We discovered fire so it is altogether natural that we burned a virgin witch at the stake under the instructions of the priesthood and under the assumption that God likes roasted food.

  It is time to leave the eagle aeries of theology for the door, the mouth of the holy temple. Many years ago on a dark night near the Toronto waterfront I was leaning against a brown Taurus when Linda Spalding asked me to do a food column for Brick, a fateful night indeed. Looking back I have realized that I’ve been on a diet for forty years and if I had even lost half a pound a year I’d be fine, which I didn’t. Last week Mario Batali was at my home and it is easy to see how my willpower fails. Here is the menu:

  Monday ~ America

  Carnevino rib-eye steaks

  Potatoes with sweet garlic and truffles

  Salad with Gorgonzola

  Grilled onions

  Tuesday ~ Spain

  Boquerones

  Kumamoto oysters

  Manchego and morcilla and berberechos

  Nantucket bay scallops

  Fideuà with rock shrimp, octopus, and Dungeness crab

  Torta de la serena and tetilla with arrope

  Wednesday ~ Modena

  Lardo bruschetta

  Robiola ravioli with duck ragù

  Veal chops modenese

  Cipolline with vincotto

  I should add that on Wednesday we had a light lunch of grilled wild quail and doves, a wild mushroom ragù, and the leftover truffled potato salad, the flavor of which had intensified with a night’s rest. The wines were appropriate:

  1996 Casters del Siurana, Miserere, Priorat

  1994 Remírez de Ganuza, Gran Reserva Rioja

  1997 Remírez de Ganuza, Reserva Rioja

  A case of Vedejo

  Bastianich Vespa Bianco

  Bastianich Tocai Friulano

  La Mozza I Perazzi Morellino di Scansano

  La Mozza “Aragone” Maremma Toscana

  It will be immediately obvious that these three days were a religious experience as the holy food marched into the open mouths of the temples. The massive bowlful of truffles were a sacrament grated by my grandson Johnny, who averred that he would do this job rarely in his life. I have a huge grill and we used mesquite, oak, and manzanita for fuel for the prime beef and veal chops, and a huge paella pan to make the fideuà. There is something particularly toothsome about baby octopus, which I have eaten in quantity in Zihuatanejo in Mexico. Of course a fideuà is similar to a paella but you use pasta moistened with a reduced Dungeness crab stock. The back of the grill is appropriately painted with a portrait of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

  There. These meals required the courage of early Christian martyrs, something I wished to be as a boy preacher. There was an untoward, near-death moment when I fell asleep at the table with a full mouth. Luckily this was noticed and I was shaken awake. We can’t forget what happened to Mama Cass, Jimi Hendrix, and John Bonham.

  The day everyone left, my peasant roots activated and I cooked myself a hot dog and a hamburger without shame, but then the next day Chris Bianco who had assisted Mario sent over from Phoenix, where he makes the best pizza on earth, a whole prosciutto and ten pounds each of imported mortadella (from Modena) and provolone. This was to allow my holiness to taper off slowly. At his sandwich shop Chris cooks whole pigs and lambs, which ensures freshness and flavor.

  The creepy liberal English major in me might ask, Why are we cooking expensive meals during a global financial collapse engineered by the satanic money community that should be summarily executed? Well, religion isn’t cheap, which is easy to see when strolling through the Vatican or visiting Mecca. And we all felt in a celebratory mood over the election of Obama after eight years when you had to be a proctologist to appreciate Washington.

  Politics is a toilet bowl in whose reflection we hope to learn how to treat each other well and not kill each other in a thousand ways. I am reminded again of Baron Wessenberg saying in 1814 at the Congress of Vienna, “Nothing in the world is more haughty than a man of moderate capacity when once raised to power.” Bush has flown off to the hellhole of Texas but we need to be reminded that he didn’t severely bruise his country and world on his own. He had a legion of helpers in his sole interest of further enriching the members of his own class. This is still going on in the trillion dollars for business and nothing for uninsured poor children.

  Wrens are helping
me organize a new life for myself after a long period of writing too much fiction, four novellas in ten months to be exact. Life is mythology. Work is reality. Recently however, wrens have piqued my interest partly because of our similar builds, squat with ample tummies, and thus I am embarked on a voyage of discovery into the somewhat limited kingdom of wrens. We both suffer though I admit I suffer from hunger and thirst infrequently. Mario left behind fourteen magnums of red but I have the courage to make my way through to the bottom of each bottle. I learned courage in my teens when despite my unkempt hair, blind milky eye, and twisted leg I rose to the top as a young night janitor. I was fourteen, had my work papers, and made fifty cents an hour. This caused certain lacunae in my education as I slept through much of high school. Back to wrens. My religion led me to them as I recently dreamed that God was a great brown bird and no one can disprove this.

