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

by Jim Harrison

do I have, he thought?

  Hundreds of thousands

  of moons have drowned out here

  and there are no gravestones.

  Here as an appendix is the recent menu. The artful chef, Mario Batali, said, “My art turns to shit by the next day.”

  Carte di Paradiso

  October 19–21, 2009

  Paradise Valley, Montana

  An extravaganza prepared by

  Mario Batali

  Loretta Keller

  Michael Schlow

  Noche primera: Madrid

  Chorizo y prosciutto

  Spicy sausage & cured ham

  Bodas

  Smoked, sweet & pickled anchovies with chiles & lemon zest

  Gambas à la planxa

  Grilled spot prawns with olive oil, garlic, parsley & serrano peppers

  Cocido con guindillas en salsa verde

  Madrid-style chickpea stew with lamb bacon &

  spicy peppers in green salsa

  Chuletas de cordero y morcil/a

  Grilled lamb chops & blood sausage

  Dos tartas: manzana y uva

  Apple butter & grape tarts

  2007 Bastianich Tocai Friulano

  2005 Aragone Maremma Toscana La Mozza 1.5 L

  2005 NaiadesVerdejo 1.5 L

  2003 Torre Muga Rioja 1.5 L

  Sera seconda: Modena

  Mortadella al refano

  Finely ground pork sausage with freshly grated horseradish

  Gnoccho fritto al lardo, testa & culatello

  Fried dumpling served with pork fat, headcheese &

  the “heart” of prosciutto

  Tortellini al tartufi bianchi

  Pasta stuffed with mortadella, turkey & rabbit, tossed in butter with Parmigiano-Reggiano & topped with shaved white truffle

  Zampone e cotecchino con pure di patate e Aceto Balsamico

  Tradizionale Extra Vecchio

  Stuffed pigs’ leg & pork sausage with potatoes puréed with extra-virgin olive oil & drizzled with very old balsamic vinegar

  Crostata di mela

  Open-faced apple tart

  2007 Bastianich Tocai Friulano

  2005 Aragone Maremma Toscana La Mozza 1.5 L

  1990 Produttori del Barbaresco Centenario 1.5 L

  1990 Bruno Giacosa Barbaresco 1.5 L

  1850 D’Oliveira Madeira Verdellio

  Sera terza: Firenze

  Finocchiona

  Fennel salami

  Due bruschette: cavolo nero e acciughe

  Grilled rustic bread with lacinato kale & anchovies

  Bistecca alla Fiorentina

  Grilled Tuscan Porterhouse

  Fagioli “al fiasco”

  Beans oven-baked with lardo, prosciutto, garlic, thyme & fresh sage

  Insalata verde

  Mixed greens with radish, scallions & toasted almonds dressed with a marjoram garlic vinaigrette

  Pan di zenzero

  Ginger cake with whipped cream

  2007 Bastianich Tocai Friulano

  2005 Aragone Maremma Toscana La Mazza 1.5 L

  1990 Castello dei Rampolla Sammarco 1.5 L

  1990 Giacomo Conterno Barolo Riserva Monfortino 1.5 L

  1989 Ceretto Barbaresco Bricco Asili 1.5 L

  1850 D’Oliveira Madeira Verdellio

  Wine and Poetry

  Give me women, wine and snuff

  Until I cry out “hold, enough!”

  You may do so sans objection

  Till the day of resurrection;

  For bless my beard they aye shall be

  My beloved Trinity.

  —John Keats

  This must have been written when John Keats was young and a bit of a rowdy. Underneath each old poet wherever he goes is an immense reservoir of sentimentality about his life as a young poet. When I was nineteen in Greenwich Village one stew bum bar to the east of Bleecker past MacDougal offered a glass of simple red for a quarter. On a possibly morose day this single glass was capable of producing literary ecstasy. Occasionally in extremis my nifty budget was a dollar a day for food, another for wine, and the last was for my seven-dollar-a-week room without a window. This austerity did not quell my obsession at the time for Rimbaud and Keats, the latter being the most singular lyric poet in English letters. As a mediocre student I wasn’t in the least interested in critical assessments and more than fifty years later still am not. I was drawn to what made my heart sing in what my father called “this vale of woe.” This meant wine and poetry.

