by Julia Reed
Alternatively, you could just drink yourself into oblivion with a cocktail named the Possum Drop, a creation of the legendary Snake and Jake’s Christmas Club Lounge, a pluperfect New Orleans dive lit solely by Christmas-tree lights and guarded by a dog named Odysseia. One night a possum fell through a ceiling tile and landed on a customer, and the drink, a shot of Jägermeister dropped into a pint of Schlitz, was born. Snake and Jake’s is not unlike Pogo’s Okefenokee: slightly dangerous, filled with characters, and completely cut off from the outside world. I bet even the possum wanted to stick around.
Big Racks and Perfect Parties
Some time ago in New Orleans, I was at a benefit for historic houses when my dinner partner, a tiny bit bored with the proceedings at hand, started telling me all about a weekend he’d spent at a nearby farm. The room was loud and there was an auction going on, so when I heard him say something about deer and fences, I remarked as to how his host’s fence must be a hell of a thing in order to keep all those pesky deer out.
I’d just seen an episode from the first season of the TV show, Homeland, the one in which returning Marine/is-he-or-isn’t-he terrorist Damian Lewis takes his government-issue rifle and blows away a deer in his suburban D.C. backyard. The deer had made the mistake of munching on his wife’s flower beds—twice—and Lewis’s character is a tad on the jittery side. So I was thinking about that scene and how the deer might have made it if only those beds had been fenced in (which in turn led to a mini-reverie about an even more riveting episode in which Lewis and Claire Danes’s bipolar CIA agent have one of the most intense love scenes ever on TV or, for that matter, in the movies) when my companion brought me back to the reality of the ballroom: “No, no,” he said. “The fence is to keep the deer from getting out.”
Out? Oh yes, he said, the deer are specially bred does and bucks that originate from Texas, and they get a nice rich high-protein diet and wander around in a very pretty place surrounded by very tall fences. So now I was convinced that I really must be hearing wrong, because while I get the point of breeding, say, chickens, and I’m a big fan of a free-range bird’s superior meat, deer already range so freely that at least 1.5 million of them get hit by cars every year. A particularly memorable front-page photograph in my Mississippi hometown’s newspaper a few years back featured a buck jumping through the plate-glass window of the local travel agency—the spring floods had driven a veritable herd of them in search of high ground, where they ranged right on up Main Street. I couldn’t imagine who in the world would think it necessary to—on purpose—breed any more of them and I said so.
When he responded with “It’s a guy thing,” I finally understood that the “farm” he visited does not have a thing to do with the quality of the venison or even how picturesque the whitetails happen to be. (I have a very rich acquaintance who once imported some extremely expensive and especially attractive European cows to her weekend place in Connecticut for the simple reason that they decorated the view.) It’s about the same thing guys have been hunting for—on pretty much every front—since time began: bigger and better racks.
At this point I was curious (and rude) enough to pull my iPhone from my evening bag. A quick search of “deer breeding” revealed that I was way behind the curve on the subject. In Texas alone the deer breeding business brings in almost $3 million a year. The first breeding operation that popped up, DeerStar, advertises “genetically improved” UltraDoes that are artificially inseminated with the semen from bucks with names like Gladiator’s Hammer and Ultimate Weapon, to produce the white-tailed version of Arnold Schwarzenegger back when he was all bulked up (and, by his own admission, on steroids), only with way bigger headgear.
Their progeny and thousands of others just like them are raised in pens (the babies get bottles, the adults probiotics) and then released on high-fenced ranches just before hunting season. Super Trophy Class bucks, usually created with semen from Northern deer that outweigh the local whitetails, have multipointed antlers that score as high as three hundred inches—so big and bizarrely shaped that one disapproving outdoor columnist compared them to “mangrove swamps.” But he seems to be in the minority. At 4M Ranch, for example, the “philosophy” is “simple”: “Size Does Matter! Remember, if you want Big Whitetails, you must breed BIG ON BIG!”
