However, I have a healthy diet and it is here that you might find my value as a caregiver. I don’t short myself at the table because I have learned that it is more fun to eat than not to eat. Michael Pollan, a food genius, has pointed out that we’d be better off to adopt the eating habits of our grandparents and great-grandparents. The invention of the supermarket has been generally disastrous for human health, though of late there has been a specific improvement in food options. France and Italy have also suffered from supermarkets but there open public markets still abound. I regularly visit a half dozen in Paris, preferring as I do markets over cathedrals and museums. There are grand markets in Arles, Narbonne, and Lyon, and in Italy my favorite is in Modena. It occurred to me that the giant pig’s head for sale in Lyon was far more beautiful than the Statue of Liberty, not to speak of the smarmy Mona Lisa. At this moment at eleven A.M. in Montana my wife is picking raspberries, green beans, scallions, tomatoes, and new potatoes for lunch. If you don’t have a garden it’s not my fault. Cities should have gardens in every vacant lot and on rooftops.
Some health points are obvious but we still can’t see them. If you’re emotionally distressed drink a big glass of French red wine. It’s easy and works immediately. While the wine does its job you are free to watch the lovely clematis flowers and vines work their way up the branches of the small dead plum tree in the garden.
Of course our individual, sociological, and political problems are so immense that all palliatives are slightly pathetic. I write about food as it is clearly the largest of problems, especially to the couple of billion people among our population who don’t get enough. There is also the question in the United States of whether bad food is better than little food. Something in addition to our sodden educational system is making us stupider and stupider. There has been immense political and media effort to make our minds smaller and smaller. There seems to be a severe evolutionary glitch unless you view our whining, indolence, fear, and ignorance as the easiest adaptation to reality. We have a clear oligarchy of the very rich and when you slip down the food chain a notch you have what H. L. Mencken called a booboisie.
Back to Michael Pollan and the food of our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, so far from the supermarkets exuding their stale poisons. I have to travel a great deal and it would be complicated to stow Grandma Hulda Wahlgren’s pickled herring and homemade butter in my carry-on, or those huge crocks of confit of pork or sauerkraut by Grandpa Arthur Harrison. The easy solution is to quit traveling and stay home and raise my own pigs. As a child I would hear, “Jimmy, slop the hogs,” and I would carry a huge pail of kitchen leavings out to the pigpen, watching with a great admiration the way these burly creatures ate with fabulous energy.
Even a poet as deranged as myself can’t quite offer raising your own pigs as a solution, though it is an obvious step in the correct direction. There is also the somewhat embarrassing fact that I can afford to buy specially raised pork, chicken, beef, and lamb. In France they call such people as myself the members of the gauche caviar, or the Armani Left, but then I’ve already said that success is a disease that diverts one from the more graceful qualities of life such as nature, love, and fishing, submerging the unlucky soul in narcissism. A famed mega-mogul in American business said on his deathbed, “Why do I have to die?”
Only humor and humility allow you to endure life as a senior with its clear view of a mile-high, neon-lit exit sign. I offer suggestions in the spirit of one building a rickety bridge across a deep ditch full of venomous snakes. At dawn tomorrow drop your cell phone in the toilet during your morning pee. In 1944 people averaged forty phone calls a year and now they’re over five thousand. Your cell phone time can be spent growing vegetables and learning to cook. Keep your lights turned off. All these electric lights are heating up innocent nature. Look out the window on a night flight and so much is ablaze for no valid reason. The world is running out of potable water, or so we are told. When you pour a glass of water finish it even if you have to add whiskey to manage. Fire a large-caliber bullet into your television screen. Avoid newspapers and magazines and movies, all of which have been unworthy of our attention. I will allow fifteen minutes a day of public radio news so you won’t lose track of the human community. I want to say to give your excess money to the poor but other than being generous to my larger family and friends I can’t seem to manage this, so ingrained is my greed. Naturally we all fail. Just last night I watched a few minutes of a BBC program about how women as young as fifteen in England are having plastic surgery to make their vaginas more attractive. Seriously. I kept hoping that the cast of Monty Python would pop out of the woodwork but no such luck. What chance does a fiction writer have in such a world?
