Along about September, when the first tart whisper of coming autumn crisps the breeze and the dogs begin to stir restlessly, I always seem to get hungrier than usual. As Havilah Babcock says, “My health is better in November,” and my stomach starts to grumble a bit more vociferously when October beckons.
It is not that summer’s butter beans and sweet corn are inferior to a pumpkin, even with frost on it, or that the stanch line of rich, red-fleshed tomatoes and an infinite variety of sea food are not nourishing fare, but they lack the tang of autumn, the crackling authority of anything that is flavored with wood smoke. There is still an excitement to camp cookery that cannot be counterfeited by all the back-yard barbecues in the world.
“If I had it to do all over again,” the Old Man once said, “I would like to be born black and be a professional hunting cook. Seems to me that apart from being a dead pig in the sunshine there ain’t a healthier way to work your way through life. And it’s a heap more practical than being a pioneer.”
They may possibly have disappeared from the scene, but there used to be a considerable fraternity of outdoor professional chefs. They worked only when fishing and hunting were at their height, which is to say about six months a year. They “laid up” the other six months and lived off their fat.
The specialist was by no means a servant. His cook fire gave him as much professional recognition as attaches to a good guide in Canada or a professional hunter in Africa. He was an autocrat of his outdoor kitchen, brooked no interference, took no advice, and was likely to be severely critical of the hunting or fishing techniques of his clients.
The closest modern parallel is the seasoned African safari cook, like my Aly or Mwende of recent experience. Aly is a coastal Swahili, a good part Arab, and a man I would choose to be my father if I needed a spare. He’s as wrinkled as a prune, a sort of medium brown in complexion, and I should say is possibly the best cook for my tastes in the world. Mwende, who is a Wakamba, has been around so long that he was second boy when Philip Percival first took Ernest Hemingway safariing about thirty years ago.
These are Africans of great dignity, professionally grave and almost winsomely charming, as opposed to that rogue Juma, who looks like a carbon of Mickey Rooney and is a kind of priest. He is currently wearing a new set of gold front teeth, shamelessly wheedled out of me on the last expedition. This was his due, he said, because when he went methodically through my box I had brought along nothing worth stealing this trip. At last count Juma owned more of my clothes than I did.
But whether they come from Mombasa or Machakos or Southport, North Carolina, these outdoor African chefs have a special thing in common. They can take a tin cracker box, a shovel, and a heap of glowing coals, and turn out a meal to make a French chef commit suicide out of sheer envy. I don’t know how they do it, but they do.
My old Aly, for instance, uses heaps of coal of varying intensity of heat, depending on what he’s cooking. He bakes a crusty, light-golden loaf in one cracker tin by heaping the coals on its top. He sears a piece of meat on a hot flame, then moves it to a back burner of damped coals, while he broils a fowl on another fire, cooks a game leg-enriched soup on a third, boils spaghetti on a fourth, or uses still another to render a chunk of fresh-killed eland suitably tender for tomorrow’s broiling.
My wife is a good cook, with a lot of experience and a great deal of imagination, but she had only one try at reforming Aly’s kitchen techniques. When his version of her mother’s molasses-cum-bacon-cum-onion special beans turned out better than the old lady’s she tossed in her chef’s cap and left Aly to his own devices. In the screaming middle of Tanganyika Aly gives you breast of guinea under glass and has been known to produce a soufflé so light that you have to put weights on it to hold it to the table top.
When I was a kid in Carolina we had a succession of Alys. One, I remember, was a paroled murderer, but what he did with fresh-killed venison chops over hickory coals was worthy of official pardon. He could also stick an unplucked duck into a clay mold and cook it until the clay cracked; you peeled off the clay, which took the feathers with it. He did the same thing with a fish, and its scales came off with the clay. I don’t know the details of this gentleman’s fit of ill temper that sent him to the jug for a spell, but given enough corn whisky and a free hand he could turn an aged shitepoke into a symphony.
Several things distinguished cooks who worked only for sporting gentlemen. I never knew one, not one, who didn’t operate in a vapor of alcohol—except of course the Swahilis, who are Moslems and are not supposed to use booze. But mainly, the drunker they got off hand-hewn corn or home-stomped wine the better they cooked.
Another thing: They couldn’t stand anybody in their alfresco kitchens. You went back to the cook fire and made some mild recommendation about the quail stew or the rabbit ragout, and you got a less-than-mild admonition to confine your energies to missing fewer quail or to bringing home a better brand of bunny. And there was generally some pouting crack such as:
“Mah mouth waterin’ for some deer liver, but ah notice ain’t nobody fetched in no tender spike buck yet. How y’all gentlemen ‘spects me to cook what ah ain’t got ah is hard put to say....”
Properly chastened, you went out and clobbered anything with horns, even a stray goat, just to keep the cook from sticking out his underlip.
