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Overview
New York Times bestselling author Jim Harrison was one of this country’s most beloved writers, a muscular, brilliantly economic stylist with a salty wisdom. He also wrote some of the best essays on food around, earning praise as “the poet laureate of appetite” (Dallas Morning News). A Really Big Lunch, to be published on the one-year anniversary of Harrison’s death, collects many of his food pieces for the first time—and taps into his larger-than-life appetite with wit and verve.
Jim Harrison’s legendary gourmandise is on full display in A Really Big Lunch. From the titular New Yorker piece about a French lunch that went to thirty-seven courses, to pieces from Brick, Playboy, Kermit Lynch Newsletter, and more on the relationship between hunter and prey, or the obscure language of wine reviews, A Really Big Lunch is shot through with Harrison’s pointed aperçus and keen delight in the pleasures of the senses. And between the lines the pieces give glimpses of Harrison’s life over the last three decades. A Really Big Lunch is a literary delight that will satisfy every appetite.
“Harrison is the American Rabelais, and he is at his irreverent and excessive best in this collection.” —John Skowles, San Diego Union-Tribune on The Raw and the Cooked
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780802126467 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grove/Atlantic, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 03/24/2017 |
| Pages: | 272 |
| Sales rank: | 1,058,028 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Eat Your Heart Out
As your ass't food editor and private WATS line to the terre d'edibles I wanted to alert you to certain new developments in the area of hot sauces. (Just yelled at my yellow Labrador who is in the garden eating corn on the cob without salt and butter. Yesterday it was a dozen eggs and a pound of butter left out on the counter.) But before we get to the hot sauce let me make a few divergent points.
1. No one is allowed to use cocaine before the meal when I cook. Afterward, OK. Cocaine creates a sort of bubblegum nimbus that slaughters the palate and sensuous capacities, in addition to shrinking the wee-wee and tearing holes in the social fabric.
2. A warning to certain of your left-leaning, spitd-ribbling, eco-freak readers: I kill much of what I eat; ducks, quail, deer, grouse, woodcock, trout, salmon, bluegills, the lowly carp (Hunanese hot and crispy carp). These people should know that technically speaking their bean sprouts scream when they are jerked out by their roots. Everything living ends up as a turd of sorts.
3. Numerologically I can't end up on an even number (2) for private reasons. Spend as much as possible on good food and wine. Last night I drank a 1949 Latour and a 1953 Richebourg because I was depressed about returning to Glitzville (Hollywood). I wept over a Save the Children ad. Then as the great wine surged through my proud veins and emptied into my brainpan I had a long satisfying fantasy about Meryl Streep. "How can I help but love you, Jim," she said, "I've read your ten books and eaten your ten best meals. I guess you could say I'm yours." Then I slipped on my fifty-dollar Key West pig mask and stalked her pealing laughter through the penthouse etc. ... Her husband was conveniently absent, having become waylaid on a turnip expedition in Washington Heights. O Meryl!
Anyway, hot sauce au point: Richard Schweid's magnificent Hot Peppers (Madrona Publishers, $6.95) is worth a hundred times its price. Yes the book is worth six hundred ninety five dollars, the exact amount of a quarter ounce of you-know-what. Luckily I got my copy free. Unfortunately, Schweid, the sage of Cajuns and Capsicum, is ignorant of Clancy's Fancy, a hot sauce manufactured by Colleen Clancy, 630 Oxford, Ann Arbor, MI 48108. Ms. Clancy is a lass steeped in exotic Acadiana. I've never met her but her sauce is stopper and neck above the hundreds of sauces I've collected from Ethiopia to Ecuador, from cold Leningrad to the steamy fuck-crazed alleys of Bangkok where slant oysters are far more numerous than the fabled Belons, Bon Secours, or the champ Apalachicolas. Jimmy Buffett, the minstrel, uses it in his duck-crab-shrimp gumbo. Sam Lawrence, the publishing tycoon, uses Clancy's during Key West exercise routines. I use it copiously. Example — a Caribbean stew.
3 lb PORK SPARERIBS (cut to 1-rib pieces)
1 CHICKEN (cut into serving pieces)
2 lb HOT ITALIAN SAUSAGE
½ cup TOMATO PASTE
7 cloves of GARLIC
3 tbsp FAUCHON BASIL VINEGAR
7 tsp CLANCY'S FANCY
1 cup CHICKEN STOCK
3 tsp LEMON JUICE
1 tsp SUGAR
7 dashes WORCESTERSHIRE SAUCE
1 tbsp CHILI POWDER
1 tbsp PAPRIKA
1. Place spareribs in large Dutch oven and cover with water. Cook for 20 minutes, discard water.
2. Place chicken pieces in bottom of Dutch oven and cover with spareribs and pieces of sausage. Add onions.
3. Mix all other ingredients in a bowl and pour over mélange.
4. Bake covered for 1 hour and 45 minutes at 300. Spoon off excess fat or suck it off with a straw.
Do not change or substitute! Above my desk hang a crow wing and a pink rubber piglet with a green drake trout fly stuck in its ass, and a coyote tooth in its mouth. I've written a new novel called Warlock. You tamper with my recipes at your peril!
