Category: Grub Garage
All Things Considered,
March 15, 2006 ·
Hunter, cook and writer Steven Rinella discusses his new book, The
Scavenger's Guide to Haute Cuisine. Inspired by a famous 100-year-old
cookbook by the king of haute cuisine, Auguste Escoffier, Rinella decided to
cook a three-day, 45-course feast that included wild boar head cheese,
skewered
elk livers, and a variety of delicacies poached inside of animal bladders.
Rinella explains the adventures that led to the feast and the philosophy
behind
such a challenging menu.
Prologue: 'The Scavenger's Guide to Haute Cuisine'
by Steven Rinella
IT'S ALMOST TIME FOR THANKSGIVING DINNER AND I'M JUST NOW beginning to stuff
the bird. But no matter how hard I stuff, I can't get it to fit inside the
bladder. I'm following a recipe from French master chef Auguste Escoffier's
1903 magnum opus, Le Guide Culinaire, a 5,012-recipe compendium on haute
cuisine.
The book is pinned open on the counter with a one-quart jar of stingray
marinade. Technically, the dish I'm making calls for a duck to be poached
inside
a pig's bladder. But when I killed a wild boar in northern California last
summer, I accidentally nicked its bladder with my skinning knife. So I'm
trying
to forge ahead with an antelope bladder and half a duck. I push and pull and
stretch, but it won't go.
The poached bladder is just one of the courses from Le Guide Culinaire that
I'm attempting to construct tonight. All together, I have the ingredients
for
fifteen dishes scattered throughout the kitchen here in Miles City, Montana.
Or, I should say, I have the ingredients for thirteen dishes scattered
around;
the makings of the other two courses are still wearing their feathers and
fur.
My two squabs, or baby pigeons, are cooing and preening in the coop that I
built last summer. The birds' names are Red and Lil' Red, and I'll be using
them
in Escoffier's pigeonneaux crapaudine. In an hour they need to be plucked,
flattened, dipped in butter, grilled, then served with gherkins and
Escoffier's
diable, or devil sauce.
The remaining dish is a pâté of cottontail rabbit. For all I know, the key
ingredient for that is still hopping around south of town. My two brothers,
Matt
and Danny, left this morning with a group of our friends to hunt pheasants
and rabbits along the Powder River, but it's getting dark and they still
haven't
returned.
I keep busy as I wait for the rabbit. After lifting some strips of black
bear fat out of a bowl of brandy, I refill the bowl with a handful of wild
boar
sausage. Then I begin prepping the fixings for a freshwater matelote, a soup
made from white wine, stock, and a medley of fish. I've already peeled the
crayfish tails, so I trim some fillets of small-mouth bass, walleye, and
bluegills and remove the long, serpentine spine from an eel.
If everything goes right, I will prepare forty-five courses from Le Guide
Culinaire over the next three nights. I have at my fingertips a collection
of
the book's ingredients that I gathered from all corners of the country. As I
work along, converting raw material to food, the last year of my life
literally
passes through my fingers. The stingray marinade takes me back to a Florida
beach, where my buddy Kern and I wrestled in a stingray amid a throng of
hostile
tourists. The black bear fat makes me remember the glaciers of Alaska's
Chugach Range, which turn the eerie blue color of gel toothpaste when the
sun breaks
through the clouds. The eel makes me think of Ray Turner, a self-proclaimed
"old hairbag by the river" who operates an eel weir in upstate New York,
keeps
an emu for company, and once built a fireplace from a rock that he found by
the grave site of an Indian princess.
Back when I first discovered Le Guide Culinaire, I knew I'd stumbled into a
strange, lost world. In his day, Escoffier was known as the King of Chefs
and
the Chef of Kings; he cooked for the likes of Kaiser Wilhelm II, Frederick
VIII, the Duke of
Orleans, Queen Victoria, the Prince of Wales, the Khadid of Egypt, the
emperors of Austria and Brazil, the shah of Persia, and the king of Greece.
If Escoffier's
list of clients just sounds like a bunch of people who figured into World
War I, you might approach Escoffier through the more familiar lens of
American
music:
Now, if you're blue
And you don't know where to go to
Why don't you go where fashion sits
Puttin' on the Ritz
That ditty from 1929 was written by Irving Berlin, the same dude who wrote
"God Bless America." In "Puttin' on the Ritz," Berlin is referring to the
Swiss
hotelier César Ritz, whose name is synonymous with taste and class and
ostentatious display.
