The Reporter's Kitchen
Page 26
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Twelve years ago, in England, I went to the Beaufort Hunt, which I have to admit found an extremely civilized affair, perhaps because you can’t eat a fox and so your celebratory ritual is the hunt breakfast—a propitiatory feast known and coveted across the pond as the English breakfast, served before the men and women of the hunt get on their horses and begin to gallop after their baying hounds. It is a warming and inevitably delicious banquet and how not, given that it comes with kippers, sausages, rashers of bacon, scrambled eggs, fried eggs, grilled mushrooms, tomatoes, and potatoes, and plenty of jam, marmalade, and butter for your toast. In France, though—as I discovered over my years of commuting to a Paris office—the celebratory hunt ritual is a wild boar hunt, after which you eat the boar. (You can’t count birding as a hunt; on the continent, it’s likely to be a slaughter on the order of Sarah Palin knocking off moose from a helicopter or stuffing turkeys into a decapitating machine.) In the Sologne, the traditional boar hunt opens with an alarming dance—a pas de deux, you might call it, or an attack, or if you were Bill O’Reilly, in court on harassment charges, just a “seduction”—in which a hunter advances on a young girl, a thrusting boar tusk in each hand, and the girl, naturally, twists away and tries to flee. The dance is atavistically macho, but so is the hunt itself and the consumption of the boar’s flesh.
The best account of a boar hunt I have ever read was written, not surprisingly, by an amused, interested, and somewhat less than enthralled woman—a wonderful French ethnologist named Claudine Fabre-Vassas. It’s about the ritual of boar hunting and what you could call transformative boar feasting in the Languedoc in southwestern France, as told by the men who hunt—and by one of the hunter’s wives, who cooks whatever share of the beast her husband brings home after the hunters castrate and divide it. The men are interested less in the boar itself than in the boar’s testicles—in the hunter who earns them for the kill and in what the others get when they dig in and divide the rest. They castrate the boar very quickly, almost furtively, Fabre-Vassas says, in what could be called a private ritual. They stand in a circle around the animal; they use a knife to castrate it while telling apocryphal stories about hunters who have bit the testicles off—impossible feats of mastery, given that a boar in his prime weighs some four hundred pounds. They say that the power of the boar’s balls—they call it “the iron” or “the force,” using the Latin word ferum—enters the hunter who makes the kill.
In some hunts, the hunting party divides the ferum. In others, they use the French word—couilles—to describe what happens once the force has entered the hunters. The testicles are worthless then; the hunters purge them in running water and vinegar, cook them, taste a symbolic morsel, and throw them to the dogs. Some hunters make a celebratory meal in the woods, and prepare it themselves. They take the heart, the lungs, the windpipe, the spleen, and the liver, purge them in the same way, chop them up, cook them over a fire with onions, tomatoes, thyme, laurel, vinegar, and red wine—while drinking as much of the wine as they can handle—call it a civet, and eat it. Most often, they divide the meat and the organs and bring them home for their wives to purge and preserve or cook. Fabre-Vassas says that either way, the name of the game is virility, and given the news lately, it’s safe to say that in matters of virile preening, it doesn’t matter if the men are old hunters or old politicians, or if they’re three-star restaurateurs scalping the cockscomb off a soon-to-be capon at the capon festival in Bresse, or if they’re worshiping the force of the ferum in Languedoc. The celebration, in any event, belongs to men, like the firemen’s feast in Roussillon.
The truth is that when men “celebrate” without women, the fare is often far more crudely challenging than celebratory, or even tasty. No woman I know would trade one taste of the heartbreak, love, and longing that flavor the wedding banquet Tita cooks in Like Water for Chocolate, or one bite of the French delicacies in Babette’s Feast—the sherried turtle soup, say, or the blinis with caviar, or the quail in puff pastry with foie gras and truffle sauce—with their power to enchant even the dour Pietists of Jutland, for a taste of the ferum at what could be called a stag party in the woods. When that lone Languedoc woman speaks, at the end of the Fabre-Vassas’s account, the blood rites in the woods are over and she is about to cook her husband’s share of scraps of meat and organs from the mutilated boar. We are back to the everyday and family dinner, back to cookery and domestication and its own kind of transformations: “Moi, I make a farcis of sausage meat,” she says. “I stuff the heart with it, and then I cook it, slowly, with petits onions. It’s the only way that they will ever get me to eat it.” That’s life, and she’s not celebrating.
Acknowledgments
So many remarkable people have helped me in the course of the fifteen years since I sat down to write the first essay in this collection: at the New Yorker, David Remnick’s valiant team of editors, fact checkers, grammarians, and OKers who shepherded me through these pieces, plus years of cumulative gratitude to Pat Keogh, in Makeup, who could glance at the huge line-overflow in every one of them and in minutes find the space to restore the words I was suddenly so desperately attached to; at St. Martin’s Press, Elizabeth Beier’s gracious and efficient publishing staff, with special thanks to the unflappable Nicole Williams; at home and in Italy, my husband, Vincent Crapanzano, and the family and friends who gamely worked their way through every recipe I tried, and most of the plants and animals I mentioned, with the understandable exception of Amanita phalloides, and especially my grandson, Garrick, an inspirational eater since, at the age of six or seven, he ordered nettle soup at a fancy country restaurant and asked for seconds; and most of all the huge cast of characters in this book—people who welcomed me into their lives and kitchens, answered what must have seemed a bewildering if not relentless barrage of questions—it was—and became my friends.
These essays began as a food-issue break from my usual New Yorker beat covering people and politics in Europe. They quickly became not only an annual respite from the rest of the year’s bad news but the source of a deepening appreciation of the table, and of the people who grow and cook and share the gifts of their talent and dedication whenever the rest of us sit down together to break bread. Somewhere along the line, my agent, Eric Simonoff, said, “This is your next book.” Food, like music, is civilizing—balm for the soul, really—and I am grateful to him, and grateful to them all, not least to the friends at Oxford and Yale who invited me to give the talks that in time grew into the long essay that ends this book.
New York, May 2017
ALSO BY JANE KRAMER
Lone Patriot
The Politics of Memory
Whose Art Is It?
Europeans
Unsettling Europe
The Last Cowboy
Honor to the Bride
Allen Ginsberg in America
Off Washington Square
About the Author
JANE KRAMER is the longtime European correspondent of The New Yorker. She has also written for The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, and Vogue. She is the author of several books, including The Reporter’s Kitchen, and has been the recipient of a National Book Award, a National Magazine Award, a Front Page Award, and an Emmy Award. In 2006, she was made a Chevalier de la Legions d’Honneur in France and, in 2016, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She divides her time between Europe and New York. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
>
Introduction
PART I: THE REPORTER’S KITCHEN
The Reporter’s Kitchen
PART II: PROFILES
The Hungry Travelers
Spice Routes
The Philosopher Chef
Post-Modena
PART III: BOOKS, ESSAYS, AND ADVENTURES
The Quest
Down Under
The Food at Our Feet
A Fork of One’s Own
Good Greens
Eat, Memory
PART IV: CELEBRATING
Pilgrim’s Progress
Rites, Rituals, and Celebrations
Acknowledgments
Also by Jane Kramer
About the Author
Copyright
THE REPORTER’S KITCHEN. Copyright © 2017 by Jane Kramer. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
The material in this book, with the exception of the Introduction and “Rites, Rituals, and Celebrations,” originally appeared in The New Yorker.
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-07437-9 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4668-8598-1 (ebook)
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First Edition: November 2017
eISBN 9781466885981