Mom, now deceased, told me to try to light one little candle in the woeful darkness of this world. I have a blue chair in the yard in front of my green studio where most often I have neither candle nor match. I watch the clouds move this way and that. Over the top of my wife’s garden, which has a high fence for protection from deer and elk, I see the Absaroka Range of mountains, part of the cordillera of the Rocky Mountains, that start up in Canada and descend to our winter home on the Mexican border. When I sit there every day, even in the rain and wind, I dwindle into absolute humility at the world’s disarray. Yes indeed we are suffocating under three feet of spin-dry lint mixed with goose shit. However after looking at the gardens and the mountains for a while, the birds flying left and right, up and down, I think of the ancient Lakota saying, “Take courage, the earth is all that lasts.”
For morale reasons it behooves us to live vividly. While I was having a little lunch of breaded pork steak, potatoes, green beans, and tomatoes, also some scallions and tiny carrots dipped in aioli, I remembered that on his deathbed Unamuno cried out not for more light but for more warmth. People should try freshly picked potatoes, a pleasure of a different order. Today we’re having fresh Japanese eggplant with yogurt and mint. I was thinking momentarily of becoming a missionary of food with a semitruck containing a living diorama of a cow, a pig, chickens, a couple of lambs, and dozens of vegetables, then quickly discerned I should leave this project to the young.
Cooking vividly offers mental equilibrium. We’ve been using a lot of buffalo lately, gotten from Wild Idea in South Dakota. Poached buffalo tongue with garden beets and salsa verde, altered from a recipe by Fergus Henderson (a brilliant man), was splendid, and so were buffalo ribs cooked slowly Chinese style. Having once watched in Nebraska a battle of two buffalo bulls weighing a ton apiece, I find it impossible to imagine how the Lakota hunted them with bows and arrows off horseback.
Yes, heat is more immediately valuable than light. I’ve been cooking largish pork shoulders off to the side of direct coals for five hours. You make a marinade invented by J. S. Brown of Tallahassee, Florida, composed of a quart of apple juice, lots of garlic, a handful of black pepper, a bottle of Frank’s Louisiana Hot Sauce, and three-quarters of a pint of cider vinegar. Don’t worry, you soak the meat overnight, you don’t drink the marinade. With long cooking the pork, an immense gift of the gods, becomes soft and tender, and you slice it onto toasted onion buns, with a thick slice of onion and your own favorite swabbing sauce. I recently read that two men who have reached a hundred years both attributed it to daily onion sandwiches. Not wanting to live that long I’m backing away from this idea.
I owned Clifford Wright’s Some Like It Hot for years, but only lately became attentive to this compendium of peppery recipes that is sure to become one of my bibles. I’m planning to do rabbit in adobo sauce to prepare my loins for next week’s trip to Paris. When I return, to restore myself, I’ll try Wright’s Peruvian pork roast, which contains a full cup of cayenne in its thick marinade paste. Yes, a cup! This should raise my brain temperature to a fervent level.
In Blaise Cendrars’s Panama there is an intriguing line: “Like the god Tangaloa who was bottom fishing and pulled the earth up out of the waters.”
Wouldn’t it be nice to think so?
Meanwhile, I offer a small recent poem that helped me temporarily counter the expanding borders of the ineffable.
Broom
To remember that you’re alive
visit the cemetery of your father
at noon after you’ve made love
and are still wrapped in a mammalian
odor that you are forced to cherish.
Under each stone is someone’s inevitable
surprise, the unexpected death
of their biology that struggled hard as it must.
Now go home without looking back
at the fading cemetery, enough is enough,
but stop on the way to buy the best wine
you can afford and a dozen stiff brooms.
Have a few swallows then throw the furniture
out the window and then begin sweeping.
Sweep until you’ve swept the walls
bare of paint and at your feet sweep
the floor until it disappears. Finish the wine
in this field of air, go back to the cemetery
in the dark and weave through the stones
a slow dance of your name visible only to birds.