CHAPTER 2Food for Thought
Dear Mike,
I am so confused and distraught that this will have to serve as my food letter for the upcoming issue. Let's face it, the twin specters of food and politics loom large these days. On a recent trip to Central America, to cover for my own curiosity the multifaceted revolutions in that area, I frankly ate very well. One particular lunch for instance I had squid stewed in their own ink, braised quail on toast, a soup made entirely of miniature crustaceans, plus a skewer of several lobsters and two bottles of wine. This was extraordinarily cheap because of our advantage in the exchange rate. The cooking was prodigiously adept compared to my recent ten-day trip to New York City where food, lodging, and pharmaceuticals ran about $8,000. I want you to be the first to know that when my next novel is published I'm heading straight to Costa Rica.
You said you were curious about my meals with Orson Welles, who of course, is a bit of a trencherman. The most memorable was at Ma Maison (the restaurant with the unlisted phone number out there in Glitzville). The two of us were accompanied by a beautiful Hungarian countess who left in either boredom or disgust halfway through the meal. You see, Mike, she was slender and could not comprehend our great, sad hearts choked as they are with fatty deposits. Orson began by clearing his palate with a half dozen bull shots in quick succession. As we were hungry the first course was a half pound of fresh caviar with an iced bottle of Stolichnaya. (Politics again! In Palm Beach two years ago a liquor store clerk refused to supply me Stolichnaya because of what the Russians were doing in Afghanistan. I explained to him that the residents of that sorry country of Afghanistan are Muslims and don't drink vodka. My account was such that I got my vodka.) The next course was a wonderful ragù of sweetbreads in pastry covered by a half quart of black truffle sauce, accompanied by a rare old Burgundy the name of which would mean nothing to the impoverished hippies who read your magazine. Then without a moment's rest arrived a whole poached Atlantic salmon in a sorrel sauce and a white Bordeaux. At this point the countess wrapped herself in her cape and spun into the night. Her departure enabled me to ask Orson how he managed to snag Rita Hayworth at the top of her form. He said he was in Rio at the time her picture appeared on the cover of Life magazine; he took the next plane to L.A. and literally browbeat her into the marriage bed within ten days. It seems, though, that romantically the great man's true weakness was for hatcheck girls.
To tell you the truth, I was beginning to lose some of my appetite at this point, my life at the time being submerged in a number of business and romantic failures. My spirits arose however when the next course arrived: an immense platter of slices of rare duck breasts in green peppercorn sauce accompanied by beautifully braised and sculpted root vegetables. With this, quite naturally, we had a very rare Romanée-Conti. I was astounded that Mr. Welles had remembered from the day before over an ample lunch that this was my favorite item, perfected by the great Paul Bocuse before he submerged himself in the cuisine minceur, a method even more fraudulent than psychiatry. This last course nearly put me under and I looked down happily at the record of the meal left on my shirtfront. I rejected the platter of desserts and rushed to the bathroom. A certain unnamed actress had given me a vial of white powder, which she told me I should use to keep awake. I know you can vouch for the fact that I don't use drugs but this seemed an exceptional occasion. I poured the whole gram on my palm and snorted heavily so that anyone coming in the bathroom might think I was washing my face. I have no memory really about what we talked about other than food and sex.
But back to food and politics. I won't drink Polish vodka because of the long record of anti-Semitism in that country. I generally avoid German restaurants for the same reason. So I am not without my politics, am I? I avoid the cooking of my motherland, Sweden, because it is a land without garlic, a land without sunshine. I avoid Jewish cooking because it is basically lousy. A certain tribe mentioned in Lévi-Strauss's The Savage Mind eats bear shit for constipation not political reasons. Perhaps when no one is looking Nancy Reagan licks her new china. I do know that of all Mother Westwind's children, the mammalian group, man alone cooks. Man alone is capable of looking over a girl's shoulder while he fucks her at the coffee table laden with fifteen appetizers. He stares into the blank eyes of the Dungeness crab that will be transformed from a delicate sea creature into a mere turd.
