I DECIDED THAT it would be cool if Diana had a notebook on her lap during the meals, so she could record the reactions of everyone sitting at the table. I asked her to make a special effort to record her own impressions, as I thought reading her personal notes would be like getting a glimpse into her meat-eating diary. Since Diana had starting eating fish almost six months before, I knew she was ready for the next steps: red meat and fowl. If I had notes about her likes and dislikes concerning those items, I could tailor my future meat cooking accordingly.

Long after the three-day feast was over, I wound up using that notebook to solve a mystery. The mystery had nothing to do with Diana’s favorite recipes. Instead I wanted to determine exactly when, during the first night, Diana had gotten sick. The notebook was an invaluable source of information, because her own memories of the evening were blurred.

While I had been cooking all day, Jen had been busy converting the living room into a swank dining room. She had agreed to oversee the decorating job on the condition that I grant Hansel and Gretel II permanent amnesty. I consented, and she recruited Diana and Anna to help her. They purchased candles, flowers, and a special Thanksgiving-themed cloth for a banquet table they rented at the hardware store. Because we didn’t have enough plates and glasses, Jen had also purchased paper plates, plastic champagne flutes, plastic wine glasses, and plastic silverware. Escoffier probably rolled over in his grave because of all that paper and plastic, but I thought the temporary nature of the place settings conveyed the specialness of the feast: Instead of using the same old worn-out plates we normally used, we were using plates that would never suffer the future stains of lesser meals. When Jen lit the candles that night, the living room looked fantastic, like something from a movie set.

As Julian and I prepared to begin serving the meal, I took a look into the living room. Most of my hunting partners were sitting in a complete circle around the room. Diana was sitting close to the kitchen door, a notebook in her lap. It was a beautiful sight.

The only blemish at the table was a newcomer who had shown up in town that afternoon. Her name was Sarah, and she was the girlfriend of my brother Matt’s friend Kevin, who drove up from his home in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Kevin’s in his mid-thirties and looks like the sort of all-American guy who would work at a golf course. He was ready for some hard-core eating. Sarah was the last girl on earth you’d expect him to be dating. She was the same age as Kevin but was dressed that night like a punky adolescent. Her hair had more dye in it than a Grateful Dead T-shirt, and her wardrobe accessories numbered in the dozens: neon-colored trinkets and jewelry and a special glitzy belt. Her wardrobe looked incredibly, well…intentional. When I saw her, I felt a strange obligation to compliment her on her hair or something. It was like she was ready for a costume party.

In retrospect, I don’t care if Sarah looks like a seventh grader. She’s an aesthetician, and to be an aesthetician, I suppose it’s important to look like you care a lot about your aesthetic, no matter how ridiculous it is. My wrath toward her is based solely on the fact that she tried her damnedest to sabotage the feast. I’m not really sure why she came; I guess she just wanted to spend the holiday with her boyfriend. Once she was there, though, she decided to wage holy war. Sarah is an extraordinarily self-righteous subspecies of vegetarian, the kind that’s usually opposed to all forms of animal subjugation. What makes Sarah somewhat unusual among self-righteous vegetarians is that she wears leather and eats cheese. Her vegetarianism stems from her belief that due to some complex, yet ill-founded health concerns, it’s important for her to live a healthy lifestyle. Her healthy lifestyle includes smoking a lot of cigarettes, regularly stripping layers of skin off her face with something called “chemical peels,” and drinking a dietary supplement of liquefied clay. Anyway, she’s got it in her head that meat is lethal. So she showed up armed with refried beans and lettuce. She even brought her own water, as if Matt’s faucets dripped meat. Then, as if all that weren’t annoying enough, she sat herself at the head of the table with a grizzly-sized snarl on her face.

Otherwise, the atmosphere was exciting and charged. Everyone was a little drunk from the bar, which was good; reduced inhibitions couldn’t hurt. I dismissed Nina from the kitchen so she could sit at the table. She and Jen were going to make sure the wines and drinks were served at the proper times.

Once everyone was seated, I gave Jen the nod to pour out fourteen flutes of bubbly. After a quick toast, Julian and I rolled out the oysters and caviar. I also passed out a bowl of caviar atop crushed ice, along with a gorgeous little seashell caviar spoon that Jen had bought for the occasion.

From where I stood in the kitchen, I could hear the exclamations of approval in the living room as the oysters and caviar made the rounds. Diana recorded her own response to the oysters and caviar as “paradise on the half-shell.” While the oysters moved through the dining room, I heated a skillet of oil to a smoking-hot temperature. I lowered each salmon-and-shrimp cake into the oil for a ten-second flash fry. I had to support the fragile cakes with a spatula as they cooked, to keep them from falling apart. Julian whipped up some more béchamel sauce to accompany the cakes. Escoffier said that a sauce should fit a dish “as a tight-fitting skirt fits a woman.” Julian and Escoffier must speak the same language. When he finished his sauce, Julian took a taste. “That’s it,” he said. “That’s what it’s supposed to be.”

We presented the salmon-and-prawn cakes to the table. Julian and I kept one of the cakes and broke it in two. I was pleased. “That salmon did not die in vain,” I said. I overheard Diana say that the cakes were the best thing she’d ever eaten, and I thought, You ain’t seen nothing yet.

I wanted to mix up the land and sea dishes, so as the salmon-and-prawn cakes disappeared, I busted out the headcheese, along with a vinaigrette dressing Nina had mixed up in an empty vodka bottle. At first the headcheese prompted a lot of caution. No one in the room had ever seen headcheese, so no one had any idea what it was supposed to look like. I didn’t know either, until that day when I finished making it. It looked mottled and brownish, and shiny. I had molded it into the shape of a large stick of butter. I handed it to Diana, whose Jewish upbringing had taught her that pig is filthy. She refused it. I wasn’t shocked. Diana passed the dish to Anna, who will eat anything. (I once watched her open a fridge and pluck out a slice of rare, pink moose heart for breakfast.) She took a dinky little slice of headcheese and tried it. Everyone watched her. “I’ve never tasted anything like it,” she said. She took a bigger slice.

Kern was the next to sample it. “It’s delicious,” he said. “It’s tough to describe. The consistency is really good. It’s much milder than I would have thought. It’s not like cheese. It’s more like a thinking man’s lunch meat.” The headcheese made the rounds like that: Most everyone greeted it with apprehension but ended up liking it. Even the couple of people who didn’t taste it thought it looked cool.

Except, of course, Sarah. During the courses of caviar and prawns and salmon, she seemed to be wondering how to handle herself. She must have recognized those dishes as standard restaurant fare and had probably heard from her acupuncturist that seafood is good for the brain or something, so she refrained from scoffing too loudly. The headcheese was a different story. She rolled her eyes and scrunched her nose up so violently that I half hoped/half feared the expression might stick.

Cooking the quenelles was a tricky business. Earlier in the day, we’d formed the creamed mixture of raw duck flesh and butter into olive-shaped dumplings. Escoffier wanted us to poach them using an odd method. I brought a pot of water to a boil, then poured the water into the shallow baking pan containing the raw quenelles. The hot water cooked them a little bit, but not much. I ladled the water back out of the baking pan and poured in another pot of boiling water. Escoffier doesn’t specify how many pots of water the quenelles might need, so after three pots, I started to worry. But after the fourth pot, the quenelles magically stiffened and rose to the surface, poached. I scooped the already-warmed duck consommé into some glass bowls that Jen had bought at a secondhand store, and added some quenelles to each bowl.

The duck consommé proved to be the biggest hit of the first day. The quenelles were creamy and rich; they had a mousse-like texture and exploded with the taste of medium-rare duck. I had sampled the consommé a few days before, so I already knew it was pretty damned good. Now my friends agreed. Diana’s notebook filled up with rave quotes: “Oh wow…Oh, that’s so good.” “It’s so subtle…it’s not something that overwhelms you initially…I just like the combination of textures.” Before tasting it, Kern reminded everyone that duck is the one game bird he doesn’t like. (He calls mallards “flying liver.”) But after tasting a quenelle, he said, “This kicks ass.” Even Diana liked it.

The foie gras soufflé was one of the least popular items. When it came out of the oven, it was perfectly risen and as light as a golden brown balloon. Within seconds, though, it collapsed like it had been hit by a dart. I served it anyway, along with an explanation that the recipe called for real foie gras and I had thrown in some year-old wild goose liver. The reviews were all-around negative: “A little too strong.” “It’s not too strong…it just doesn’t taste like food.” “I don’t like it.” “It’s a bit waterlogged, really.” “It’s like eating a plant from a swamp.” Diana found the dish “too airy.”

While the soufflé was being condemned, Sarah thought it would be a good time to come out swinging. “That’s what you get,” she said, “for eating something so fucking nasty.” My brothers and Drost and Kern had begun to ignore her, so she tried to align herself with the girls at the table: “Men are such carnivores,” she said reflectively. But she only isolated herself further. These girls weren’t the type to respond to a girl-power campaign. From then on, our only breaks from Sarah came when she went outside to smoke cigarettes.

Meanwhile, Julian and I were having a hell of a good time in the kitchen. We were cooking and drinking and making an incredible mess of ourselves. We went from Grand Marnier to bubbly to port to sherry and then back to Grand Marnier. This behavior would never have flown in Escoffier’s kitchen. Escoffier wouldn’t let his chefs drink any liquor at all. He devised a nonalcoholic barley beverage that he kept on the stove at all times; if his chefs were thirsty, he reasoned, they could drink that. His rule was probably a good one. I cut my hand twice while finishing up the matelote, leaving Julian to place the pieces of freshwater fish and the segments of raw eel in a large pan with onions, garlic, white wine, and a bouquet garni, while I bandaged my fingers. Julian started to pour in the brandy, but I insisted that I be the one to flame it off. When I tried, I started a small fire, which spread to a pile of greasy towels. Julian jumped in to rescue the dish, nearly singeing his pelt. When he emerged from the smoky kitchen, cradling the dish, a round of applause erupted from the dining room.

Diana, who had by this time eaten a greater variety and a greater quantity of fish and meat than she’d ever eaten in her whole life, didn’t record anyone’s impressions of the matelote. This may have been an oversight, or she may have already been getting woozy. Either way, she swears that she tasted the matelote and liked it.

However, she doesn’t remember much about the crayfish mousse. Which is good, because the dish was a disaster. I’d begun to eye the mousse with suspicion when Julian and I first poured it into its mold. Or, I should say, I’d begun to smell it with suspicion. When we turned the mousse out of its mold, the smell hadn’t improved. It was a synthetic odor, like something you might clean carpet with. Strangely, none of the constituents of the mousse—crayfish, champagne, gelatin, cream, fish stock—accounted for the stench. I tried to ignore it and breathe through my mouth.

By the time we got the thing decorated, it looked ready to melt. I entered the dining room and announced an intermission while Julian put the mousse back into the freezer for ten minutes before we served it. Kern was the only person who liked it. He even came back into the kitchen after the dish was returned to pick the bits of crayfish tail from the melting mousse and save them in a coffee mug.

By now, the meal was taking on the attributes of a gospel sermon, with lots of ups and downs, damnation and redemption. We followed the mousse with fried stingray. It was good—fried fish is always good—but there was an added bonus: Its texture was scallop-like. It lacked the flaky grain that white-fleshed fish usually has, and it was pinker than normal fish. If Diana’s nausea had indeed set in by now, she must have rallied for a minute, because she wrote down that she liked the stingray. Drost declared it “a true crowd-pleaser.” Jen rebelled against the masses: “I don’t think I’m very open-minded. Actually, I don’t think I like meat anymore.”

When I brought the rabbit pâté into the dining room, I thought that Diana looked stunned, but I figured she was just reveling in the joy of consuming mass quantities of wild game. I didn’t notice that her pen was working only intermittently. She did manage to record a few quotes about the pâté, but she didn’t taste it. Eric declared the pâté the best-smelling dish so far. When I sliced through the golden-brown crust and tried to remove a piece, the layers of fat and meat fell apart at the seams. Too dry, I guess. Drost said that it tasted like a piece of lunch meat that’s been dropped into a vat of liquor—but in a good way.

Diana’s first wave of serious nausea must have hit around this time, between the rabbit pâté and the mountain goat sweet meat, because the notes about the sweet meat are in Jen’s penmanship. Personally, I thought the dish was a pleasant surprise. The dome came out puffy and buttery, textured like a good croissant. Nina did a hell of a job on the decorative mountain goats that she made out of the leftover puff paste; the animals rose a quarter inch above the crust while it baked in the oven. Julian and I delivered the sweet meat to the table to show it off before slicing. Jen documented Danny’s reaction. “Oh man,” he said, “that is so good!” Eric concurred: “Dee-fucking-licious.” Other comments followed: “You can really taste the brandy.” “For a mountain goat that fell off a cliff, it tastes pretty good.” “I feel so fat right now…Oh my God.”

Once the lid of the sparrow and polenta cake was browned, we pulled it out and carefully removed it from its mold. The entire polenta case was the color of lightly toasted bread. I cut the cake in half, exposing the alternating layers of risotto and sparrow breasts. The sparrow meat came out the color of walnut shells. One of the sparrows fell out, so I popped it into my mouth. It was rich and dark, with a gizzard-like texture. The flavor was potent, like an exaggerated version of dark turkey meat. If you generally like mild food, you wouldn’t like sparrow. I pried out another breast with my fingertips and popped it down. The rest went to the table with an espagnole sauce. Lauren didn’t want to eat sparrows because she felt bad for them, so Danny tried to vilify the birds. “Sparrows are vicious, Lauren. They kill native birds.” Drost liked the sauce. “This sauce is the shit,” he said. The sparrows made Nina nostalgic: “When I was a kid, my mom used to give me the heart of a chicken. I liked it. Sparrow reminds me of that.”

By this point, eleven courses into the meal, Sarah was getting hungry. She asked if I had any polenta or risotto left over. “That hasn’t touched meat,” she clarified. I told her no. From then on, she changed her approach. She was no longer snide and judgmental; now she was bored and annoyed. She crossed her arms and scowled. Whenever I stepped out to serve a dish, I was greeted by her scowl from the head of the table. She reminded me of a chaperone at a dance.

After the sparrow was cleared from the table, Diana made a break for the bathroom. She zipped wordlessly through the kitchen, her face drained of color like a piece of meat that’s been soaking in water. I followed her down the hall. The bathroom door closed in my face. I worried I’d somehow poisoned everyone with bad shellfish or tainted meat. When Diana came out, some five minutes later, I questioned her extensively but tried not to seem alarmed. “Maybe you had too much to drink? Could that be it? When did you first feel sick?”

“I think I OD’d on meat,” she said. “Or I got gout. It’s probably gout.”

I had been talking about gout a lot lately, because Escoffier’s clientele suffered from it in plague-like proportions. It’s a painful condition where uric acid crystals accumulate in joint spaces. The ailment used to be known as “the disease of kings and the king of diseases,” because it’s greatly exacerbated by drinking alcohol and eating purine-rich meats such as shellfish and animal organs.

“You get gout in your joints, like your ankles and toes,” I said.

“Not me,” Diana said. “Mine’s in my gut.”

Diana promised to put on a poker face and return to the table. If everyone in the living room knew she was sick, then I’d have a major crisis on my hands. When it comes to foodborne sickness, people tend to overreact. I once got sick on a pork and avocado sandwich. The pork was surely the culprit, but in my stomach’s mind, the avocado was guilty by association. I couldn’t eat avocado for years. A case of food poisoning at this juncture in the meal would spoil everything. I gave Diana a hug, but the hug only made her feel nauseated all over again. When that wave passed, she went back to the table and took her seat. Although she was pretty quiet from then on out, no one suspected a thing.

I was half expecting ten or twelve people to keel over with convulsions at any moment. Thankfully, I had Ray Turner’s smoked eel ready. Ray Turner’s smokehouse is a state-inspected facility. If we were all going to get sick anyway, we probably wouldn’t get any sicker from the smoked eel. I had cut the eel into one-inch slices, saving a couple of pieces for Julian and me to share in the kitchen. We savored the smoky, slightly oily flavor of Ray’s eel. It lacked the dry, aftertaste-inducing qualities of my own smoked products.

Julian and I took a brief break after the eel. I was trying to monitor the bathroom. If I thought people were using it too much, I was going to start worrying. But after a stretch without unusual bathroom activity, I decided that Diana’s gout, or whatever it was, was an isolated case. We proceeded with the bladders.

Julian pinched the little sacks closed and I threw two half hitches on the end of each one. The sacks were sphere-shaped, the size of racquetballs. When we poached the bladders in game stock, they expanded a bit, then contracted. The leg and wing bones of the pigeons threatened to poke holes in the bladders. We consulted our resident doctor, Deirdre, about the tenacity of the organs. She glanced in the pot and surmised that a bladder should be able to withstand that level of abuse without getting punctured. As the bladders continued to cook, they turned a brilliant rainbow swirl of colors. Shades of pink, purple, black, and red spread across the bladders like motor oil on mud puddles. It was very beautiful. Julian finished the bladders with a sauce of red wine, shallots, and pureed duck liver. I assigned Danny the task of carving the birds. After tasting a piece of the poached bladder, Anna said, “It tastes the way grass smells.” I took a bite and enjoyed the way the bladder resisted chewing. I eventually broke it apart a little with my teeth and swallowed it, even though I hadn’t gotten it sufficiently chewed up.

The actual pigeons weren’t as good as the bladders themselves. Escoffier had never said they would be. I knew I was taking a gamble by using the birds instead of ducklings, but I had hoped that the new cooking technique would render them tender and delicious. It didn’t. The pigeons were as tough as I’d remembered.

The look of the bladders confirmed everything that Sarah had expected about the depravity of the meal. She resumed her that’s-so-gross routine. But her running commentary about the meal had steadily lost what little bite it might have had. At first people had at least looked at her when she spoke. As the evening went along, though, she might as well have been talking to Red and Lil’ Red. It was really a pathetic sight, and I couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for her. Not like the sorry that you feel for a wet puppy; more like the repulsed sort of sorry you feel for a fly that’s drowning in an abandoned glass of lemonade. If I were Escoffier, I probably would have made her all kinds of delicious vegetarian stuff, if only to keep her from spoiling everyone else’s time. But I guess I can’t fill Escoffier’s shoes on all counts. I just let Sarah suffer.

If one thing could have penetrated Sarah’s veneer, it would have been the turkey galantine. It was the most visually intriguing dish of the night. After poaching the log-shaped, cloth-wrapped bird for three hours in game stock, we let it cool on a rack. The stock coagulated around the bird, forming a transparent, pinkish aspic. I unmolded the package and cut the strings holding the cheesecloth, then unwrapped the bird with the care of an archaeologist unveiling a mummy. Inside, the turkey skin, which was acting as a sort of sausage casing, was firm and white. The galantine wasn’t fragile at all. At the table, I sliced through its center with all the fanfare of a magician sawing his assistant in half. In cross section, the twirls of pistachios and sausage and morels gave the dish a kaleidoscopic effect. Even Sarah had a compliment for it: “It looks pretty,” she said.

The galantine was supposed to be the first night’s pièce de résistance, but I’d made a last-minute decision to give Red and Lil’ Red the headlining performance of the evening. The two pigeons looked stunning, all dressed up as pigeonneaux en crapaudine. Julian and I had to guess what Escoffier meant when he wrote, “Cut the young pigeons horizontally from the point of the breast along the top of the legs and right up to the joints of the wings but without cutting right through. Open them out, lightly flatten, season, dip in butter and grill gently.” Using a heavy pair of scissors, we split the birds along their backbones, leaving a flap of flesh like a book’s binding. The birds came out looking flat, but still vividly resembling themselves, the way prepared chickens at a Chinese barbecue still vividly resemble chickens. Julian finished the birds with a diable sauce of white wine, shallots, and cayenne. The sauce had a nice, subtle burn to it. As a garnish for the dish, Escoffier recommends gherkins, but we substituted slices of Drost’s homemade pickles that he’d brought from Michigan.

