Meals of Peace and Restoration

I believe it was the late John Wayne who said, “It pushes a man to the wall if he stands there in the buff and looks straight down and can't even see his own weenie.” I think it was John Wayne who said that. However, I'm a poet and a novelist, not a John Wayne authority, and so what if I'm a tad burly? In my childhood we prayed every evening for the starving children in Europe, causing a primitive fear of hunger. There are also the scars from my youthful New York City art wars, when I thought I was Arthur Rimbaud and the average dumpster ate better than I did. And then there is the notion of the French surrealist poet Alfred Jarry: “I eat, or someone will eat in my place.” In any case, I have decided it is time to escape the sodden mysteries of personality and try to help other folks. Not that I really wish to become the Baba Ram Jim of food advice, but something calls me to offer a handful of garlic along the way.

Times have changed. We have seen the passing of the blackjack and the accordion. Few of us sing alone on our porches on summer evenings, watching the sexual dance of fireflies in the burdocks beside the barn. The buzz of the airport metal detector is more familiar than the sound of the whippoorwill or coyote. The world gets to you with its big, heavy, sharp-toed boot. We are either “getting ready” or “getting over.” Our essential and hereditary wildness slips, crippled, into the past. The jackhammer poised daily at our temples is not fictive, nor is the fact that all the ceilings have lowered, and the cold ozone that leaks under the door is merely a signal that the old life is over. There is a Native American prophecy that the end is near when trees die from their tops down (acid rain).

To be frank, this is not the time for the “less is more” school when it comes to eating. The world as we know it has always been ending, every day of our lives. Good food and good cooking are a struggle for the appropriate and, as such, a response to the total environment. Anyone who has spent an afternoon in New York has seen the sullen and distraught faces of those who have eaten julienned jicama with raspberry vinaigrette and a glass of European water for lunch.

But let's not dwell on the negative, the wine of illusion. You begin with simple truths in food: for instance, peeling sweetbreads is not really exercise. When you're trimming a two-pound porterhouse, don't make those false, hyperkinetic motions favored by countermen in delicatessens. Either trim it or skip trimming. Eat the delicious fat and take a ten-mile walk. Reach into your memory and look for what has restored you, what helps you recover from the sheer hellishness of life, what food actually regenerates your system, not so you can leap tall buildings but so you can turn off the alarm clock with vigor. Chances are you will come up with something Latin—I mean food that is quite different from our own in areas of fruit growth, food from a place where garlic and flowers abound, where there are blue water and hot sun. At the bottom of dampish arroyos are giant butterflies and moths, extravagantly plumed birds that feed on the remains of lightning and sunbeams, the unique maggots that feed only on the spleens of road kill. Farther up the cliffs, where the cacti are sparser, rattlers sun themselves. At first you are uncomfortable, then disarmed by the way the snakes contract over hot coals. They are particularly good with the salsa that goes by the brand name Pace.

Last March I was hiking out of the Seri Indian country, south of Caborca along the Sea of Cortés, with Douglas Peacock, the fabled grizzly-bear expert. We were both out of sorts: he, because he can't seem to make a living; I, because my sinus pain was so extreme that I had to bash my head against the car door and specific boulders we passed. Luckily, we were able to dig a full bushel of clams at a secret estuary and make a hearty chowder with a pound of chilies and garlic, which started me on the road to recovery. Broiled tripe from an unborn calf helped, as did giant Guaymas shrimp. After this infusion of health I was able to dance five hours with a maiden who resembled a beige bowling ball. She was, in fact, shaped rather like me. In the morning my clothes were crisp from exertion; my head, bell clear. The world seemed new again—like a warm rain after a movie.

One late-November night, on the Navajo reservation in Arizona, I was camping out with two old men who I was reasonably sure were witches, although kind witches. I was researching a film on the life of Edward Curtis and that morning had received word that the studio had fired me again. But that night there was a big moon through the intermittent snow, and above the fire a posole was cooking, with its dark freight of several different chiles, a head of garlic, sun-dried hominy, and the neck, ribs, and shanks of a young goat. After eating the posole, we hiked in the moonlight, and one of the old men showed me his raven and coyote imitations, jumping in bounds the length of which would have shamed Carl Lewis.