How can I answer any of the questions on your questionnaire? All of my dooms are small dooms, the ones, to quote myself, "that seem to lurk behind each fence post." Yet your questionnaire is not contemptible nor is my refusal Audenesque; all that fake liberalism warring against the state when it's still the same fake liberal paying his taxes and marching right along with the other civil servants. I barely ever think of the government anymore even though a few years ago I paid taxes equaling the salaries of four senators. Why they took this money that could have been spent on food, wine, and floozies — exotic travel — beats me. As an instance of the banality of it all I read in this morning's paper that when confronted with this $100 billion deficit, Reagan told a cute joke about some Negro buying a bottle of vodka with food stamps. This, I think, indicates a constitutional hopelessness in leadership. Another instance I reflected on when I was in Central America: I wondered if there was a single legislator who was familiar in any deeper sense with the history of Latin America. I thought then — probably nope. But enough of this sententiousness. Don't you find it strange that the true symbol for God, the Buddhist circle, is also the exact shape of a dinner plate. Has this ever occurred to you? The all-knowing father-mother has made us machines of devouring and he has given us heads to figure out what we are going to eat next. Let's not be ignorant, in terms of mythography, that the sacrament of the Eucharist makes us all vampires. Yes, vampires by proxy. Mike, you should remember that within the unyielding anguish of the writer, it's always night and you're always flying solo, and then usually over the Mato Grosso.
Yes, Golden, I went without protein for four days ... without any form of protein, eating rice and fruit like a Jain. Golden, even that name. Do you realize that if you could get $350 an ounce for your body you would be worth what Barry Manilow makes in one night at a concert? Anyway, I went without any protein for four days, I fell into a depressing trance, I could barely move, my head ached, I was depressed, of course, this the average third world experience. I dreamed of ham, western ham, northern ham, southern ham, not eastern ham. Redeye gravy, the sweet vinegar clove gravy, mashed potatoes, more ham, slabs of ham, juicy ham, dry ham, ham sandwiches, ham croquettes, ham on rye, hamburgers — anything. I wanted it, I wanted it with a desperation akin only to sexual desire. I wanted it like a fifteen-year-old farmboy in 1952 wanted Ava Gardner. All those big words of yours and your questionnaire are meaningless to me. Such polysyllabic words such as God and world are too much for me to handle at this late date. Do you not on your logo express the strange wisdom of the ages, both the Orient and the Occident, not to speak of the other regions by saying, "Zen bones, Zen bones, Zen hambones"?
CHAPTER 3The Dead Food Scrolls
Dear Mike,
"Whither food?" you asked in a recent letter. That question set me to thinking. Food, you see, is something that is so obviously dead and that we have in large, large quantities. We don't, of course, bother bearing this deadness in mind because quite naturally you eat it, everybody eats it — dogs, cats, everything on earth. Everything that lives eats it. Certain things worry me though, certain thoughts — tonight I am in a white heat and all around me is snow, and I sit awake with my sleeping animals who always keep a weather eye half open in case I go to the refrigerator. I'm angry enough to turn over a car myself, something I did on a bet with a Model-A way back when my back was in good shape. Yes, I tipped over a Model-A by myself. What I'm trying to say tonight is there's nothing to eat, in fact my bank account is low, which is another source of anger. Mike, to be frank, I feel myself on the verge of a change. Perhaps a great leap backward into a smaller size. All too frequently I find that women, when they say to me you're too big, they're not referring to my primal fundament but my overall body size! When I ask friends do you think I'm too big they say no, and use polite euphemisms such as burly, pulpy — not insulting words, just a shade short of grotesque. But certainly you, Mike, who live in New York, which is rife with such schemes, know there is nothing so boring as somebody else's self-improvement plan. The oddity here is that I am not trying to improve on anything. What I'm thinking is much more positive than the cheapness, the drabness of self-improvement plans. What I am thinking is what if a man just said to himself in the privacy of his haunted nights, I swear on Mom, the Lord, and everything holy, I'm only going to eat live food. Enough of this dead food that has been taxing my system and taxing my popularity with the opposite gender. I don't mean those sorts of decadent experiments of the Middle Ages when the French were given to eating a swan while it was still alive. They would cook a swan while it was still alive and start eating at it while it was still squawking. I don't mean torture, neither do I mean that I'm going to become one of those bliss-ninny grazers they call vegetarians. Mike, you probably think I'm setting you up for something here; I'm not, I am perfectly serious. Of course I know that a woman, Ms. Distaff as it were, is alive, and a woman's you-know-what is very much alive, but checking with my local optometrist, the only real medical man in the area (he's also gay), a woman's you-know-what is totally without nutritional value, unless you catch her right after she's spilled the bowl of soup in her lap.