  Living as remotely as I do in Montana and on the Mexican border I only rarely take a peek into the peevish dumpster of literary activity, but I have noted recently that the “acknowledgments” sections of literary books are growing longer and longer. I am innocent, having offered only minimalist versions like “Thanks, Bob, for the loan.” Feeling left out I offer this:

  To my best friend Odin who forgave the ravens who sat and shat upon his shoulders. To all the girls I left behind because they were too far ahead of me. To my agent Myrna who navigated the pus-slick streets of Gotham in her fuchsia air shoes on my behalf, and allowed me to stay in mega-tropical Missouri with my children Frances, Francis, and Francine, and our beloved Yangtze cat Goober Pie. And to the rehab folks at Hazelden in Minnesota, and the vegan community of Café Girardeau who made my morning mirepoix of okra, Jerusalem artichoke, kohlrabi, and parsnips, not to speak of the magic of kelp. Yes, literature is the brutal but vital offal that fuels us on our void-bound journey. And to the Cedar Rapids, Iowa, drumming group the Night Kittens, who raised me from a recent narcosis. Big girls. Big drums. Those lassies in rabbit pelts got rhythm. And to the young Indianapolis couple I’ll call Mimsy and Whimsy who showed me several sexual routes and side roads far from the banal Interstate. Not incidentally, the book you have in hand wrote itself.

  Food and Music

  I’ve been spending the summer thus far in the guise of a house wren though trout fishing a lot within a three-hour range and feeling sorry for the billions of planets in the universe that apparently don’t have rivers. I had hoped to discover and discuss the relationship between music and food but there isn’t one. This, of course, shouldn’t and doesn’t stop a writer. I’ve never heard of anyone demanding to hear Mahler while eating flan and many have died speed-eating barbecued chicken wings while listening to the babble of rap.

  I am preternaturally nervous this morning because at dawn I pulled two corned tongues from the brine. I have never corned tongues before and this item is not available in Montana. A couple of years ago the publisher of this magazine tried to send me a corned tongue from a Jewish delicatessen in Toronto, but the permit for its entry into the States would have been five hundred bucks. In terms of geologic time no writer is worth this much money. The beef tongues, oddly enough, are from Mexico, presumably from Spanish-speaking cows in the province of Veracruz where they daily gazed at the vast mountain, Orizaba, and listened to the mauve songs of Caribbean wind.

  The tongues were corned in one of Mom’s crocks from the old farm where it usually held pickled herring, one of the family’s few culinary triumphs. Dawn-to-dark work usually equates food with fuel to assuage the hunger of manual labor, rather than with elaborate fare to pique the interest of those who aren’t truly hungry. For reference I used The River Cottage Meat Book by the estimable food writer Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. The name doesn’t sound Jewish, but the rich brine he had devised reminds me of when I was a skinny young goy in New York City, and how desperately I searched for food I could afford aside from a fifteen-cent herring sandwich. When I managed to get a buck together for a dinner I’d head for a Jewish delicatessen, I think it was the famed Essex, where the counterman would bellow at me, “Hey, kid, you’re too fucking skinny” and give me a vastly overloaded corned beef sandwich with plenty of life-­giving fat, a substance now avoided in North America but which much of the world craves for survival. I would eat slowly, marveling at the beauty of life for a young artist in Gotham, knowing that back home friends and relatives were eating at Aunt Patty’s Squat and Gobble restaurant, which featured Big Sonia at the Wurlitzer. Sonia also made a dozen different Jell-O desserts every day plus her signature dish, chicken à la king, which included a scant quarter of a teaspoon of garlic salt per five-gallon batch, plus the mucus-textured béchamel that contained nuggets of raw flour. Sonia would play “Hello Dolly” and grin with her prothagonicious jaw reminding me of those huge machines used in remaking highways that gobble and grind cement. My Aunt Vera once slapped my face in this restaurant when I asked how Sonia managed to center her ponderous butt on the toilet. The pain of the slap turned my scientifically inquiring mind toward the arts. Once I put my thumb out to hitchhike to New York City, I vowed to forever turn my back on green Jell-O with bananas and peas, and chicken à la king and its dark freight of soggy celery.

