A Really Big Lunch: Meditations on Food and Life From the Roving Gourmand
A REALLY
BIG LUNCH
Also by Jim Harrison
FICTION
Wolf: A False Memoir
A Good Day to Die
Farmer
Legends of the Fall
Warlock
Sundog
Dalva
The Woman Lit by Fireflies
Julip
The Road Home
The Beast God Forgot to Invent
True North
The Summer He Didn’t Die
Returning to Earth
The English Major
The Farmer’s Daughter
The Great Leader
The River Swimmer
Brown Dog
The Big Seven
The Ancient Minstrel
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE
The Boy Who Ran to the Woods
POETRY
Plain Song
Locations
Outlyer and Ghazals
Letters to Yesenin
Returning to Earth
Selected & New Poems: 1961–1981
The Theory & Practice of Rivers and New Poems
After Ikkyū and Other Poems
The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems
Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry, with Ted Kooser
Saving Daylight
In Search of Small Gods
Songs of Unreason
Dead Man’s Float
ESSAYS
Just Before Dark: Collected Nonfiction
The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand
MEMOIR
Off to the Side
A REALLY
BIG LUNCH
Jim Harrison
With an Introduction by
Mario Batali
Grove Press UK
First published in the United States of America in 2017 by Grove/Atlantic
This edition published in Great Britain in 2017 by Grove Press UK, an imprint of Grove/Atlantic Inc.
Copyright © the James T. Harrison Trust, 2017
Introduction copyright © Mario Batali, 2017
The moral right of James T. Harrison to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
The pieces collected in this volume have originally appeared in Smoke Signals, the Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant newsletter, Brick, New Yorker, Martha Stewart Living, Playboy, Edible Baja Arizona, Big Sky Cooking by Meredith Brokaw and Ellen Wright, The Montana Writers’ Cookbook by the Montana Center for the Book and the Montana Committee for the Humanities, and Molto Italiano by Mario Batali.
Permission to print Jim Harrison’s poems “Time” (from Saving Daylight), “Poet Warning,” “Broom” (both from Songs of Unreason), and “Pain (2),” “Galactic” (both from Dead Man’s Float) is granted by Copper Canyon Press and the James T. Harrison Trust.
Permission to print Mario Batali’s recipe for Duck Scaloppine with Dried Cherries and Grappa (p. 88) is granted by Mario Batali.
Permission to print the Merrill Gilfillan poem “The Good World” (p. 187) is granted by Merrill Gilfillan.
Permission to print the original menu from the really big lunch (“Carte,” pp. 69–81) is granted by Gérard Oberlé.
We were unable to confirm the spelling of Damien B.’s last name so it has been abbreviated on page 72. No offense is intended.
Thank you to Gérard Oberlé for proofreading the French portion of this text.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.
Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.
Hardback ISBN 978 1 61185 623 1
E-book ISBN 978 1 61185 944 7
Printed in Great Britain
Grove Press, UK
Ormond House
26–27 Boswell Street
London
WC1N 3JZ
www.groveatlantic.com
Contents
Introduction by Mario Batali
Eat Your Heart Out
(Smoke Signals, 1981)
Food for Thought
(Smoke Signals, 1982)
The Dead Food Scrolls
(Smoke Signals, 1983)
The Vivid Diet
(Unpublished, 1986)
Father-in-Law
(Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 1995)
Wine Notes
(Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 2002)
Is Winemaking an Art?
(Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 2002)
My Problems with White Wine
(Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 2002)
Eat or Die
(Brick, 2003)
Paris Rebellion
(Brick, 2003)
Odious Comparisons
(Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 2004)
Wine Criticism and Literary Criticism (Part II)
(Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 2004)
Food, Sex, and Death
(Brick, 2004)
A Really Big Lunch
(New Yorker, 2004)
Carte
Tongue
(Brick, 2004)
Ducks
(Molto Italiano, 2005)
Wine Strategies
(Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 2005)
Resuming the Pleasure
(Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 2005)
Snake-Eating
(Brick, 2005)
Bear Posole
(The Montana Writers’ Cookbook, 2005)
Food, Fitness, and Death
(Brick, 2005)
The Fisherman Gourmand
(Big Sky Cooking, 2006)
Food and Mood
(Brick, 2006)
Vin Blanc
(Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 2006)
Eternity and Food
(Brick, 2006)
The Spirit of Wine
(Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 2007)
Here I Stand for a Few Minutes
(Brick, 2007)
One Good Thing Leads to Another
(Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 2007)
Don’t Go Out Over Your Head
(Brick, 2007)
Rage and Appetite
(Brick, 2008)
Close to the Bone
(Martha Stewart Living, 2008)
Food, Finance, and Spirit
(Brick, 2009)
The Body Is a Temple
(Brick, 2009)
Food and Music
(Brick, 2010)
The Arts Versus Food and Birds
(Brick, 2010)
Wine and Poetry
(Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 2010)
Caregiver
(Brick, 2011)
Chef English Major
(Playboy, June 2011)
The Logic of Birds and Fishes As It Relates to Shingles
&nb
sp; (Brick, 2011)
Pain
(Brick, 2012)
Courage and Survival
(Brick, 2013)
San Rafael
(Brick, 2013)
Eat Where You Live
(Edible Baja Arizona, 2014)
Gramps le Fou
(Brick, 2014)
Truly Older
(Brick, 2014)
Real Old Food
(Brick, 2015)
Everyday Life: The Question of Zen
(Brick, 2001)
Photo Credits
Introduction
One night back in 2000, a beleaguered author not so hot on the idea of any book tour, but who was nevertheless on a book tour, appeared at my restaurant Babbo in New York. Jim Harrison and I had written letters to each other, but had never met, and little did I know then how he would go on to become one of my closest friends. In tow were a few members of his publishing team, a book editor from the New York Times, and a handful of other lucky food lovers from NYC. Jim was hungry, thirsty, joyously friendly, and characteristically overeager for the first course to come out of the kitchen. Jim’s appetite was legendary, and nothing makes a cook quite so happy as someone who exists entirely to eat—and when not eating, to talk about eating, to hunt and fish for things to eat, or to spend time after eating talking about what we just ate.
That night we ate just about every non-grocery-store cut of every animal I served. The meal ran to fifteen courses: from one of Jim’s favorites, our Babbo-made testa, with my dad’s finocchiona and culatello, to lamb’s tongue vinaigrette, tripe in the style of Parma, and both beef cheek and calf’s brains raviolis; from light love letters of goose liver, crispy sweetbreads dusted in fennel pollen and finished with duck bacon and membrillo vinaigrette, on to squab with barlotto, quail with salsify, and duck with brovada; finishing with a whole series of desserts. Jim relished in the unabashed frivolity of this meal; he would talk about “tripe,” sure enough, there it came, and a tale of hunting would beget the birds shot in the story. We drank ’82 and ’85 Barolos, both in magnum, then a double mag of Le Pergole Torte then back to the north for some Gaja Barbaresco with which we ate a couple robiolas and a mountain gorgonzola with housemade black truffle honey.
Our friendship moved from pen pals to real pals that night, and I knew I had finally shaken hands, shared abrazos fuertes and broken bread with not only an eternal friend but a mentor, a spiritual leader, a confidant, and a man who shared my passion for all things above and beyond the world of food, and who wrote sentences that stretched beyond the wildest poetry of my imagination, resonating with stories of the friends and associates who eat well, drink Lambrusco and vin de pays as well as Bordeaux from the fifties and sixties, work hard, play hard, and experience the natural world in full.
A couple of years later, after a mere ten-course meal celebrating the magnificent white truffle at Babbo, I walked Jim back to his hotel. He stayed regularly at the Inn at Irving Place near Gramercy Park, a charming hotel that allowed smoking—a deal breaker for Jim—and was close to the Spanish restaurant that our team opened in 2003, Casa Mono. It was after 11 pm, closing time, and we had consumed as much food as was humanly possible. We discussed his obsession with Antonio Machado the entire walk home. As we turned the corner to his hotel, Jim peered into the candlelit Casa Mono and then leaned in. “Mario, do you think we could just get a little taste of those fabulous oxtails in piquillo peppers you do here on a little bread, just for the taste in my mouth, please? Just a taste,” he bashfully whispered, “it reminds me of Lorca.”