Luckily for me the inception, the beginning of this experiment — and as the experiment unwinds I'll let you know — is that I'm going south to do a little hunting, after an onerous, secret project that I'm not at liberty to divulge to anyone of course. I'm going to Louisiana to hunt the fabled woodcock and I'm going to do some quail hunting in north Florida so I will be close to the Cedar Key oyster and the Bon Secours oyster. I will be interested to hear from any of your readers of any other live food that I can have. I love sushi but you know there is a point at which you really don't want to sink your teeth into a fish that's still flopping, and I'm not again talking about the greens that can be technically alive. I could go out and dig under two feet of snow and find some reasonably green parsley, rip it up, and stuff it in my mouth — that's not what I mean.
I'm a little worried that I've changed certain brain waves by not drinking enough alcohol which I've cut down on vastly. Mostly because I find the less I drink, the more I get to dream and dreaming (up here in the great white north where not a lot happens) gives you something interesting to do at night. Anyway, of late I've been strapping weights all over my body and dancing to reggae music for an hour a day to combat winter. I'm wondering if this isn't changing my brain in some ways because I used to eat beef and now I'm suddenly going for more pork products. I have a passion, which I've only been able to solve lately by going to Kentucky and eating ample quantities of pork skin and pit barbecue with a sauce so hot that every hair on my body including seven hairs on my chest is wet. So that might be a consideration. Then again I'm not going to take this live food thing too far if it endangers my health. For instance, I've agreed to do a project with the French actress Jeanne Moreau: the project is of course top secret as is everything I do. Anyway I was thinking of lying there on the forest floor in France with a trained pig; admittedly this would cost bucks. The minute the truffle is torn from the ground I will pop it in my mouth while it is still alive like a big black, pitch black, coal black, raw apple. It isn't that I've killed too much; I must say that I've enjoyed eating several hundred woodcock, quail, geese, and venison this fall. These animals are top-drawer nutrition-wise as they spend their lives in what your humble readers in New York would think a natural environment. There is nothing quite so natural as the big slab of deer liver fresh from the steaming cavity.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "A Really Big Lunch"
by .
Copyright © 2017 James T. Harrison Trust.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction Mario Batali ix
Eat Your Heart Out (Smoke Signals, 1981) 1
Food for Thought (Smoke Signals, 1982) 4
The Dead Food Scrolls (Smoke Signals, 1983) 9
The Vivid Diet (Unpublished, 1986) 14
Father-in-Law (Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 1995) 22
Wine Notes (Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 2002) 24
Is Winemaking an Art? (Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 2002) 28
My Problems with White Wine (Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 2002) 31
Eat or Die (Brick, 2003) 35
Paris Rebellion (Brick, 2003) 39
Odious Comparisons (Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 2004) 44
Wine Criticism and Literary Criticism (Part II) (Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 2004) 47
Food, Sex, and Death (Brick, 2004) 52
A Really Big Lunch (New Yorker, 2004) 58
Carte 69
Tongue (Brick, 2004) 82
Ducks (Motto Italiano, 2005) 88
Wine Strategies (Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 2005) 91
Resuming the Pleasure (Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 2005) 95
Snake-Eating (Brick, 2005) 100
Bear Posole (The Montana Writers' Cookbook, 2005) 106
Food, Fitness, and Death (Brick, 2005) 107
The Fisherman Gourmand (Big Sky Cooking, 2006) 113
Food and Mood (Brick, 2006) 116
Vin Blanc (Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 2006) 122
Eternity and Food (Brick, 2006) 128
The Spirit of Wine (Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 2007) 135
Here I Stand for a Few Minutes (Brick, 2007) 141
One Good Thing Leads to Another (Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 2007) 147
Don't Go Out Over Your Head (Brick, 2007) 151
Rage and Appetite (Brick, 2008) 158
Close to the Bone (Martha Stewart Living, 2008) 166
Food, Finance, and Spirit (Brick, 2009) 169
The Body Is a Temple (Brick, 2009) 176
Food and Music (Brick, 2010) 183
The Arts Versus Food and Birds (Brick, 2010) 191
Wine and Poetry (Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 2010) 201
Caregiver (Brick, 2011) 207
Chef English Major (Playboy, June 2011) 216
The Logic of Birds and Fishes As It Relates to Shingles (Brick, 2011) 223
Pain (Brick, 2012) 229
Courage and Survival (Brick, 2013) 236
San Rafael (Brick, 2013) 243
Eat Where You Live (Edible Baja Arizona, 2014) 250
Gramps le Fou (Brick 2014) 252
Truly Older (Brick, 2014) 262
Real Old Food (Brick, 2015) 267
Everyday Life: The Question of Zen (Brick, 2001) 272
Photo Credits 276