  Wine crawls in the window of your life and never leaves. A young poet is at a loss because his calling has set him outside so many comforting boundaries the culture offers and wine easily offers itself as a liquid fuel, making him think he might belong in this hostile country. Even Virgil’s father chided him about becoming a poet, saying, “Homer died broke.” Of course any young geek can think of himself as a dark orphaned prince from another country. Whatever works to keep the ego inflated without evidentiary fuel. One invariably becomes a poet long before writing actual poems. It begins with a general reverence for life and its intensely detailed existence, for women, trees, fish, dogs, rivers, birds, and of course for wine. As the great philosopher Wittgenstein said, “The miracle is that the world exists.”

  Li Po, perhaps the grandest of all Chinese poets, said,

  lf the heavens were not in love with wine,

  There’d be no Wine Star in the sky.

  And if earth wasn’t always drinking,

  There’d be nowhere called Wine Spring.

  Only yesterday did the circle of wisdom close more completely with a science factoid from NPR. We are genetically related to yeast! One would have thought so. We are fermented and naturally enough we ferment. The gods slipped us this gift in prehistory, noting our hardships, our cold and hunger and our battles with wild beasts. “Oh no, another glacier is headed our way, let’s drink some wine,” one imagines them saying. Way back then in southern France in the locale of many great present vineyards there were one-ton bears running around at top speed on their hind legs, an unattractive fact.

  It has been said by anthropologists that perhaps the Neanderthals lost out to our species because they drank too much. Alcohol presents obvious dangers. The guards of ancient Scandinavian kings had to be half bear and when drunk would errantly kill a king in their enthusiasm. Just recently there was a convention of seventy thousand AA members in San Antonio who must have been a disappointment to local restaurateurs whose profit margins depend on alcohol. Of course, one cannot question the legitimacy of an organization that saves so many from dying. Of my many poet friends, many have died from drink, though predominantly from hard liquor. One friend, the luminous Nebraskan poet Ted Kooser, for two years our poet laureate, told me he had to quit drinking decades ago so that he’d stop falling down stairs. This seems a valid reason indeed. I had to moderate in my mid-forties so that I wouldn’t have to quit. I had a fine cellar at the time and the thought of not drinking it was unbearable. I also didn’t want to spend the rest of my life not doing something. As the French poet Gérard de Nerval said, “One must drink or someone will drink in their place.” Obviously, though, one must give up a beautiful woman if you are abusing her.

  Ikkyū, the renowned Zen master of the fifteenth century, was a bit unorthodox in saying that the Buddha can also be discovered in wine and in brothels. He wrote:

  Dead winter but our poetry glows:

  Drunk after downing cup after cup.

  Years since I enjoyed such sweet love play.

  The moon disappears, dawn breaks, yet we hardly notice.

  For a number of years in my late teens and early twenties I worked on a horticulture farm and part of my duties involved pruning grapevines. Pruning time is usually cold, wet, an
d muddy but in a vineyard you become intimate with the mystery of wine. The vines and soil look dead and half frozen and you doubt the future of everything, including yourself. But then spring comes and the vines leaf out and you are lucky enough to have a girlfriend who likes to drive with you into the countryside with a blanket and a bottle of seventy-cent Gallo red and make love in a pasture or grain field. The wine, however cheap and it’s what you can afford to carry in your 1947 Dodge, allows you to ignore the mosquitoes.

  Wine produces memory. If I drink a Brouilly in Montana, the wine inevitably reproduces my sitting at Le Select on Montparnasse in Paris dozens of times drinking the same wine trying to recover from a day of interviews on a Paris book tour. When I drink a bottle of Domaine Tempier Bandol in our casita near the Mexican border, I invariably revisit my many meals cooked by Lulu Peyraud in Bandol in southern France. My memory helps me eat them again. If I drink a Bouzeron on a warm summer evening, I’m able to revisit some of the best trout fishing of my life on a lovely river when we would finish our floating on the last mile of river or so by opening a bottle of Bouzeron. We are delightfully trapped by our memories. I can’t drink a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape Vieux Télégraphe without revisiting a hotel bistro in Lucerne, Switzerland, where I ate a large bowl of a peppery Basque baby goat stew. A sip and a bite. A bite and sip. Goose bumps come with the divine conjunction of food and wine.