If you were hunting anywhere at all close to salt water oysters always figured heavily in the menu—oysters and any fish, like a blue or a mackerel, that was fat enough to sputter his own grease into the low-blue-tongued broiling fire. The oysters got roasted in a kelp blanket, and sometimes when I think about those oysters, drowned in a peppered sea of heat-bubbling butter, I just want to sit right down and cry. There’d be a fat mackerel, his hide cracked from the heat, much of his surplus oil dissipated in his own cremation, falling apart from the sheer thoroughness of his preparation, with only a sprinkle of pepper and a slight douse of vinegar....Brother, pass the plate.
Somehow the coffee made from leaf-dyed branch water had an extra-special tang, and enough smoke got mixed up in the eggs and bacon—not these silly, slim strips of bacon, but a decent hunk of hog meat—to make an adventure of it. And the sowbelly that flavored the beans had enough character to transmute a string bean into an art form.
Possibly the idea of a possum may revolt you, because he’s certainly a filthy beast and horrid to look at, but a Mose or an Ike had a certain talent for bastioning the rendered-down marsupial with enough sweet taters and onions to make an innocent believe that he was eating his way across France. In the same vein, I shunned wart hog for a long time until the white hunter Don Bousfield conned me into trying a young one. It makes American pork repulsive by comparison. Since the African wart hog is an active animal it doesn’t run to fat, so the meat is as lean as fowl.
I would like to insert here that I have eaten elephant’s heart, and found it nothing much but rubbery and tough. The foot tastes like pickled pig’s feet, and has the same gristly cellular structure. And when once I presented my idea of how to grill a kudu fillet to Aly, even the hyenas spurned the refuse. But roast grasshoppers ain’t bad; taste kind of like shrimps in batter.
I think that the bread the old-timy hunting cooks used to produce was possibly the best flour or corn-meal combination I ever encountered. There was a large, plum-black gentleman named Joe, who worked for the late Paul Dooley in a snake-infested camp in the Everglades, and he could make a golden corn bread on an open fire—a corn bread that had the consistency of cake. Joe was kind of handy with hush puppies, too, and when you scraped off the ash they went away in a bite. A hush puppy (which ain’t nothing but a hoecake) dipped into the mud-and-oyster-flavored butter in which the oyster has bathed is a kind of gastronomic experience that is too good for most people and should be licensed.
Joe, like most hunting cooks, was a lover of extreme scope, but instead of orchids he took rabbits to his ladies fair. We always went hunting at Grapefruit Gulch with a stem admonition from Joe to assassinate a mess of rabbits, because he had his eye on that fat gal over the hill.
One day Paul and I, with Lee Hills and Walker Stone (the latter two sort of disreputable newspaper executives), went out in the swamp buggy and put the hounds onto an Everglades wild boar. They fetched him squealing by the ears, and we shoved him—he was only a shoat, really—into one of the boxes in the back of the buggy.
Then we went back to camp and told Joe that we’d bad luck with the rabbits, but the dogs had caught one alive and he was in the beverage box in the back of the truck. Joe went out to retrieve his long-eared calling card, and came back stricken sore and almost gray.
“Ah open dat box and de rabbit roar at me,” Joe said. “Ah don’t want no truck wid no roarin’ rabbits!”
Joe had a hard time out of us ruffians. Dooley took him to the Bahamas on his boat one time, and the weather was awful. Joe got so sick that his normal purple coloration doubled.
Later he said to me, “Ah swears ‘fo’ Gawd and three other ‘sponsible witnesses, ah ain’t nevah goin’ to sea wid Mistah Dooley agin!”
Joe’s off-duty hours were devoted to romance, although in the Bahamas he had no rabbits to serve as entree. But shortly after he recovered from his mal de mer, a certain covey of comely maids were in evidence. I asked Joe how he arranged this collation of beauty so swiftly.
“Ah tells you, Mistah Bob,” he said. “It so simple. Ah jes goes asho’ and makes a play fo’ de old, ugly gals, and in no time de word jes’ spreads.”
The world is so full of nobility and stupidity and other “itys” these days that I have almost forgotten the wonderful simplicity of a hickory-chip-fire smell, the tiny beacon of light presaging a massive breakfast sandwich of hot egg and bacon on fat-fried bread, with a rich African voice singing something like “Go Down Moses,” and the dogs whimpering with eagerness to be off, the coffee bubbling, brownly inviting, the smell of greased gun, and the last star dropping in the sky. The whole promise of a great day was before you, the dew was wet and so were the noses of the dogs, and any one of fifty Joes was going to do something miraculous with the skillet by the time you’d come home, dead tired but almost blissfully, impossibly happy.
You know, I think the Old Man had a good idea. I can’t wait to be reborn black, but I think I’ll get myself a job with some rich folks as a hunting-fishing cook and lay down this weary writin’ load.