“You bet, Jimmy,” I said. And a quick little bottle of Priorat to wash it all down, five American Spirits on the stoop, and off to bed. I have never seen a man so happy in his pursuit of pleasure that evening. And from that moment on, we were friends for life.
Jim and I shared many qualities: an unending appetite, inhaling life to the full chorizo, finding hilarious and playful nuance in every breath and every moment, but I always was and remain the student. Jim was sharper, more in tune with the distant cry of the loon over the lake while fishing on a lazy Tuesday morning, more sensitive to the moonlight over Washington Square Park on a dusk walk toward the Babbo apartment, where he sometimes stayed. Jim lived art not as a method to distill his thoughts, but as a categorical way of understanding life, a quest to quench an insatiable thirst for all it put before him. And to share that understanding with any and every one he met.
But Jim was not all Zen, and certainly not patient. We once shared a slightly overlong supper at the Michelin three-star restaurant Eleven Madison Park in New York, where he fidgeted through most of the complex meal, announcing early on in his loud baritone to the entire dining room, “Maaaario, you know I am much more of a trattoria kind of guy,” and finally sending his chicken back to the kitchen, because the chef had somehow denied him “THE FUCKING LEGS . . . where are THE FUCKING LEGS . . . ?” When we cooked together he was often at my shoulder with cooking tips and timing questions. “Are you going to stir that?” or “Remember I like it medium rare, not a degree over, damn it,” while cooking a three-inch-thick rib eye from Carnevino on his parrilla in Arizona. By the time we were seated he grudgingly admitted to the deliciousness of the meal and to the success of yet another of our collaborations . . . It always gave me infinite joy.
In January of 2016, two months before Jim left us all lonely, we gathered again. This time we were memorializing Linda, Jim’s beloved wife of fifty-six years, at their casita in Patagonia, in Arizona near the Mexican border town Nogales. With a handful of intimate friends and family of Jim and Linda to feed, I set off with a plane full of food and two of Jim’s favorite chefs, Anthony Sasso from Casa Mono and Chris Bianco from Phoenix. We cooked rib eyes, sausage and peppers, paella, and fideuà, ate an entire kilo of Oscietra caviar with an entire jamón de Jabugo, we made drinks for brunch with giant local pomelos. I surprised him with his favorite lunch of all, a glorious Bollito Misto with testa, zampone, brisket, osso buco, tongue, and fresh sausage, all served up with his sauce love, a tangy salsa verde of capers, herbs, chopped cornichons and mustard, the hot one from France he dreamed of daily. Jim was sad; life was hard without his lovely Linda. We ate, we talked, he complained, as he always did, about my taste in music and the volume I played it at while prepping or cleaning up after dinner. We lived hardily that weekend, and we did our best to heal Jim with what we knew he loved most. We spoke of his imminent trip to Paris, of our plans to really dig into our pet project of the last decade called The Search for the Genuine. He plumbed a gem or two from his poetry mind suggesting that cooking for himself was going to lead him “to learn to love again,” but his heart cried for Linda . . . He was in a dream state, a fugue, a funk . . . I watched him drift off on the patio toward the creek, the birds, grief, and then he’d snap right to when I’d say Jim and hand him a mound of mascarpone, jamón, and caviar; the food and my love helped draw him back toward life. That last weekend I saw him filled my heart with his joy, his immense and remarkable love, his visceral way with words both loving and cross, tangy and salty, sweet, gentle and filled with love of the physical plane.
Jim once wrote of a character, “He’s literally taking bites out of the sun, moon, and earth,” which is what he himself spent a lifetime doing. Damn he was my hero.
—Mario Batali
January, 2017
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.
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 c
apacities, in addition to shrinking the wee-wee and tearing holes in the social fabric.
A warning to certain of your left-leaning, spit-dribbling, 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.
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