The point of all this of course is that size sells. Hunters have been known to pay $10,000 (and in some cases an astonishing $100,000) to bag a super buck. Which is where the fences come in. You don’t want your potential gold mine to actually have a shot at getting away. Plus, when a buck is in possession of semen worth anywhere from $3,000 to $35,000 a pop, you can’t have him spreading it around just anywhere. On websites like DeerStar’s, bloodlines are traced further back than those of most racehorses. Cloning is not unheard of.
DeerStar, whose motto is “Not just state of the art, the state of nature,” seems unaware of how much it is tampering with the latter. The owners claim instead to “have thought many things out in detail to make sure that what we do honors our creator,” which is the part where I always get nervous. It rarely ends well when a commercial enterprise (or a political candidate or Pat Robertson—whoever) claims to have an inside track on the wishes of our Lord. Also, I’m not at all sure how He might come down on the subject of dosing up “breeder does” with the sperm of genetically manipulated bucks who have names better suited to professional wrestlers and then charging people a bunch of money to take aim at their offspring. Still, folks persist. One embattled member of the industry told the Texas Deer Association, “Because I’m a deer breeder, sometimes I feel like I’m a Christian at an atheist rally.”
I should interject here that I am grateful for my many deer-hunting friends who manage to bag plenty of bucks the old-fashioned way. I make a mean venison chili and I am crazy for a deer head—in fact, I’m a huge fan of taxidermy in general. As I type, the mounted head of a wild boar is shedding all over my office mantel, upon which two stuffed birds from the great Paris taxidermy shop Deyrolle sit. Last year for Christmas, my thoughtful former assistant Bebe Howorth gave me a “basket” made from the body and tail of an armadillo, and one of my greatest regrets is that in a fit of pique at a particularly onerous ex-boyfriend, I got rid of the magnificent stag horns that were the only nice things he’d ever given me.
After I canceled a wedding (different boyfriend, a lot less onerous), my best friend Jessica and I decided to have a black-tie ball for all the people disappointed that they were no longer invited to the Mississippi Delta for the nuptials. The location was a falling-down antebellum mansion once owned by the family of Shelby Foote, and the theme was taxidermy. If you live in the right place, this is an extraordinarily inexpensive way to decorate for a party. All it took was a pickup and two Suburbans we filled with various trophies collected from friends and acquaintances, including a beaver munching on a log, an albino squirrel, and at least a half dozen raccoons and foxes. By the time we’d completed the twenty-mile drive from town to the party site, we’d gained a sizable—and very noisy—canine escort who’d followed us the whole way down the highway.
We suspended geese and ducks from the ballroom ceiling with fishing line and stuffed a bouquet of wildflowers into the mouth of a loggerhead turtle that doubled as a coffee table. A coiled rattlesnake presided over the bar, a panther pounced on the mantel, and a hornet’s nest hung from the chandelier above the moss-covered dining room table. Among our own superstars was an entire stuffed deer that greeted guests just outside the front door, and a chair made of the legs, horn, and hide of an elk Jessica’s father had gone all the way to Gunnison, Colorado, to kill. (The chair had been his gift to the local Elks Lodge, whose members were vocally unhappy when we came to borrow it for the night—not because they were going to miss the chair, but because it required Bonnie the bartender to leave her post for less than five minutes while she held the door open for us, but I digress.)
Anyway, we also had a band with a height-challenged Cajun washboard player who d
id backflips across the stage and a brunch the next day on the banks of the Mississippi where Jessica’s sister Eden played the piano, and it remains one of the best parties either of us has ever given. The whole thing would have come off without a single hitch had we remembered to put the deer back inside the door before we left.
The deer belonged to the owner of a pawnshop who didn’t want to part with his handsome specimen, so it was for sale for what we thought then was the inflated price of something like five hundred or maybe even a thousand dollars. During the night, a dog had its way with the deer’s back leg, but we managed to locate an emergency taxidermist to repair the damage. Now I can’t believe we didn’t just buy the deer in the first place because I would give anything in the world—except, I hasten to add, anywhere between $10,000 and $100,000—to own him. Like every other white-tailed deer I’ve ever seen, he was very beautiful, but we had no idea how lucky we were that the dog had not chewed on someone’s UltraBuck. Perhaps I should take a moment to thank our Creator.
God, Gators, and Gumbo
In February 2013, just before the start of Lent, Jim Piculas, a tour guide at the Insta-Gator Ranch & Hatchery in Covington, Louisiana, posted a letter on his employer’s Facebook page from the Most Reverend Gregory M. Aymond, archbishop of New Orleans. Piculas had written Aymond to ask if the Church might classify alligator as a fish, thereby making it okay to eat on the Fridays leading up to Easter. The archbishop wrote back that alligator is indeed “considered in the fish family,” and when the response went viral, he took to the local airwaves to confirm his position, which, he added, had been backed by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Piculas did not post his own letter, but judging from Aymond’s reply, it was fulsome in its praise of the gator. “I agree with you,” Aymond wrote. “God has created a magnificent creature that is important to the state of Louisiana and it is considered seafood.” The letter was signed “Sincerely in Christ”—who, it should be noted, did not feed the five thousand with loaves and gators. But I digress.
I am a Presbyterian and a fairly lenient Lenten observer, which means that I rarely get around to giving up anything at all, though in terms of Fridays and food I wouldn’t have to suffer much. In addition to okaying gator meat, the bishops agree that the Friday rule does not “technically” forbid “meat juices and liquid foods made from meat … meat gravies or sauces, as well as other seasonings or condiments made from animal fat.” By that measure it’s okay to use beef or chicken stock in your seafood gumbo—or indeed alligator stew—and the Bloody Mary at New Orleans’ Cochon, which is enriched with pork stock, would also be perfectly acceptable.
Now, some people might say that these are the kinds of loopholes and elastic definitions that have landed the Church in a spot of trouble of late, but given my own shaky status, I will skip over all that and point out that elastic definitions are sort of a Louisiana thing in general and not limited to the Church, as evidenced by the fact that the state was the last to outlaw cockfighting, in 2008. For decades, the New Orleans newspaper, animal rights activists, and various other folks who held the welfare of the chicken close to their hearts had lobbied hard for a ban. They came close to victory at one point in the 1980s when a cruelty-to-animals law was discovered on the books, but then the state attorney general wrote an opinion saying that chickens were not in fact animals, they were “fowl,” and the legislature passed another law to that effect, which meant that the noble cocks could keep on fighting for another two decades.
When they were legal, I attended more than one standing-room-only cockfight, so I was aware of their popularity. But apparently I missed the fact that the appetite for gator in Louisiana is so insatiable that to give it up on one day of the week during a season that lasts little more than a month would be a terrible hardship. At Insta-Gator, where you can also arrange a child’s birthday party or purchase “quality alligator products” in the gift shop, the girl on the phone told me they sell “thousands upon thousands” of pounds of gator meat each year. The tail meat sells for a beefy ten dollars per pound, a price driven up by the enormous popularity of the reality show Swamp People, as well as an aggressive campaign by the Louisiana Seafood Promotion & Marketing Board, which wholeheartedly agrees with Aymond that gator is within their purview and is positively breathless in its description of the meat’s “thrilling” versatility and various other qualities that “make any meal more memorable.”
In New Orleans, memorable gator meals can be had at Jacques-Imo’s, which has long served an alligator cheesecake, the Parkway Bakery & Tavern, which sells an alligator sausage po’boy, and at Cochon, where it comes fried, accompanied by a chile aioli so good it would enhance (or mask) pretty much anything. Co-owner Donald Link says the main reason he and chef Stephen Stryjewski offer gator on the menu is that they feel an obligation to buy the meat from farmers who are really raising the gators for the far more profitable hide. When I ask Link if he actually likes gator, he says the same thing people invariably say about rattlesnake and all the other disgusting things that I honestly do not believe that the Lord meant us to eat on Fridays or any other day: “It tastes like chicken.”