  An initial glass of whiskey might be helpful after a cold October day of bird hunting but I’ve tended to stick to wine in my hunting and fishing. Also, the sudden jolts offered by hard liquor lessen the possibility of making a good dinner, while the gradual all-suffocating warmth of wine tends to increase one’s cooking attention.

  More than thirty years ago I wrote a “Drinking Song” that begins with:

  I want to die in the saddle. An enemy of civilization

  I want to walk around in the woods, fish and drink.

  I’m presenting this not necessarily as an article of faith but close to it, like Keats’s Trinity of wine, women, and snuff. Sad to say, Keats died at age twenty-eight of tuberculosis, a disease that cheated the world of many potential glories. I close with a glorious note on Claret from his letters.

  I never drink now above three glasses of wine—and never any spirits and water. Though by the bye, the other day Woodhouse took me to his coffee house—and ordered a Bottle of Claret—now I like Claret, whenever I can have Claret I must drink it,—’t is the only palate affair that I am at all sensual in. Would it not be a good speck [speculation] to send you some vine roots—could it be done? I’ll enquire—If you could make some wine like Claret to drink on summer evenings in an arbour! For really ’t is so fine—it fills one’s mouth with a gushing freshness—then goes down cool and feverless—then you do not feel it quarrelling with your liver—no, it is rather a Peacemaker, and lies as quiet as it did in the grape; then it is as fragrant as the Queen Bee, and the more ethereal Part of it mounts into the brain, not assaulting the cerebral apartments like a bully in a bad-house looking for his trull and hurrying from door to door bouncing against the wainstcoat [wainscot], but rather walks like Aladdin about his own enchanted palace so gently that you do not feel his step. Other wines of a heavy and spirituous nature transform a Man to a Silenus: this makes him a Hermes—and gives a Woman the soul and immortality of Ariadne, for whom Bacchus always kept a good cellar of claret—and even of that he could never persuade her to take above two cups. I said this same claret is the only palate-passion I have—I forgot game—I must plead guilty to the breast of a Partridge, the back of a hare, the backbone of a grouse, the wing and side of a Pheasant and a Woodcock passim. Talking of game (I wish I could make it), the Lady whom I met at Hastings and of whom I said something in my last I think has lately made me many presents of game, and enabled me to make as many. She made me take home a Pheasant the other day, which I gave to Mrs. Dilke; on which tomorrow Rice, Reynolds and the Wentworthians will dine next door.

  —John Keats, from Letter to George and

  Georgiana Keats, February 18, 1819

  Caregiver

  Will carbohydrates be the downfall of Western civilization?

  This sentence cribbed from the back of a cereal box (organic flax and raisin bran) is not the less poignant for its source. I’m even using my most loathed word, caregiver, which summons up the image of serene but slack-faced busybodies so intrusive in our lives of late. Everywhere we are imperiled and fear burbles in us like the third stomach of a cow fed on noxious weeds. Around the clock the media smothers us with war, famine, disease, and widespread sexual mayhem, and even the animal kingdom is pestered minute by minute by faux scientists demanding more money for research. There is clearly a worldwide conspiracy to drown us in fear. Even the solace of food and alcohol is suspect not to speak of the cigarettes so valued by Albert Einstein, James Joyce, and me.

  Oddly, before I am free to help others I’m struggling to ascertain my own specific relationship to the ninety billion galaxies out there. No information on the matter has been forthcoming and I’m itching to get on with my new job as a caregiver. One of the more remote galaxies, M109, is said to possess a trillion stars which is half again too many. It is difficult to get your head around these ninety billion galaxies but until we learn our connection we’re only whistling in a cemetery.

  Meanwhile I need this alternative career as a caregiver in order to make a quick mil and retire. Any writer naturally fears elimination in the last round, the end of the third act, as it were. Miracles are possible. I read that the Cleveland Clinic can remove a five-foot section of colon through a one-inch incision. This is astounding. Presumably something was wrong with the colon or they wouldn’t willy-nilly remove it.