  Arguably “Hello Dolly” is a perfect accompaniment for many low-life casseroles featured at church or community potlucks, but it is an error indeed to try to extrapolate principles from culinary septic tanks. Perhaps every effort should be made to keep the arts separate from one another. A noteworthy mudbath of the 1960s was poetry readings with jazz accompaniment. Back then when I’d give a public reading there was also a nitwit minstrel wanting to strum his guitar with my poems.

  I admit that my thinking is susceptible to disarray during hot weather and my already limited vision can become further blurred. One blistering afternoon on the river I actually asked a friend and fishing guide if what I was seeing in the distance was a Sandhill crane or a yellow Volkswagen, but then Blake said, “Pray God keep us from single vision and Newton’s sleep.” In a proper mood this defect can make all women attractive. An ancient Chinese Zen man insisted that the fastest horse cannot catch a mouse as well as a lame kitten. Added to this muddy sight and thinking is the acceptance that aesthetically and biologically I am both a Mozart lover and a stray dog within the same skin. On a coolish Toulouse night it is better not to wolf down a big serving of daube or cassoulet before going to a chamber music concert. Frilly Debussy is better suited to a Parisian foam café than a bistro in Lyon. Imagine Ferran Adrià serving up a bowl of pistachio foam to a construction worker from Lyon or a rugby player from Toulouse. Of course all food may be reduced to its liquid essence and thence by our technological gizmos turned into foam. Suffice it to say foam is not the best part of the ocean.

  It is a good thing that Schubert’s habitual gluttony didn’t enter his music. And poor drunken Henry Purcell could create the ethereal “Come Ye Sons of Art,” which has little purchase among screenwriters. Purcell’s wife locked him out of the house one hideously cold London night when the cloacal Thames froze nearly solid. Purcell died within a few days at thirty-six, and his wife is reported to have said, “Win some, lose some.” The world has always been full of those who enjoy punishing others. Recently the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs decided the armed services should be a totally nonsmoking entity, including the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates overturned the war-zone smoking prohibition. It is easy here to construct an image of a dying soldier, the last of his blood leaking out on alien soil, being denied a final cigarette because of regulations. The boundlessness of zealotry is amazing but stifling to what we have left of the spirit. Just when I am thinking I’m totally right I prove myself partially in error. Yesterday our first tomatoes from the garden went well with the Spanish composer Soria, and the first peas (with capellini) were made even more perfect by Beethoven sonatas.

  The other evening while discovering once again that vodka is not a healt
h elixir, something I first noted on a trip to the U.S.S.R. in 1972, I recalled the TV trays and tables used back before people owned multiple TV sets. The single massive set, though small-screened, would be in a living room and the extended family would gather around with their TV trays eating Kraft Macaroni and Cheese that Mom had mixed up in a washtub. Dvořák’s Ninth in E Minor would be on at max volume while a mile-long wagon train with ten thousand pioneers would be attempting to cross the very wide Missouri in a hurry because they were being pursued by ten thousand Lakota warriors. At the same time ten thousand buffalo on the other side were trying to cross to get at the usual greener grass that seems to imperil all creatures. Not incidentally buffalo are poor swimmers and there are records of herds of thirty thousand dying together while fording a river. In this case both the buffalo and all the settlers drowned in time to Dvořák’s booming thud, except for a baby girl who floated downstream next to a rattlesnake on a buffalo carcass where she was found by the famed Indian killer Kit Carson. The baby later became the Queen of California, to be followed by many ten thousands of other queens who were to save the movie business from death by general pure male suppuration. Not incidentally the ten thousand Lakota warriors survived because they stopped for a few days to observe the rites of the summer solstice, then detoured to avoid the odor of deliquescence. An ex-marine and writer friend, Phil Caputo, told me that you can smell a battlefield miles away, another reason to light a cigarette.

  Perhaps the most pleasant aspect of being a poet is trading poems with other poets by whatever means. The process is without the taint of ambition and the sodden feelings of publication. With poetry you have to sit around Sardi’s restaurant a year or so waiting for reviews while playwrights get the bad news by closing time.

  Recently I received what I feel is the best food poem in the history of the planet; by Merrill Gilfillan, one of our finest writers but not widely known: