by Jim Harrison
We start at base with garlic. Without garlic forget it. Garlic should be bought in odd numbers. You should get one pound, three pounds, five pounds, seven pounds of garlic. Roast these heads like they do at Mustard’s famous restaurant near Yountville, California. Use a little olive oil, fresh rosemary, thyme, beef stock. You cut the top off the garlic, a little flat spot on top so you can baste it. Eat several heads, as I have on numerous occasions. Just squish them out or go at them with an oyster fork. Drink a pint mug of Cabernet with this, anything less is cowardly and you won’t be vivid. Nowhere in the United States that I have traveled with my band, Vince Van No Go and His Poor but Proud Crowd, have I seen people that live more vividly than in Cajun country. Of course much is being made of this diet but essentially what you get in New York is a very watered-down variety except Texarkana and the great chef Abe de la Houssaye. Down there they’re not afraid of your basic hot peppers. Go over to Nogales it’s the same thing. The best menudo in the country can be gotten across from the Historical Museum in Nogales. They serve these wild little chiles. There are wild Sonora chiles on the side, freshly chopped cilantro, and there are nice fatty morsels of calves’ feet in there with the tripe. It’s just splendid. Myself and the grizzly expert, Douglas Peacock, go there.
How to eat vividly? Of late I have been following this diet because I decided I don’t want to die. It’s called Eat to Win by Doctor Bob Haas. Of course the question is win what? Now I don’t recommend this as a vivid diet but the principles are correct—to reduce the amount of fat in your diet and simple carbs, and go for complex carbs and protein. Get the sludge out of your veins. I’ve been meaning to write Dr. Bob, who will be known henceforth as Bob, a comforting name. Bob being the most popular name in the United States, naturally there are some good Bobs and some bad Bobs but mostly indifferent Bobs, not to speak of the old-fashioned BeBob-a-re-Bob. I’ve been thinking of writing Bob about improving this diet because there are too many recipes in there that are torpid.
The best salt substitute, the only salt substitute that’s adequate, is plenty of hot peppers. My grizzly man sent me a care package from Arizona of about thirty different kinds of ground and whole chiles. Other than the fact that the place is hot and stupid, why doesn’t one live in Arizona where all these chiles are available? I don’t know, I just love “here” and it’s never occurred to me to move down there. My soul is drawn toward these Apaches and Hopis and Navajo. I watched the sacred Yaqui Deer Dance and had some snacks at this Yaqui Festival. Let me tell you these Indians aren’t afraid of a little hot pepper. They adore them, they hang wreaths, strings, and medallions of peppers all over their little adobe huts. I’ve made wild rabbit tacos with plenty of hot peppers. You could actually make a giant burrito with a whole squirrel but I don’t really care for squirrel. It reminds me of a really extravagantly premature baby.
Some of the key to this diet I might eventually publish along with a Frenchman and a Montana painter in a cookbook which is to be called Sporting Food. It’s the kind of food that Balzac would eat without getting pissed off. It’s not boring food. How am I going to stop such foods from killing me? Well I learned a secret in Brazil last winter and this secret had nothing to do with the extraordinarily cheap pharmaceuticals there. That threw me off my feet for a while, those softball-sized sacks did nobody any good. As it’s known locally, that kind of snort is known as “bone-be-gone.” If you want to turn your pecker cold as stone just keep it up, boys, keep it up. Down in Brazil I was at a churrascaria and their beef down there is grass fed so it’s not full of fat, like ours. You’d see vast tonnages of meat roasting on wood fires and they would hack you off what you want. They would wheel it around on carts that took several peasants to push. Along with these meats there were extraordinarily hot salsas. My favorite cut of meat was a little fatty. It was the hump of a zebu cattle, it’s about the texture of a brisket but much more delicious. There is a marvelous racial mix in Brazil. I’m thinking this diet of rice and beans and fruit and vegetables and fish might be what gives these women on the beach bottoms that were designed by their ineluctably superior diet. Go to Brazil, it’s quite inexpensive, skip any drugs because foreign jails are really dreary. And then there is the danger to any attractive male like myself. Go to Brazil, eat vividly. If you’re a girl you’ll be that thirteen-year-old staring up at that picture of James Dean or Monty Clift again, you’ll have hot and cold flashes, you’ll have gorgeous dreams, you’ll yearn again, you’ll yearn for life. Of course if you’re a boy in Brazil you’ll have a perpetual half-master, you’ll be semi-choked up all the time, you’ll regain your emotions.
I discovered that the Black Pope Tancred reconfirmed my feeling about the word seven. It’s the only number there is, it’s the magic number. To eat vividly I have a tendency to work in multiples of seven. If I’m stir-frying a little pork loin and fresh asparagus I have a tendency to put seven hot peppers and seven cloves of garlic in it. It just makes it a much more vivid little dish. Another vivid food that is much maligned in our country, but makes the most nutritionally sound meals, is black beans and rice (it’s a given you can eat a salad with it) or you can make pinto beans and rice. In Mexico the athletic kids are so much stronger than the junk food puffballs that we are breeding up here. Beans and rice are vivid food. You can tell when you go into Cuban bars in Florida or Mexican bars or by listening to my favorite current rock group Los Lobos. That is beans and rice music. That is incredible music of the streets.
Some of the more odious seem to prefer the English rock. Give me a break. When England lost India and her superior diet, she went downhill in a handbasket. You can eat well in London of course but it is generally where there is Italian food. I had a foreign visitor who started to get depressed at being in New York a week with the expense account bungfodder that we eat in Gotham, so I made him a simple dish of fresh pasta with a sauce made out of a cacciatore of rabbit and pheasant and sausage. His energy was immediately restored. The repellent fact of life to anyone who likes to cook is that the domestic duck is full of fat because it is raised on Long Island along with other banalities and absurdities. That duck is appropriate for East Hampton, South Hampton, Sag Harbor. Once you get interested in a vivid diet, I don’t mean these kind of yuppie nightmare foods, you get the farmer down the road and con him into raising you some Muscovy ducks if you don’t want to do it yourself. Muscovy duck is a very lean, gorgeous duck that I roast just short of twenty-five minutes at a super heat in my forced-air oven. They are delicious when their flesh is a deep pink. A superb duck. Buy Muscovy.
Many of you stickball queens would be a lot better off if you put aside this stickball and bought yourself a shotgun and went into the forest every fall and shot yourself some healthy, meaty fowl. Buy a fishing pole, even now as I am dictating this in my auto I am heading back to my hidden cabin in the forest in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and my car is loaded with fishing tackle. I even like the less desirable species pike; I like perch, Lake Superior whitefish, lake trout, the small pinkish ones. There is no industry within a hundred fifty miles of my cabin but there is some acid rain up here but of course Reagan refuses to do anything about it because he thinks of it as some kind of a Grecian Formula. Somebody told him acid rain keeps you from growing gray hair. When I started writing the Dead Food Scrolls I didn’t know where it would take me but I’m not able to eat meat as much as I used to. I like it but it makes me weird and vindictive for some reason. If you look deep into the eye of a rib eye steak you fully don’t realize it’s dead, but just leave it out in the sun for a hot afternoon. Then take a whiff.
Unfortunately some vivid food is sometimes expensive. Don’t waste your time on the mediocre French restaurants in New York. Another revelation just hit me with the force of a breeze: why is it that waitresses are more sexually vivid than actresses or models? Easy, they work with food.
Another good number is thirty-three. Make a low cal béchamel into which you add thirty-three cloves
of poached and pureed garlic, make mashed potatoes, fresh not instant, Bob. Stir this garlic béchamel into the potatoes, take a little barnyard chicken and stuff it with these potatoes, massage the chicken with Clancy’s Fancy or your favorite hot pepper concoction and put it in a greased pan. I like to roast leeks, carrots, and little turnips with my chicken. I braise it on a rack, then you make a sauce with vastly reduced chicken stock to baste with. Roast it forty-nine minutes. You’ve got yourself a nice little breakfast or lunch. Dinner should be more ample. This will serve one mature adult or two semi-matured adults. Some of you may have noticed that my food columns have lightened up a bit—that’s because I don’t want to leave behind the legacy of gluttony. Now surely you have the good sense, as I only infrequently do, to eat rather lightly and naturally most of the time. I know it’s boring but we don’t have a choice. I missed the greatest party of the year where we roasted a pig and a half steer and some barons of beef, I missed it because I was in bed with a vastly red and inflated toe—gout had struck—I had earned that gout but I was ashamed of it and what’s more I couldn’t go to the party because I couldn’t walk. I tried to get there by taking a few Percodan but that didn’t touch this pain. The rule of thumb is “moderate to excess.” My favorite way of frying potatoes is in goose fat but let’s face it, you can’t do that all the time. At the dinner table my dad used to tell all us kids that all around the pig’s ass is pork. I’m still not sure what that meant but it owns a certain poignancy and urgency to me now.
Let me tell you a little story, almost a Paul Harvey anecdote about how cooking saved seven lives, from when I first started touring with my band Vince Van No Go and His Poor but Proud Crowd. We started out the way every great band did. We played Tastee-Freeze openings, special used car sale days, commemorations at rural airports where they only have one airplane, 4-H club dances in Kansas; we had an elaborate camper and we were so broke that to keep these guys from snorting potato chips I started cooking for them along the road. Sometimes we’d stop to buy a pig or a lamb from a farmer. We’d stop by slaughterhouses. We’d take along a bushel of garlic and the only wine we could afford was Gallo. Those guys were a sorry bunch of tropical dropouts. I put them on this elaborate vitamin-mineral program and vivid food. They all had an average forty-to-fifty-pound weight gain and they all live very happily married and divorced today. They all regained their sexual vigor. They became husky, brawling lads. I don’t like to see them anymore because like all musicians on the skids their sole profession is to try and borrow money. They’d all be out there with Hendrix and Joplin if they hadn’t started Eat to Win.
I recognize of course that President Reagan should eat my menudo in order to regain the foreign affairs advantage. At the very least he could go back to his Musso & Frank’s Diet of 1948 where he wasn’t scared of a few harmless nitrates. Where he wasn’t afraid of some good solid corn fat in his beef, where the oysters were plentiful and garlic abounded. I’m waiting for the leader of a prominent country to have the guts to wear a necklace of garlic bulbs like Don Ho wears his flowery lei. That leader will show the potentiality of being the true king of the world. If you figure that you like all other human beings spend most of your time rehearsing your irritations then what a pleasure it is to spend a couple hours a day eating vivid foods. My next installment will deal with a critical problem, we’ll leap into a more interesting cosmos—that is the food of sexuality. The first chapter will be called The Oysters of the Gods. Where to find them and how to prepare them and their direct effect on the genitalia, male or female. This is not what they call sexist. Male and female alike need fundaments fine-tuned by good nutrition. Even while I dictate this to the daughter (a veggie) of a Jersey meat packer, I pour a tankard of Bardolino and tend the fresh rainbow trout grilling over a wood fire. The trout is stuffed with wild leeks, basted with vermouth and butter. Wild leeks provide the creatures of the forest, Mother Westwind’s children, with the spirit of garlic. As a grade school tyke I was sent home from school for eating wild leeks at recess and stinking up the classrooms.
Father-in-Law
Throughout literature (and lower forms of entertainment) the Father of the Bride is an object of just ridicule, a ditherer with a hopefully ample wallet sweating on the sidelines while people actually competent in such matters orchestrate the wedding.
I recently proved to be no exception whatsoever during the marriage of my younger daughter, Anna, in Livingston, Montana. I had no part in any of the central decisions that made the several-day party implacably smooth except in the area of food and wine, and even in the matter of food I deferred somewhat to my older daughter, Jamie, now a novelist, but formerly an employee of Dean & DeLuca in New York City. I was mostly the not very tiny voice yelling “more” and more we had including crab and shrimp from Charles Morgan’s company in Destin, Florida, bread and cheeses from Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor, Michigan, including Grafton cheddar, Comté, Papillon Roquefort, triple crème l’Explorateur, Vermont mountain cheese, Stilton, also roasted Italian olives. I almost forgot Dunn’s Irish salmon, and patés including splendid wild mushroom loaf. I also almost forgot the oysters and the actually prime Delmonico roasts, the Norwegian poached salmon, the two hundred pieces of duck confit made by the chef Mark Glass. There were about a hundred in for dinner and another fifty came along later.
Somehow they drank nineteen cases of wine, not to speak of eating all the food. Years ago while cooking beef ribs at his house Jack Nicholson told me that “only in the Midwest is overeating still considered an act of heroism.” We’ll have to throw in Montana, too. Of course drinking a lot is de rigueur at weddings except in the dourest confines of yuppiedom.
Since it was my sole delegated responsibility I gave the wine my full, somewhat manic, attention, testing twenty or so Côtes du Rhône over a year’s time in case lots, before settling on a Sablet blanc and Bandol for the red. I’m very good at this sort of testing compared to my miserable college years; my pratfalls are in the arenas of the novel and moviemaking. The Sablet is quite wonderful though I drink very little white wine. The Bandol decision was easy as I had been drinking and serving it for years. I rather like this sturdy, suggestive red with everything, and often with nothing at all. It invariably has made me happy, recalling as it does the primal flavors of sun and earth, rather than lightbulbs and supermarkets. It is also affordable if you can withstand the usual nagging of your accountant. Whenever life begins to crush me I know I can rely on Bandol, garlic, and Mozart. It will also be served in vast quantities at my funeral. This opinion was obviously shared by those at the wedding, the legion of the hollow legged. I salute the Domaine Tempier. This pleasure in geologic time is no more evanescent than life herself.
Wine Notes
Much about wine is problematic and open to nearly infinite conjecture. For instance, what is the sex of wine, and are we falling into a sump when we consider the question, a trap of silliness that professional wine tasters so easily fall into? Wine tasting is susceptible to parody, but so are other professions of great intrinsic value, from mad scientists to virtuous strippers to pure-hearted politicians.
But then it is always good to question the terminology of our enthusiasms. We can say that wine is essentially female because it comes from the earth and we don’t say “father earth.” The best things are female, including females, and allowing this characterization energizes our imaginations in ways not possible to other terminology. Blatant, loudmouthed, bad wines are, of course, male.
There’s a lot of tannin in the river beside my cabin, emerging as it does from a swamp. I’ve also visited a friend while he was, unfortunately, tanning the hide of an otter. I taste tannin in many vintages, especially American, but it’s no big deal if it is slight. Wines that have never seen an oak barrel are occasionally called “oaky” but why quarrel about this? From my childhood onward up in the country I have picked wild raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, and other berries, but I must say I do not find
these unique flavors in wine, though many apparently do. My perhaps naive honesty prevents me from using these terms that would lie to my taste.
Our sensual memories are so vast, why shouldn’t we use the entire reservoir when we describe our affection or dislike for a wine? Sometimes our American tasters seem to be ascetically as serious as Cotton Mather when he “barbecued” Indians. There is black and white and the multifoliate variances of gray but an alarming lack of color, reminding me of the cartoons in French publications poking fun at American wine snobs. But how often have I tasted wines in France with a fine platter of charcuterie on a table or perched on a barrel before us, with joyous badinage, laughter, with no sense that we were deciding the fate of nations.
There is a definite possibility, and I say this with my usual modesty, that what I am saying is totally wrongheaded. My notes on Corsican wines that I tasted could not be published without being bowdlerized. Maybe a wine shouldn’t be allowed to remind me of “the thighs of a rich girl depleted by lassitude,” one of the tamer descriptions. Conversely we can say jug wines tend to be loutish, abrupt, faintly soiled, evoking memories of the locker room after a football game on a warm September evening. That sort of thing. Bad properly evokes bad.