In large part, Ritz's reputation rested on his long partnership with Auguste
Escoffier. Ritz ran the hotels; Escoffier ran the kitchens in the hotels.
When
Escoffier collected his methods in Le Guide Culinaire, he produced a work
that single-handedly revolutionized French haute, or "high," cuisine.
As old as it is, the book didn't seem to me like a historical document when
I found it. Instead, I saw it immediately as a scavenger's guide, an
inventory
of all that is bizarre and glorious and tantalizing about procuring your own
food and living off the wild. I tore into the book, hell-bent on recreating
as much of it as I could. I allowed myself a year, and now all that time has
come down to these moments, these three nights, and I'm filled with
overwhelming
giddiness. And an equal dose of anxiety. I've got friends here from all over
the country tonight. If I can't pull off this feast, this last year of my
life will seem a little less extraordinary.
I go outside to see if my brothers are back yet with some rabbits. They're
not. I take a peek into the pigeon coop. It's dark out, and the two squabs
are
sitting on their perches, oblivious to what lies ahead. The older pigeon,
Red, has one of the younger pigeon's feathers stuck in his bill. There's
plenty
of room for the two to spread out, but they make a sport of pecking at each
other in a ritualistic sort of dance. They usually shadowbox, but now and
then
Red connects. I'm visited by this weird sense of guilt that I get every time
I look at them. Catching the squabs required almost a year's time and
several
near-death experiences. When I first started chasing pigeons with the
thought of trying some of Escoffier's thirty-four squab recipes, I thought
of the
birds as dirty pests. But after catching a few pigeons and raising the
squabs by hand, I came to see the birds as a metaphor for the contradictions
of
a society that has distanced itself from the production of its food. Now
that I'm moments away from "prepping" the birds, I lament that it's going to
be
an awfully abrupt ending for such a long story. In Escoffier's day, people
killed squabs by smothering them. The ancient Romans drowned their squabs in
red wine. I might use a hatchet.
I go back to the kitchen to finish plucking a box of twenty English sparrows
that I got in Iowa. The birds are so small, I can hold four or five of them
in my palm at once. Plucking the little things is delicate work. I lift one
from the box and pinch a tuft of feathers from its breast just as my
girlfriend,
Diana, walks into the kitchen. At the sight of her, I reflexively drop the
sparrow back into the box and kick the lid closed. At the same time, I toss
a scrap of cheesecloth over the plate of wild turkey bones that will go into
tomorrow's game stock. Escoffier often recited the maxim, "If you want to
keep your appetite, stay out of the kitchen." I'm trying to enforce
Escoffier's advice on Diana, because she's a struggling vegetarian. I'm
hoping that
this feast will serve as a rite of passage for her, and that she'll emerge
from the experience as a full-on carnivore. She's agreed to try as much of
the
food as physically possible tonight. I'm counting on her getting blown away
by the beauty of the finished products and I don't want her to get turned
off
prematurely.
Once I shoo Diana from the kitchen, two of my buddies from childhood, Kern
and Drost, come running through the front door in their hunting boots and
then
go out the back door. As they disappear, I yell, "Hey, did you get the
rabbits?" But they don't hear me.
I go outside and see that my brothers and Drost are helping Kern pin down
one of his hunting dogs. The dog got hung up on a barbed-wire fence. Kern's
wife,
Deirdre, is a doctor. She's got a curved needle and a long thread, and she's
sewing the dog back up.
When she finishes tightening the last knot, I look at Danny. "Rabbits?"
"Two. I'll skin 'em for you."
When Danny comes in with the rabbit loins, I have what I need to finish the
fourteenth dish. I slice the loins in long, thin strips and put them to soak
in the brandy. Fourteen down. Now there's just one dish left.
I step outside with the hatchet. Someone's turned on the yard light, so Red
thinks the sun has risen. I can hear him cooing.
Ah now that is extremely interesting! Thanks for posting it here. I doubt many people have caught an animal and prepared it for human consumption. I've cooked fish and clams I've caught myself but that's about it as I can't really hunt. It would be interesting though...