Chef English Major
“Nobody can tell you nothing,” my dad used to say to me. He was actually well educated but regularly used a remnant of rural bad grammar for emphasis. The off-the-wall arrogance that allowed me to become a novelist and poet didn’t pan out in the kitchen, and it has taken me nearly fifty years to become a consistently acceptable cook.
There are obvious and somewhat comic limitations for the self-taught golfer, tennis player, or cook. With the last it’s not all in the recipe, but that’s a start. About forty years ago when my eldest daughter was ten and my wife was taking late-afternoon tennis lessons, my daughter said, “Dad, don’t you think we should follow the exact recipe, at least the first time out?”
What a preposterous idea! Was my own daughter quelling my creativity? Of course. And of course she was right. I was blundering through one of Julia Child’s epically complicated seafood dishes while she was studying the recipe in careful detail. Here we were stuffing sole with crab when the mortgage payments of $99 a month on our little farm in northern Michigan were a struggle.
I still have grand lacunae: I have never successfully baked a loaf of bread or made a soufflé that rose higher than its liquid batter. I do well with fish, wild piglets, chicken, elk, venison, antelope, doves, grouse, woodcock, varieties of wild quail, and sharp-tailed grouse but not so well with Hungarian partridge in our present home in Montana. The key to any failures has always been arrogance and perhaps too much alcohol. Once while I was having an after-lunch drink with the famed chef André Soltner of Lutèce, he said that when he hired the young for his kitchen, within a day they wanted to create a salsa of their own devising. “As for myself I have invented nothing. I cook only French food,” he said. This seemed not quite true because in answer to my question he rattled off a half dozen possibilities for Muscovy duck, a large fowl and difficult to master. My problem here is an errant creativity that befits the page rather than the kitchen.
Poverty can hinder, but it can also help. In graduate school I was struck by Arnold Toynbee’s notion that great cuisines come from an economy of scarcity. By common consent we are dealing with the cuisines of the Chinese and the French, throwing in the Italians as third. By extension this is why it’s hard to get a good meal in Iowa or Kansas, where they have everything. In our own case it was a long period of near poverty averaging about twelve grand a year for fifteen years during my apprenticeship as a poet and novelist. We ate very well because my wife has always been a far better cook than I. My specialty was food shopping and studying recipe books. My wife had the specific advantage of not cooking with her ego. As a fisherman and hunter I was always good at “bringing home the bacon.” In the rural areas in which we lived wild game and fish were in plenitude, and since I learned how to hunt and fish early in life, wild food plus what we grew in our big garden was a large part of our eating. Luck plays a goodly part in hunting and fishing, assuming you’ve mastered the technique. I recall one cold spring evening coming home from nearby Lake Michigan with five lake trout that had a combined weight of sixty pounds, and one day during bird season my French friend Guy de la Valdène and I came home with nine grouse and seven woodcock. The next day he was startled when a local friend of mine stopped by and gave me an “extra” deer. A gift deer in France would be a very large gift indeed.
For the man who cooks perhaps twice a week the prime motive in cooking is to have something to eat worthy of your heart’s peculiar desires. In my own critical view 99.9 percent of restaurants in America are in themselves acts of humiliation for someone with exacting tastes. When you live rurally and remotely good restaurants are rare, and there were these long periods when if a good restaurant did exist in our area it was rarely visited because we couldn’t afford the tab. It was the same when I lived in New York City at nineteen and my weekly salary of $35 was split evenly among room rent, food, and beer, and the recreation other than chasing girls was to walk the streets reading restaurant menus pasted to doors or windows. The restaurants were so far out of the question that I felt no envy. One evening in the White Horse Tavern I won two bucks in an arm-wrestling contest and turned the money immediately into a large corned beef sandwich. There was a place near Times Square where you could get a big piece of herring and two slices of rye bread for fifteen cents. When you’re nineteen you’re propelled by the non-calorie fuel of hormones so much so that when I’d return home to Michigan, my father would regard my skinniness and say that I might eventually return home weighing nothing. At that age you’re always hungry but are too scattered to figure out how to address the problem.