Two squabs make for slim pickings when divided up by a pack of carnivores. I took my little slice and a spoonful of sauce and retreated to the kitchen to sample the dish in private. I’d never worked so hard for one little morsel in my life. I was desperately hoping it would taste good. But at the same time, I recognized that it didn’t really matter whether it was good or not. The experience of collecting the birds had been such a thrill and education. A bad taste couldn’t take that away. As I stood there pondering the piece of squab, the little bite of meat was getting cold. I popped it into my mouth.

I haven’t been as surprised by a taste since I pressed my tongue to the points on a 9-volt battery when I was a kid. But the squab was nothing like that battery; it was delicious. The flesh was as tender as a Reese’s peanut butter cup. And it was almost as sweet. I ran into the living room and most everyone in there was equally thrilled. I felt as though I had proven a point and won a bet about something that I myself hadn’t even fully believed in. The squab was a new taste altogether. It was way different from regular pigeon. I wanted to shout about it. In fact, I did shout about it. “Man, it’s so different,” I said.

Diana didn’t try the squab, but she was happy about my triumph. It was very cool of her, to be happy about something’s tasting good even when she had no desire to try it.

We still had two more meals and twenty-eight more courses to go, but it was clear that my hopes of converting Diana to meat eating were dashed. By the next day, Diana had virtually no recollection of what she’d eaten. We were able to rule out gout and poison, and decided that she had overwhelmed her system with foods that she was unaccustomed to, which had caused a mental shock. Over the following weeks, I’d ask her stuff like “Hey, did you try those sparrows in the polenta cake?” She could never remember. Now she can’t even remember specifics about the stuff that I know she ate.

“I don’t know, I was sick,” she always responds. Or else, “There were forty-five courses! How am I supposed to remember?”

But my assessment is that her memories are repressed. I remain hopeful that she will someday recover the memories; I hope that the tastes and flavors will come back to her and that she’ll begin eating meat again. But I doubt it. She may decide to eat more meat on her own, but I’ve thrown in the towel on trying to force it on her. She tried wild game meat, and then she rejected it. That’s better than what she was doing before: rejecting it without trying it. So there’s been a small improvement. I owe Escoffier for that one.

And I guess I owe Sarah, too. She probably went home and complained to her friends in Jackson Hole about the animals (people and otherwise) she’d had Thanksgiving dinner with. All in all, though, I’m glad she came. Without meaning to, she provided a great, drab backdrop against which I could see how cool my friends were. Every time I brought out a dish, there was always someone besides Sarah who wouldn’t taste it: Lauren didn’t want to eat sparrows because she liked watching them; Matt hates liver; another friend of Matt’s suffered from arachnophobia and by association wouldn’t eat crabs; Diana wouldn’t touch wild boar because of the tenets of Judaism. People were turning down dishes right and left. But no one besides Sarah passed any kind of overriding judgment on the feast as a whole. Instead, we enjoyed discussing all our various likes and dislikes and hang-ups, because those things provided us with a way to discuss not just the food but also what food means to us.

When you go on a big trip with a group of people, you feel a bond with them that lasts for months or even years. The bond is especially strong if it’s a dangerous sort of trip, like canoeing in white water or hiking into a particularly sketchy and remote piece of wilderness. I think that bond forms because the people in the group know they’re doing something new and perhaps uncomfortable, and they associate their fellow participants with that great rush that comes from being brave, from going all the way out. That first day’s Escoffier meal was the only time I ever felt a bond like that form inside a house. My friends felt the bond, too. Our rented dinner table had been like a runaway raft, taking us into a crazy, uncharted gorge full of rare tastes and strange smells. Rather than run away, or feign lack of interest, my friends dug in and went for it. And they all came out on the other side, laughing and having a good time. And we still had two meals to go.