A Really Big Lunch: Meditations on Food and Life From the Roving Gourmand Read online

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!

  Food 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 Occi
dent, not to speak of the other regions by saying, “Zen bones, Zen bones, Zen hambones”?

  * Mike Golden, editor of Smoke Signals

  The 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.

  Incidentally, I sent McGuane Schweid’s now famous book, at least it’s famous in my own mind, Hot Peppers. I think, of course, it’s superior in grace and beauty to any novels I’ve read coming out last year. There is a beautiful meal enclosed in a new book by William Least Heat-Moon: the book is called Blue Highways. Look for the great meal in there.

  This reggae music might just be poisoning me. I looked for Jamaica on the map to make sure I knew just where it was. But I have a tendency to jig around in odd places when I shouldn’t be jigging around, like the lobby of the Carlyle Hotel, or at the Keeneland auction—the horse sale. At the horse sale which I attended the top mare went for $3.8 million: think of socking that into a wine cellar! As my cousin, Thurman, who is a block layer, says—a house with an empty refrigerator is like a dildo without a battery. It’s pretty catchy. In other words, if your clothes are too tight, get bigger clothes.

  I fear this reggae is infecting everything I do now. Once Buffett brought me a gallon of fresh shucked oysters and we went out to have a few cold ones, put them in my studio fridge, and when we got back I put them out on my desk next to some books—my books looked so fragile compared to this great mass of fresh shucked oysters and, as if not knowing what I was doing, I thrust both hands into this gallon of oysters and began to eat greedily, because I was so dazed with grief at the time I knew this live food would help—of course they weren’t swimming because oysters don’t swim—they were moving counterclockwise at a rate which you didn’t see them directly, you just saw it out of the corner of your eye. I wanted to congratulate you for quitting smoking but have you thought perhaps you quit smoking for the same reason that you started smoking, another desperate ploy of the ego? It’s like trying to explain eagerly to a starving child that you just gave up spending a couple of hundred bucks a week on cocaine; the starving child sits there with those huge eyes like a Keane painting and whispers, “Congrats.” I suppose with the same distance that a writer necessarily has from the world, I will always be a rather lonely detective of food, uncritical, an observer between meals . . . it’s a job.

  Addendum

  Dear Folks,

  I am back to eating dead food. In Florida I put a small live frog in my mouth but I could not swallow it. The same thing happened with a minnow. Perhaps, this whole concept of live food should remain just that, a concept. My next Dead Food Scroll will be about “the food of lust and violence.”

  I hope you are well, Mike. I have been dancing an hour each day not with a girl but with a heavy dumbbell in each hand. I am getting to be a very strong fat guy.

  A Letter to the Editor

  Dear Mike:

  Hang on to Jim Harrison. Don’t let that big fish off the hook. He’s the best food editor in the US of A. He makes James Beard look sick. In fact any robust male makes James Beard looks sick. Keep Harrison at all costs. Spare no expense. Send him cases of Echezeaux, Romanée-Conti, Montrachet, Roederer Cr
istal. Spoil him. Pamper him. Give that glutton anything he wants. And watch your distribution soar. Before you know it Smoke Signals will be right up there with Family Circle and Good Housekeeping. He will make you golden, Mike.

  Faithfully yours,

  Sam Lawrence

  Boston, Mass.

  The Vivid Diet

  Dictated while mildly deranged by grief and hope

  One wonders, doesn’t one, why we are insufficiently wily in foreign affairs. Without question it is because we do not eat vividly. We are always being euchred out by people with superior diets with more interesting food, technically speaking of course. Mitterrand made mincemeat of Reagan in Europe mostly because of the kind of superior foods he eats. Let’s face it Mitterrand drinks superior Bordeaux, Burgundy, eats garlic, truffles, goose livers, various forms of tripe, sweetbreads, intestines, jellied calves feet for midnight snacks. By contrast the sluggish Germans what do they eat or more importantly look at Reagan’s diet, it’s a nightmare, though he stops short of the ketchup and cottage cheese trip that Nixon had which isn’t as bad as some people say it is, it’s just not something you’d want to eat more than once in your life but Reagan’s into a lot of bran flakes, very lean dryish turkey breasts, probably no garlic whatsoever, lean fish. So maybe we should start thinking about it.

  I’m making this presumption that you want to live vividly. Everyone knows that D. H. Lawrence said that the only aristocracy is that of consciousness. Rather than shlep through life on this Reagan diet eat vividly. Or what does William Buckley eat? I understand his wife is a famous hostess. William Buckley shows signs of eating far too many club sandwiches. Anyone who can eat a quarter of a club sandwich without expiring from torpor is beyond me. Buckley no doubt has a food perversion, a food that perhaps his wife doesn’t even know about. Something like Franco-American on toast or Kraft Instant Macaroni and Cheese. My daughter likes the latter and I’ve tasted it, and it’s proper for a fourteen-year-old girl. Maybe Buckley secretly cheats because most of his philosophical viewpoints are formed by his efforts to justify being rich. Who cares if he’s rich? If you want a philosophical justification of it you can’t pull this white Christian trip because you’ll never find a man in the history of mankind who was less impressed by the moola than Jesus. What is a diet of vividness but to live vividly, to see vividly, to write vividly, to make love vividly or as the French say it “to fricoter,” which is a new French hip term.