THE AMERICAN HERITAGE DICTIONARY describes haute cuisine as “elaborate or skillfully prepared food, especially that of France.” However, haute cuisine came to resemble its modern form in Italy, during the Italian Renaissance. The elaborate preparation of food was considered to be a creative art among the wealthy classes of Milan, Florence, and Naples, and the enjoyment of the food was a sophisticated pastime. The art was transported from Italy to France by Catherine de Medicis, the great-granddaughter and only legitimate heir to Lorenzo the Magnificent, a statesman and spice trader and the patron of such artists as Botticelli and Michelangelo. When she was fourteen, Catherine was sent to Marseilles, in southeast France, to marry the Duke of Orleans. As part of her dowry, she brought along Tuscan chefs. Fourteen years later, the duke became King Henry II of France, and French society was enchanted by Queen Catherine’s court. Her banquets enlivened an otherwise monotonous national cuisine, and she turned the French onto a new world of food: artichokes, sweetbreads, truffles, olive oil, carp, songbirds, and an array of sweets.

Haute cuisine flourished in France over the next two hundred years, aside from a brief remission following the French Revolution. (The proletariat considered the eating habits of the aristocracy to be excessive and indulgent. After receiving his death sentence from the revolutionary regime in 1793, King Louis XVI sat down to six cutlets and a roast chicken before napping and then having his head chopped off in a new invention created by the French physician Joseph Guillotin.) The culinary arts were resuscitated after the revolution by Antonin Carême, who is known as the Moses of haute cuisine. Carême was born in France in 1784. When he was eleven, his father took him to Paris and abandoned him on the street with a poetic farewell: “Go, little one. There are good trades in this world. Let the rest of us languish in the misery in which we are doomed to die.” Carême got a job in a tavern, where he studied and advanced as a chef. Around 1805, he was hired as the personal chef for the French statesman Talleyrand, a self-styled gourmet and a minister in Napoleon’s consulate. Carême thrived under Talleyrand’s patronage. He proved to be an innovative genius, and his own greatest fan. “From behind my stoves,” he later wrote, “I contemplated the cuisines of India, China, Egypt, Greece, Turkey, Italy, Germany and Switzerland. I felt the unworthy methods of routine crumble under my blows.”

Auguste Escoffier was Carême’s most illustrious successor. Like Carême, Escoffier became a chef through circumstance, not choice. In his autobiography, Memories of My Life, Escoffier admits that, as a kid, he never wanted to be a cook. “I was attracted by the world of fine arts and wanted to become a sculptor,” he writes. There was a fat chance of that. His father, Jean-Baptiste Escoffier, was a second-generation blacksmith who didn’t have the economic luxury of indulging his kid’s frivolous desires. Escoffier was only thirteen years old when his father sent him off to work in an uncle’s restaurant in Nice. “I was given no option but to obey,” recalls Escoffier.

At the time, chefs were generally regarded as little more than highly skilled servants. Escoffier writes that his apprenticeship was a nightmare, but he was able to pull it off “without the slightest outward manifestation of unhappiness.” He was so short that he had to wear platform shoes to keep from burning his face while standing at the range. He washed pots, waited tables, got slapped around and yelled at—your basic old-school apprenticeship. From then on, his only break from restaurants would come during the Franco-Prussian War, when he served as a cook for the army of Napoleon III.

When the war was over, Escoffier settled into his first position as head chef, at the Hotel Luxembourg in Nice. The next year he took the head position at Le Petit Moulin Rouge, a swanky Paris restaurant where he first met many of his later clients and friends, including the Prince of Wales and the actress Sarah Bernhardt. Not long after, in 1884, he became partners with César Ritz. Their alliance lasted for eighteen years, until 1902, when Ritz suffered a bizarre mental breakdown upon receiving the news that King Edward VII’s coronation ceremony had been postponed because the king needed an appendectomy.

Escoffier would probably be a completely obscure figure today if he had dropped out at the same time that Ritz did. Instead, he was putting the finishing touches on the book that would be his masterpiece. One year after Ritz’s breakdown, Le Guide Culinaire was published as an encyclopedic codification of French haute cuisine. In the back of Le Guide, Escoffier includes almost sixteen pages of menus from some of the more memorable meals he created. Most of them number between twelve and twenty courses, some even more. The menus became more interesting to me as I read about Escoffier and his book, because I was curious about what the King of Chefs and Chef of Kings classified as a “memorable” meal. Apparently, a memorable meal means a shitload of food.