Posole is a generic dish, and I've eaten dozens of versions and made an equal number of my own. The best are to be found in Mexico. Menudo is a similar dish and a fabulous restorative, the main ingredient being tripe. I would offer specific recipes, but you should immediately buy Authentic Mexican by Rick and Deann Bayless, published by William Morrow. And if you are in Chicago, you can literally eat your way through the book at their splendid restaurant, Frontera Grill. I've made a good start on the project.

Curiously, though, menudo has specific effects around which you can design a day. Picture yourself waking on Sunday morning with a terminal hangover and perhaps a nosebleed, though the latter has fallen from favor. You have a late-afternoon assignation with a fashion model you don't want to disappoint with shakes and vomiting rather than love. Just eat a couple of bowls of menudo sprinkled with chopped cilantro and scallions, wild Sonoran chiltepines, and a squeeze of lemon. The results are guaranteed by the tripe cartel, which has not yet been a victim of arbitrage.

Last fall I felt intense sympathy for a friend, Guy de la Valdène, who was arriving in Michigan for bird season after a circuitous road trip through Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota. If you've ever passed through them, you doubtless know that these are not food states. On the phone I could tell that Valdène's spirit was utterly broken, so three days before his arrival I began making Paula Wolfert's salmis de cuisses de canard, from her Cooking of South-West France. Since there were to be two of us, I increased the recipe, using nineteen duck legs and thighs, a couple of heads of garlic, two pounds of lean salt pork (homemade by my butcher), a half-cup of Armagnac, a bottle of Echêzeaux, and so on. (Wolfert's new effort, World of Food, can also be read as an edible novel.) During the three days of preparation, it occurred to me how Ronald Reagan was outsmarted by François Mitterrand a few years back. Reagan purportedly concentrates on a diet of lean fish, turkey breast, raw zucchini, and jelly beans, while Mitterrand snacks on caviar, truffles, foie gras, and jellied calves’ feet and drinks fine bordeaux and burgundy (rather than Reagan's habitual Riunite on the rocks with seltzer). At least George Bush eats pork rinds—a step in the right direction. Anyway, I helped my friend directly to the table, and within twenty-four hours we had finished the dish, his health completely restored.

Not to belabor the peasant motif, a week later Valdène ordered two pounds of beluga malassol from Caviarteria in New York, which we ate in a single sitting with my wife and daughter. I reminded myself not to do this too often, since the next morning my goutish left big toe tingled, making bird hunting awkward.

It's interesting to see, in the manner of a pharmacist, how particularized the food nostrum can be: for clinical depression you must go to Rio to a churrascaria and eat a roast sliced from the hump of a zebu bull; also try the feijoada—a stew of black beans with a dozen different smoked meats, including ears, tails, and snouts. For late-night misty boredom, go to an Italian restaurant and demand the violent pasta dish known as puttanesca, favored by the whores of Rome. After voting, eat collard greens to purge yourself of free-floating disgust. And when trapped by a March blizzard, make venison carbonnade, using a stock of shin bones and the last of the doves. If it is May and I wish to feel light and spiritual, I make a simple sauté of nuggets of sweetbreads, fresh morels, and wild leeks, the only dish, so far as I know, that I have created.

I recently went to Chicago to see the Gauguin retrospective at the Art Institute. The show was so overwhelming that I actually wept, jolted into the notion that art does a better job for the soul than food for the body. I remembered reading, though, that Gauguin himself, when a little low and cranky, liked to have a goblet of rum followed by breadfruit, a fresh steamed fish with ginger, and perhaps a roast piglet. No mention was made of dessert. During my art-dazed walk back to the hotel, I slipped into the Convito Italiano for a bite—a simple carpaccio and a hit of grappa. Finally, after a long nap with South Seas dreams, I went up to Café Provençal for a grand feast. So it goes.

1989