  I concocted a couple of quick showbiz ideas but no one has bitten yet. How about retelling the story of Anne Frank starring Lindsay Lohan? Instead of Nazis we would have apostate Mormons and locate the story in Utah. Mel Gibson is the evil ruler bent on murdering all non-Mormons. Lindsay is being hidden in the basement of a pharmacy/liquor store, perfect for her behavioral issues. Of course she is discovered and Mel is ready to cut her heart out on an altar in the Tabernacle when she escapes, running nudely through the desert, jumping on a horse that in turn jumps off the rim of the Grand Canyon where Lindsay is swept by the Colorado River south to safety in the arms of a poet who heals her dependencies. Another, perhaps more marketable idea is a simple TV series to be called Guess the Disease. Each segment would have a succession of terminally ill patients with a rare disease giving measured symptomatic clues to a panel of doctors who try to guess it. In addition to solving my money problems this would offer much-needed help to prizewinning doctors. A dear friend was recently charged $50,000 for a three-hour neck surgery and who can live on that? They put in long days and need a new car to drive home.

  Meanwhile I want to retire and live in a willow grove beside a lilting stream with Dawn Upshaw singing to me. I have not yet determined the chef or wine steward. If I only have five minutes left to live I’ll simply pet my dogs as that’s not time enough to prepare and eat a proper meal.

  I’m a bit fatigued from spinning fictive fibs for the few remaining readers of literary fiction. Next week I have to fly to Paris and do twenty-seven print, radio, and television interviews in five days. I’m told by my French publisher, Flammarion, that there might not be any time for me to eat. I’ll pack a few sandwiches in my duffel and hope that they don’t deliquesce. In my childhood we poor kids often took lard sandwiches to school and many of us grew big and strong, mostly big. Luckily in my fridge I have a block of Mario Batali’s lardo. It is wonderful melted on French bread. I won’t have an oven in my Paris hovel but can encase the lardo in bread and keep it in my underarm until it melts. This is the much-wanted American ingenuity.

  Sergei Yesenin wrote:

  Here on earth I wished to marry

  the white rose and the black toad.

  What a
n accurate metaphor for our lives. The white rose is our ideals inextricably wound together with the black toad of our actual lives. How much can I help you, gentle reader, when I’m mostly only a forensic pathologist of a dying culture, a morgue that has only recently discovered it’s a morgue not a five-star hotel? And I’m a poet and what is a poet but a wandering trollop with a weak smile, a bareback rider without bridle or reins? That preposterous aesthete Rilke actually insisted that everyone should eat Quaker Oats. Did this help in war-torn Europe when Verdun claimed 800,000 casualties in ten days? Perhaps. Camus maintained that the critical decision was whether or not to commit suicide and that once you assent to your own survival you must commit to life with your full energies. As an irrelevant aside I must observe that while millions of humans have committed suicide, dogs avoid this act, except for that famous Eisenstaedt photo of the Pekingese, bored with Paris, leaping himself from the top of the Eiffel Tower. This was definitely a black toad moment.

  Of course it’s presumptuous for me to think I can help you when my own life has been a model of disorder, but then because of the structure of time I can’t very well go back and scrub the paving stones I’ve walked upon. And I must be honest. I can’t tell you to lessen your carbon imprint by riding a bicycle to work when I don’t own one. And I have severe shortcomings. Last year an observant doctor told me that I didn’t know how to breathe. When I was young, members of my family would yell at me while I was reading on the sofa: “Breathe!” I’ve observed that I didn’t breathe adequately while talking and writing but then scientists have proved that there is no more unhealthy profession than writing except for dump picking, which exposes one to trillions of malevolent bacteria daily. I chatted with some Mexican kids who were dump picking down on the border where I live in the winter, and these kids were covered with ulcerated sores while the writer’s disfiguring sores are interior. Oddly children can be fine if their parents don’t cut off their legs and blind them with their own disappointments. In the interest of honesty I should add that I’m blind in my left eye from an injury and my right leg is slightly crooked. Mom only told me this when I was in my fifties: “We were sorry we couldn’t afford to fix your leg when you were a child.” I also have gout, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, and severe kidney stones. I have also had some success that I have learned to view as a disease.