That he was juggling such an enormous number of recipes in his head at any given time explains an important aspect of Escoffier’s personality. Friends and colleagues thought he was a private man. When he was working, which was nearly always, he refrained from alcohol and often ate alone in his office. During his breaks, he would take solitary strolls down the street, stopping only to hand out tips to the crossing guards. But to me, it doesn’t seem like the man was private. He was probably just trying to avoid distractions because he had a lot to keep straight in his head.

No matter how much work a complete Escoffier menu entailed, who was I to argue with Escoffier’s ideas? If I wanted to make a true Escoffier meal—and I did—I’d have to collect enough stuff to cook a full menu. But I couldn’t do just one.

Here’s why: For me to produce an Escoffier feast would require a lot of help from my five main hunting and fishing partners, who are spread out around the country. Most of them are named Matt. Together, Matt Drost, Matt Moisan, and Matt Rinella form the Matmosphere. To keep things simple, I just call Drost and Moisan by their last names, and I call my brother Matt. My other two partners are Eric Kern and my brother Danny. If all of my hunting partners helped me with the scavenging—and I knew they would—then I’d have to invite them all to the feast. And if they all flew out to Montana, they’d certainly expect more than one night of feasting. I wanted to offer them three meals, totaling fifty or so courses.

I began studying Le Guide Culinaire with Talmudic thoroughness. I made a list of every ingredient found in the book. It was sort of like conducting a feasibility study. I wanted to determine what I needed, and what was possible. Then I imposed two restrictions on myself: (1) I would give myself one year to garner the necessary ingredients, so that nothing would have time to go bad in the freezer; and (2) because hunting and fishing in other countries pose enormous legal, logistical, and financial problems, I would limit my search to the United States.

Then I realized I had a major geographical problem on my hands.

The problem was, haute cuisine is so deeply and historically European that its base ingredients, naturally, are the sorts one finds in and around Europe. Escoffier’s recipes deal largely with fish of the eastern Atlantic Ocean, such as Dover sole. Here in the United States, we have a variety of soles and flounders, but not that particular fish. Escoffier recommends the meat from the European stag. We have great herds of elk in Montana—close cousins to the stag, but certainly not the same thing. Another factor that concerned me had to do with threatened and endangered species. In Escoffier’s day, people didn’t worry about that sort of thing; they’d just keep on catching and eating something until it was completely wiped out. Le Guide includes recipes for hosts of songbirds that are now protected. As a hunter and environmentalist, I certainly couldn’t go out and contribute to the problems of a vanishing species.

Luckily for me, Escoffier did occasionally recommend American counterparts to his European ingredients. For example, while Escoffier did not cook with the wild rabbits of America (he liked the Belgian hare), he does go out of his way in Le Guide to recommend specific substitutions for his American followers. He disguises this endorsement of American rabbits within a mild snub: “As a result of one of those freaks of taste, hare is not nearly so highly esteemed as it deserves in the United States; and the fact seems all the more strange when one remembers that in many of her states excellent specimens of the species can be found.” The list of excellent specimens he recommends includes the cottontail rabbit.

It was nice to know that I could go just about anywhere in the country and get a rabbit that Escoffier approved of, but other endeavors were going to be much more complicated. A quote I found in the beginning of Le Guide added to my anxiety about using substitutes. Escoffier offers his readers the following warning: “It is just as absurd to expect excellent cooking from a chef whom one provides with defective or scanty goods, as to hope to obtain wine from a bottled concoction of logwood.”

I began to worry that I’d have to follow a strict, fundamentalist interpretation of the book if I wanted success, but then I started to read between the lines of Escoffier’s biography, so to speak, and I realized an important element of his credo.

Escoffier was fond of the story of François Vatel’s death. Vatel was the chief steward of Chantilly, the estate of the French nobleman the Prince de Condé. On a Friday in 1671, the prince was expecting King Louis XIV for dinner. And since the prince was in great need of the king’s favor, the path to which led through the king’s stomach, he entrusted Vatel to organize an elaborate and impressive banquet. (When Louis XIV died, his physicians reported that his stomach was three times the normal size and that he had a tapeworm.) Vatel placed an order for fish, to serve to the king for the Lenten meal, but the fish didn’t show up on time. Rather than face professional embarrassment, Vatel fell on his own sword three times, the third time puncturing his heart.