Cooking is in the details and is not for those who think they must spend all of their time thinking large. This morning I burned my Jimmy Dean hot-pepper sausage patty because I was on the phone speaking with a friend about another friend’s cancer. Yesterday morning I ruined a quesadilla by adding too much salsa because I was busy revising a poem. How can I creatively and irrelevantly interfere with a proper quesadilla? It’s easier to screw up while cooking than driving, both of which suffer grossly from inattention.
You start with hunger and then listen to the chorus, small, of two daughters and a wife. If the weather is fair you look out the window at one of your several grills and smokers and then head for the freezer or grocer. When I was cooking solo at the remote cabin we used to own and sadly lost, everything depended on my captious moods, which in turn depended on how well the work went that day and the nature of the news from New York or Los Angeles. Your immediate survival can depend on the morale boost of a good dinner. I recalled a day when I got fired (for arrogance) yet again from Hollywood and the murk of the dismissal was easily leavened by grilling a baby lake trout, about a foot long, over an oak fire, basting it with dry vermouth, butter, and lemon. Minor disappointments over an inferior writing day could be allayed with a single chicken half basted with a private potion called “the sauce of lust and violence.” This recipe is hard to screw up, so you can easily consume a full bottle of Côtes du Rhône during preparation.
I’ve talked to a couple of prison wardens about how food is the central morale item for us caged mammals. At the cabin I’d even walk a couple of hours to ensure a sturdy enough appetite to enjoy a meal. I have regularly observed in both New York City and Paris that intensely effete cooking is designed for those without an actual appetite. You have to be a tad careful about your excesses because you can’t make a lasting philosophical system out of cooking, hunting, baseball, fishing, or even your sexuality. Life is brutal in its demand for adequate contents, but the very idea of leaving out cooking mystifies me. Life is so short, why would you not eat well or bring others to the pleasure of your table?
Men
learning to cook often start with the BBQ grill, perhaps because they have been roasting meat over fire for a couple of hundred thousand years. Of course women do it equally well, but then they must think, Let the dickhead go at it; I’m tired of doing all of the cooking. There is no better insurance for a long-lasting marriage than couples who cook together or a man who engineers the meals a few times a week to release his beloved from the monotony.
It is quite impossible for a man to do anything without a touch of strutting vanity, and as the years pass a man will trip over his smugness in the kitchen or at the grill. A friend who is normally a grill expert got drunk and literally incinerated (in a towering flame) a ten-pound prime rib in front of another friend, who had laid out the two hundred bucks for the meat, which ultimately tasted like a burned-out house smells. And there must be hundreds of thousands of instances of the one dish a neophyte can cook. You hear “Wait until you try Bob’s chili” or “You won’t believe Marvin’s spaghetti sauce!” as if there were only one. Bob’s chili had a large amount of celery in it, which exceeds in heresy the idea that God is dead, while Marvin’s pasta sauce had more oregano in it than a pizzeria would use in a week.
Currently the overuse of rosemary among bad cooks in America must be viewed as a capital crime. The abuse of spices and herbs is a hallmark of neophyte cooking and enjoyed only by those with brutish palates. I admit my guilt early on in this matter, recalling the upturned faces of my daughters and their glances: “What in God’s name did you put in here, Dad?”
I admit to obsessions that by definition can’t be defined, as it were. Once on my way north to the cabin I stopped in an Italian market in Traverse City, Folgarelli’s, which helped shape and enlighten the eating habits of the area, and told the proprietor, Fox, that I needed seven pounds of garlic. Fox was curious about which restaurant I owned, and I said it was just me at my cabin, where the nearest good garlic was a 120-mile drive. To start the season in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where many years there still was remnant snow on the ground in May, I needed to make a rigatoni with thirty-three cloves of garlic in honor of the number of years Christ lived. Fox Folgarelli seemed sympathetic to my neurosis as he built my sandwich out of mortadella, imported provolone, salami, and a splash of Italian dressing. Food lovers are not judgmental of one another’s obsessions. Many years later when I sat down in France with eleven others to a thirty-seven-course lunch (only nineteen wines) that took thirteen hours, no one questioned our good sense. Nearly all the dishes were drawn from the eighteenth century, so there was an obvious connection to the history of gastronomy, though in itself that wouldn’t be enough to get me on a plane to Burgundy.