I have spent a great deal of time in the past six months researching the archaeology of food, sometimes in later dates lapsing into the more known history of food. The purpose of this work is a book I am doing with the chef Mario Batali to be called On the Track of the Genuine. To ensure our freedom in the writing we have not presold this book, though a worldwide auction is coming in the future, perhaps in coordination with the Keeneland horse sales in Kentucky in the spring. I have been lucky enough to never have learned the computer so I escape the loneliness of the writer by having twelve satellite researchers, all attractive young women. By never touching a computer I saved thousands of hours of precious time. Do we really need to read a long article on how Russian prostitutes are shipped to Spain in blue oil barrels?
I come from generations of backwoods people adept at fishing and hunting. This was never thought of as manly, an invention of some later feminists in attempt to ridicule people who betimes go outside. In fact, my mother was an excellent angler, though I had to row the boat, an arduous task as it was brutally heavy holding six passengers in the humble craft made of water-soaked pine. A farmer had made it for my dad for thirty-five dollars, oars extra. I had to bait my mother’s hook as she couldn’t stand big, squirming night crawlers, possibly a Freudian glitch. Let us readily admit that the preponderance of outdoorsmen are jerk-offs, pure and simple. Canadians must ban the New Brunswick habit of breasting woodcock that you’ve shot. It’s a criminal waste. Roasted, the legs and thighs that are thrown away are the finest thing God allows you to put in your mouth. Pluck them. It only takes minutes. I suspect these non-pluckers go in the bathroom after the hunt and look at their dicks in the mirror or do the John Wayne strut around the cabin to get ready for the bar. Sad to say these people are generally pathetic cooks. I have heard dozens of times in my sporting life, in both Canada and America, how they’ll skin several grouse, put them in the Crock-Pot with three cans of Campbell’s mushroom soup, and cook for hours. This is ghastly treatment of a creature. It’s too bad you can’t train grouse to shoot hunters. Canada should ship these people to that island where they can be clubbed to death with seals and their bodies ground into sausage and sent to China.
In the mythology of north central Africa, the savanna from which we all emerged, there was a heroine known in story and song as Irma Warmgut. She could chop into a dead elephant faster than any man and secure the hundreds of pounds of kidney fat for her family. The fat was useful in preserving other meats just as it is in contemporary French-made confit to preserve ducks and add flavor. My grandparents on my mother’s side were very poor farmers but rich in big stone crocks. You could fry up fifteen pounds of sausage patties, put them in the crock, and pour over them ten pounds of melted lard. The sausage would still be good for several months.
We hear much these days about the war against fat. To the eye it is not yet successful. I know several blimpish people, men and women, who average ten bottles of Pepsi a day while eating their chocolate cookies. All sugar pure and simple, despite the strict diets they say they try. Not liking sugar or pop myself, I don’t get it. I collect huge paunches at our local grocery stores and supermarkets. Some real big ones, in both Michigan and Montana. I don’t have a camera, but all I have to do is stare and blink my eyes a few times and the record paunch is indelible. I did this with game animals in Africa forty years ago and still have hundreds of mind photos on record. You use the same method if you have the luck to look up a pretty girl’s dress. You blink and are home free. You blink and now you have a permanent record of what makes life valuable. Naturally I also do this with food. Some of us remember the food in that wonderful, edible movie Tom Jones. I can still see a wild piglet in France roasted and stuffed with truffles and a lamb I cooked over coals after my daughter had inserted sixty cloves of garlic. No California wine was allowed on the property.
Three famed physiologists at Harvard did spadework on the universal problem of odors. All fat people, even myself when I occasionally get overweight, have crevasses in the manner of glaciers in their fat, out of which emerge unpleasant odors. The physiologists point out that the problem can’t be attacked without the military and a well-organized gestapo. This is a fearsome choice, but a solid democracy can make a wise decision. If you doubt me, take a Fat Boy’s Steam Bath. This chain is in every city and you can find it by odor.
I am in the middle of a crushing experience that almost, but not quite, affects my appetite. It is the publication of my new novel, The Big Seven. America novelist William H. Gass pointed out that there is no more sodden time for a writer than publication. No one asked me but I agree. In fact, many fellow writers tell me that I’m on easy street. Here I am making a living as a writer and I’m only seventy-seven years old. Obviously, it could have been otherwise. It looked grim when I quit writing screenplays so as to avoid dying in Los Angeles. This preemptive decision cut my income by more than half. Luckily the French stepped in and decided they liked my stories. Who knows why? I do know now that dozens of trips to France have given me the opportunity for enough to eat. I can be a little hard on chefs. One evening in the Camargue, a chef insisted on cooking me all the local seafood, plus roasting a small lamb in the fireplace, plus a dozen bottles of wine. Midnight found us both sleeping on the stone floor, having traded shirts in new friendship. As Mom would have said, “It was a learning experience.” No, it wasn’t. Too much wine steals my judgment that was never very good in cold sobriety.
The hardest thing lately has been the deaths of two good writer friends, Peter Matthiessen and Charles Bowden, plus the death of the insane book collector Beef Torrey. With Matthiessen it was the grandeur of this bird of passage disappearing. I had known him well for more than forty years and he and the poet Gary Snyder were models of behavior for me. Neither did the vanity jitterbug in New York City. I always advise humility to young writers because no one has the ability to invent the destiny of their ambition. If any, in spades. Both Matthiessen and Snyder were and are naturalists of some repute, amateur, often the best kind, rather than professional. This helps. A several-hour walk in the forest heals more wounds than any doctor of my experience.
I’m not allowed to say “Woe is me” minutes after I was faxed a review saying I was a hero of American literature. I wonder what one actually is. Luckily it doesn’t involve throwing yourself on a grenade to save your friends. The death of a friend is the strongest pointer possible to the clarity of your future. In a world in which Anne Frank dies, it is easier for me to lose interest in the inevitability of my own.
In times of extreme stress like book publication I crave herring. It is much more comforting than the drugs and alcohol favored by so many. When heart and brain feel like a jackhammer at play, I turn to herring, the food of my people on my mother’s side, the Swedes. Since where I live my several lives is somewhat inaccessible, I depend on others. This time Mario Batali sent eight containers of different herring from Russ & Daughters, the herring capital on East Houston in New York City. Since you don’t drink good wine with herring I poured a simple eight-ounce glass of vodka. As I dabbled in the containers, waves of glorious warmth suffused my body as if I were sleeping with Venus, fresh from the sea.
I sang a simple hosanna, knowing that if I write novels, it’s my business. Just buy the book, chumps. Button your gobs to criticism.
With the right things to drink and eat you can have a nice life. It behooves you to find out what they are. You can obviously eat better in France than in Michigan or Montana or Arizona or ever the fabled Ottawa in Canada, though Calgary is a better choice. You, as a writer, must mix your essential gluttony and writing carefully. Despite your complaints you have lots of time to do so. Good food is so much more important than the mediocre writing that pervades the earth.