Escoffier thought that Vatel had overreacted.

“Quite simply,” he said, “I would have fabricated some fillets of sole using the breasts of young chickens.”

This response is somewhat surprising, considering what a stickler for detail Escoffier was. He used to stand in the doorway of his kitchens, readjusting the placement of garnishes as they went out to the dining room. How could a man of such exacting standards recommend a quick-fix substitution? The answer to that question lies amid the chaos of the Franco-Prussian War.

In 1870, Escoffier was plucked from Le Petit Moulin Rouge to serve in the French forces under Napoleon III. Napoleon thought Prussia’s influence was becoming too strong in Europe, and he wanted to use his military might to set the empire back. Escoffier was assigned as a field cook for the officers of the General Headquarters of the Rhine Army. This was a dangerous, demanding position. As battles raged between French and German armies, Escoffier stalked rabbits with a rifle and scrounged abandoned farmyards for eggs. At the Battle of Gravelotte, he prepared hors d’oeuvres while six thousand men were slaughtered just one mile away. After making a hasty retreat under the cover of darkness, he found himself with a side of beef that might have gone bad if left uncooked. “My decision was quickly taken,” he later recalled. “Great dangers give birth to great solutions.” He chopped down some trees and roasted his side of beef. While it cooked, he and another cook had to draw their sabers to defend the beef when their own marauding troops tried to steal a hunk.

Then came the Siege of Metz. After suffering humiliating defeats, French forces were surrounded by the Prussians in northeastern France. The conditions in the city of Metz were horrible. There was hardly anything to eat. Escoffier rustled up whatever chickens and goats he could find or purchase and assembled them in a makeshift farmyard in a private courtyard. At an exorbitant price, he managed to acquire some small pike that had been fished from the Moselle River. As conditions worsened even more, he had to slaughter the officers’ horses and serve them the meat. In his autobiography, Escoffier writes, “Certainly, I reached heights never before attained when it came to using up scraps.”

While Escoffier was eating braised horse flesh in Metz, Paris too had fallen under Prussian siege. But the Parisians had it worse than the citizens of Metz. As if the Prussians hadn’t created enough problems by surrounding the city, a violent insurrection of the Paris Commune was boiling amid Paris’s own population. Meat and vegetables were vanishing fast. Rats went on sale for three francs apiece. A chef was selling a terrine, or casserole, of rats called rats à la parisienne for fifteen francs. Two cookbooks published at the time contained recipes for dogs and cats. A restaurant was selling cocker spaniel, and cats were going for a market price of ten francs. The zoo located within Paris’s botanical gardens ran out of feed, so restaurants bought the zoo animals for use as fresh meat. On Christmas Day 1870, the Café Voisin menu included bear steaks, donkey, kangaroo, wolf, a house cat garnished with rats, and the trunks of two elephants named Castor and Pollux.

Rather than feeling disgusted, Escoffier found great inspiration in such improvisations. He became convinced that resourcefulness was the mark of a true chef. Forty-five years later, during World War I, a number of young French chefs working in London complained to Escoffier that the rations and wartime food shortages had rendered French haute cuisine an impossibility. Escoffier implored them to make do and carry on, even showing the chefs a copy of the 1870 Christmas menu from Voisin’s that he had kept as a memento.

After considering this aspect of Escoffier’s legacy, I felt that a strict adherence to authenticity might actually be an insult to Escoffier’s sensibilities. In my effort to emulate him, I didn’t want to overlook one of his most admirable traits. Instead, I decided to familiarize myself with his food to better understand what would and would not work for substitutions. In the soup section of Le Guide, I found a recipe for bird’s nest soup made from swallows’ nests. Swallows use their sticky saliva to hold their nesting materials together, and by simmering the nests, you can extract the saliva that Escoffier credited with giving a “characteristic viscidity” to his consommés. To make his bird’s nest soup, Escoffier had used the nests of tropical swallows, from southeastern Asia. Reading this, I remembered some cliff swallows’ nests I’d seen the previous summer when I was floating in my inner tube beneath a bridge in downtown Missoula. I decided to walk down to the bridge to have a look. The swallows were all gone, having headed south for the winter, but they’d left behind dozens of nests hanging from the bridge’s horizontal supports. Most of them were busted and falling apart, but some were still intact. They were the shape of bulls’ scrotums and about that size. I chucked a couple of rocks at the nests and caught some of the chunks that fell off.