Which leads me back to Aymond’s letter and the all-important duck test. You know the one: If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck … then it probably is a duck. It seems to me that a corollary to that test is that if something tastes like chicken, it might ought to be considered meat, or at least something firmly not “in the fish family.” You could also make the same case based on the fact that gators do not just taste like chicken, they consume it. There is, for example, the memorable scene in Live and Let Die in which the gators’ appetite for Roger Moore is whetted by an appetizer of raw poultry parts. Just recently, I met a delightful Brit named Peter Pleydell-Bouverie, who had, in his youth, spent a summer at a ranch outside of Houston, where one of the chief forms of entertainment was feeding fried chicken by the bucketful to an alligator on the premises named Gladys. Despite having landed in a slew of clichés on his maiden trip, he still loves the South and visits often, though he does not eat alligator.
Who can blame him, since gators also have been known to eat deer, panther, black bear, the occasional human, and one another? Under duress they are not above going after an inanimate object, such as the trolling motor of my friend Howard Brent’s boat, which was bitten off by a gator during a hunt at Howard’s farm, Panther Tract. Panther Tract is located on a gorgeous stretch of swampy wilderness in Yazoo County, Mississippi, not far from where the state’s record gator, which weighed in at 697.5 pounds, was killed a week or so prior to Howard’s hunt. Due to the ample amount of water on his property, Howard is granted five permits a season by the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries, and Parks, which means he can kill ten gators, an already daunting process the department does not make any simpler.
After spotting a gator’s eyes in the water, you use a rod and reel to land a grappling hook in his hide, and then you get close enough to immobilize him (sort of) with a snare, a device Howard describes as a noose on a pole akin to what old-fashioned dogcatchers used. The aim, since alligators possess between seventy-four and eighty teeth, is to “try and get that noose tightened up around his mouth, so he won’t bite”—the one that attacked the motor was caught by the tail. Only after the gator has been snared is the hunter allowed to take his weapon out of its case, and even then, it’s not much of one. “You can’t use a rifle or a pistol,” says Howard, just a shotgun loaded with bird shot. Further, according to the instructions on the department’s website, the hunter must “keep gentle pressure” on the restraining line to keep the gator’s head and neck above the surface of the water before placing the shotgun a maximum of six to eight inches from him, aiming for the center of the neck.
Needless to say, it’s a process a whole lot easier said than done, especially after a few hours on the water in the pitch- black dark during which time I would bet some alcohol is consumed. “You got to find that little old soft spot b
ehind his head, and it’s only about the size of a fifty-cent piece,” Howard says. “And then he’s moving around the whole time.” An average hunt will last from about six in the evening until two or three in the morning, after which the skinning begins and then everyone sits down to a big breakfast. Howard loves the sport of it, but he says they’ll eat the meat too, usually fried in an egg batter, but first, he cautions, “you got to hammer the hell out of it to tenderize it.” I imagine so. “And what does it taste like?” Oh, you know, he answers back, “Sort of like chicken.”
Slugging It Out
As a child, I really loved escargot. The dish (which takes the French—and much sexier—name for “edible land snail”) was part of the education in sophisticated dining I received by tagging along with my father on numerous trips to our nation’s capital. There was smoked salmon carved tableside and a proper Caesar salad likewise tossed at the old lobby-level restaurant of the Hay-Adams Hotel, where we always stayed. Most exciting, a block or so from the White House, there was escargot and steak frites at the original D.C. “power lunch” spot, Sans Souci.
We dined in the now demolished restaurant so often I became a whiz with the tongs and two-tined fork required to extract the snail from its shell. And the thing itself, drenched in garlicky, herby butter (which was at least half the point, after all), was a chewy pleasure that carried over well into adulthood. Further, the snail happens to be the mascot of my alma mater, the Madeira School. Our motto is Festina lente (“Make haste slowly”) and the school cheer is “Go, Go, Escargots!” Snails and me were clearly meant to be.