Tropical swallows build their nests out of sticks, but these cliff swallow nests were made from mud. At the time, I figured swallow spit was swallow spit. I took the mud home and boiled it in a pot. I was left with nothing but hot muddy water and a floating dead bug. Nothing remotely gelatinous appeared. The water had zip “viscidity.” So if I was going to make a pot of bird’s nest soup, cliff swallow nests would not cut it. This made me fret about American ingredients not being up to the task. But rather than getting discouraged, I quickly moved on to a sauce that Escoffier made with fish semen. He recommends carp milt, which I could certainly find in the spring, but I decided to try a substitution of milt taken from yellow perch. When I cooked some perch semen and seasoned it, it looked and smelled suspiciously like, well, semen.

I next decided to thaw some of my turtle and try that. As soon as I started cooking the turtle, my whole apartment began to smell like a boiled Loch Ness monster. As it was cooking, Diana walked into my apartment, covered her mouth, and said, “Oh. My. God. Steve.” And walked back out. I had a couple of friends over to sample the turtle and only two of them dared taste it. One friend of mine, a painter, said she wanted to try it just to see if it tasted as bad as it smelled. She dipped the ladle in and sipped. “It does,” she said.

But even after three failed attempts, something still made me want to keep trying. In large part, that “something” had to do with nagging doubts that I was having about my methods. For instance, my snapping turtle had been fed ground venison while in captivity. Escoffier doesn’t say to feed meat to captive turtles. Instead, he says to flush them repeatedly in clean water before slaughtering. I hadn’t flushed my turtle. Maybe that was the problem.

As a final last-ditch effort, I decided to try one more experiment with American substitutions; if this didn’t work, I would forget the whole project. The dish I selected was truite au bleu, or blue trout. To make it, Escoffier says you need a live trout, “procured in mountainous districts, where the clear water they inhabit is constantly refreshed by strong currents.” Living in Montana, I was in the perfect place to find such a trout. Escoffier probably cooked with the European brown trout. For my truite au bleu, I would use a brook trout, a distinctly wild and North American fish. Other than that, I would follow Escoffier’s advice to the letter, right down to the live trout.

I waited for a warm weekend, then went to a stream up in the mountains that was open for fishing in the winter. I took Diana along with me and we set up camp and made a fire. I had all the ingredients in my pack, and I got them ready: water, vinegar, salt, thyme, bay leaves, carrots, onions, parsley, peppercorns. Diana and I took my fly rod and walked along the stream. Brook trout are aggressive fish, and they’ll hit good even when it’s cold. We found some trout holding beneath a rock ledge that hung over the river. I pasted out a cast and landed the fly along the rock ledge. A fourteen-inch trout rose up and grabbed the fly. I pulled the fish onto the bank and we walked it up to the fire. I stunned it on the head with a rock and plunged the trout immediately into a pan of simmering vinegar and seasoning. Its skin turned a brilliant blue. It was beautiful, like a chameleon. Diana marveled at the beauty, but rejected my offer of a bite. It did almost seem shameful to eat something so cool-looking. But I did it anyway. The vinegar tasted subtle on the fish’s flesh, and gave it a pleasing light and springy texture. It was the best trout I’d ever eaten. So Escoffier was right, I thought. This stuff does work.

But I still didn’t completely shake my concerns about substitutions and authenticity until later in the winter, when I was down in Florida fishing with my brother Danny and our buddy from Michigan, Eric Kern. We were staying for the week in a rental house on the Gulf of Mexico. Every day we fished out in front of the house and we caught fish like crazy—pompano, whiting, black drum, redfish, Gulf flounders, sand perch, and hand-sized blue runners. I had along my copy of Le Guide Culinaire, and I claimed for my pending project any fish, such as whiting, that seemed like a close match to Escoffier’s chosen ingredients. Any fish that was unlike those commonly used by Escoffier, such as a blue runner, was assigned to that night’s dinner.

One night, Kern tied into a fish that was especially big. Suddenly his rod arced into a sharp bend and line began zinging off his reel. The fish headed out past the sandbar, then turned left and began traveling south. The way it swam, it didn’t cause the rod tip to dance up and down the way some fish do; instead the fish glided smoothly along the bottom, and the rod arched over in a graceful bend. Kern would reel in some line, then the fish would calmly but steadily pull the line back out.

The sun began to set and the fish was still fighting. People who’d come out to watch the sunset were instead drawn to the spectacle of Kern battling the fish. (Beaches must be boring as hell for people who don’t fish, because just about anything seems to be able to divert them from what they’re doing—which I guess is nothing.) A family of four came over to watch; the parents wanted to see the fish, and the two kids wanted to play with our bait. A gang of college-aged guys with cans of Budweiser gathered beside us too. Then two fellows from the condominiums next to our house walked down to the beach, swirling red wine in matching gold-rimmed glasses and trying to act very bored by Kern’s fish.

Eventually one of the wine-drinking guys started getting jealous about all the attention that Kern was getting, and he began talking as though this just happened to be the one night when he wasn’t the one battling a fish.

“Could be a black-tip, could be a ray,” he said. “Maybe a big redfish. It’s hard to say at this point. Whatever it is, it’ll tire out. If that line don’t break. He’s just gotta keep the pressure on it. I hope he’s got good line.”

I tried to tune the guy out. There are so many things in an ocean, and so many of those things eat shrimp, it seemed futile to make guesses about what it was and how strong it might be. However, I was secretly worried about it being a ray. When I was a kid, my dad and I watched some fishermen in the Florida Keys catch a couple of rays, chop their tails off, and leave them for dead. I asked why they did that, and the fishermen said rays weren’t any good to eat.

When Kern finally got the fish reeled in close to the shore, it started acting less like a fish and more like an anchor. It would hardly budge. I walked into the darkness of the water, following the line out, and peered into the waves. I could see a dark shape, and I poked it with my rod tip. It went ripping back out toward the deep in an explosion of silt, leaving a wake along the surface of the water. Another twenty minutes or so went by before the fish had anchored itself near the shore again. I went out and gave it another poke. As it took off, Kern walked the rod backward and, with the help of a big wave, dragged it up to shore. Our crowd let out a simultaneous sigh, an “aahhgg” that lasted a couple of seconds. The fish was an Atlantic stingray, like a giant underwater moth with a bullwhip for a tail. With its identity revealed, the onlookers quickly dispersed, acting like their patience had not been adequately rewarded, as though Kern had pulled in some old car tire. They wanted a shark, something with teeth, something more dramatic.

As we debated what to do with the ray, I sat down in my beach chair and aimed my headlamp at the index in Le Guide. I was surprised to find the word raie. I flipped back to recipe numbers 1,824 to 1,828. There I read about poached ray with brown butter, poached ray livers with croutons, ray wings gratin, and marinated ray with onion rings. In his discussion of these recipes, Escoffier mentions his fondness for the thornback skate of the eastern Atlantic. Thornback skates and Atlantic stingrays look pretty damn similar. Both have wings and long tails and blunt noses and hang out in shallow water near soft bottoms. They’re both batoids, with cartilaginous skeletons. But there are also significant differences. The Atlantic stingray is viviparous (gives birth to live young) and the thornback skate is oviparous (lays eggs). The Atlantic stingray has a nasty serrated spike on its tail, and the thornback skate doesn’t. The Atlantic stingray ranges up and down the western Atlantic, from New Jersey to Brazil. The thornback skate ranges up and down the eastern Atlantic, from Norway to the Mediterranean Sea.

I remembered back to those fishermen I met in the Keys as a kid, who so callously discarded their mortally injured rays. I compared their closed-mindedness to the culinary receptiveness of Escoffier, and it was clear to me which approach was more rewarding. After all, even my disasters with the swallow nests and the fish semen had proven to be fun and extremely educational. I had learned things and put that knowledge to the test; and then, in failure, I had learned even more. Whatever the results of cooking this ray might be, I knew that three things would happen for sure. One, I’d eat all of it; two, I’d learn a lot more than I would by throwing it back; and three, I’d enjoy the hell out of the experience. I recognized the latter reason as being perhaps the most important. This Escoffier feast was supposed to be fun. It was supposed to be an eye-opener. If Escoffier had to make do with an Atlantic stingray rather than a thornback skate, he certainly wouldn’t throw himself on his own sword. He’d go for it. From then on, I had my operating theory. My modus operandi. I’d do the best I could to fulfill Escoffier’s recipes, and leave the rest to chance.