LE DEUXIÈME JOUR—DAY TWO

caviar—whitefish caviar served with blinis

huitres—oysters

bouillabaisse à la parisienne—whiting, lingcod, burbot, rockfish, flounder, and clams cooked with white wine, water, oil, onion, leek, saffron, pureed tomato, parsley, garlic, and a bouquet garni, then finished with butter and served with fresh baguettes

crabe à l’anglaise—Dungeness crab mixed with mustard, cayenne, and vinegar, served in its own shell with caviar and chopped egg

brochette de foie—skewered elk liver with duxelles sauce

aspic de crevettes—prawns in champagne aspic

moules à la catalane—glazed blue mussels with liquor of lemon and butter

coeur de veau sauté—elk heart with béchamel sauce

saumon fumé—Pooder’s smoked salmon from San Juan Island

côtelettes financières—glazed medallions of bighorn sheep stuffed with creamed morels, partridge, and pheasant

langues de porc choucroute—tongue of wild boar with sauerkraut and Madeira reduction

pâté d’abattis—giblets of pigeon, wild turkey, Canada geese, pheasant, and mallard sautéed in bouillon fat and baked inside a puff pastry

faisan à la georgienne—pheasants and chukars poached with walnuts in an espagnole sauce combined with pressed grapes, pressed oranges, wine, and green tea.

écrevisses à la bordelaise—crayfish cooked with white wine and fish stock, then flamed with brandy

selle de chevreuil Briand—saddle of antelope larded with bear fat, roasted on a bed of vegetables, and garnished with pears poached in red wine

You can see by the above menu that Julian and Nina and I didn’t skimp on the cooking for the second day’s meal. Except for the caviar and oysters, we avoided repeating any of the dishes from the day before. Even though we tried to keep things new and innovative, our work was much less hectic on the second day. For one thing, we didn’t need to kill anything or smuggle roadkill into town. And we had a more solid grasp on Escoffier’s basic procedures. We no longer argued about how much salted bear fat was too much or too little. The bases for the sauces had all been made ahead of time and were waiting in the fridge. We had a better sense of timing, so hot things were hot and cold things cold. We cranked out puff paste and short paste as casually as if we were whipping out grilled cheese sandwiches.

Also, we suffered no shortage of kitchen help. After forfeiting my battle to turn Diana into a carnivore, I no longer felt compelled to keep her out of the kitchen. What the hell did it matter now if she saw a bunch of bloody, gory stuff? If she ever wanted to try a piece of meat, I told her, just let me know. Until that day comes, I promised not to bring it up. Since she was no longer living in constant fear of having to eat some nasty piece of flesh, she had actually started to feel more comfortable around my food. Throughout the day, she came and went through the kitchen at will; she even cut a few things up and moved some pans around on the stovetop. Watching her cook and hang out in the kitchen, I could visualize our future together. Who cares if I eat antelope and she eats tofu? I was ready to live and let live, as long as she was willing to do the same. After all, we wash and fold each other’s clothes without wearing each other’s underwear.

The second day’s preparation went so smoothly, in fact, that we were basically just standing around by seven thirty. We had some things in the oven to keep an eye on, but we killed time by swigging Madeira and dredging Cool Ranch Doritos through our two-pound tub of American golden caviar. Escoffier would have disapproved of our drinking on the job, and if he’d known about Doritos, I’m pretty sure he would have disapproved of those, too. However, I’m sure he would have been pleased with our efficiency. Since we’d tackled our day’s workload so effortlessly, I started to fear that we’d taken all the challenge out of Escoffier. I decided to add a course to the next night’s menu, just to keep things interesting.

Drost and I waited until midnight, when the meal was over and everyone was lying around in a food coma, then made a midnight run downtown. We wanted to see if we could get lucky. We did, right in the alley behind an old brick hotel that fronts on Main Street. I was showing Drost a typical covered ledge where pigeons might hang out. I shone my flashlight on the side of the building, fifteen feet up. “I’ve never actually surveilled that ledge,” I said, “but you see that pigeon shit streaking those bricks under there? That’s just the sort of thing you’re looking for if you want to find a sleeping pigeon.” We pulled the ladder down off the car and set it up.

When I climbed up the ladder and got to the ledge, I was greeted by two of the nicest, plumpest squabs I’d seen yet. They were still in the nest. As I lifted the squabs and tucked them into my pockets, I felt the familiar mixture of fear and excitement I got every time I went trespassing around town for pigeons in the middle of the night. I tried to come up with an appropriate thing to say if the hotel manager called the cops on us. I had a handful of different answers that I had thought up over the past year, answers tailored to appeal to other people’s sensibilities: I’m living off the wild; I’m practicing a responsible utilization of a creature that most people regard as a worthless pest; I’m conserving energy by eating locally. Each answer was true, for sure, but each captured only a fraction of the total truth.

Imagine that someone invented a special brain-reading machine, with probes that went into a person’s ears to determine what he or she was primarily thinking at any given moment. If you had plugged such a machine into my head as I collected the squabs, the meter would have read, “This person is having a hell of a lot of fun.”

Fun—there are several hundred thousand words in Le Guide Culinaire, but not that one. Escoffier was interested in professionalism, consistency, productivity, and quality, but I don’t think he was too interested in fun; that’s not what he got paid for. But I can’t think of a better word to describe the feeling I get from participating in the great, endless tradition of American scavenging. There I was, in the middle of the American West, in a town that was built a hundred and some odd years ago over the decaying bones of the vanishing herds of buffalo. At the peak of their existence, the buffalo of the Western plains numbered some forty million animals. Thousands of people hunted the buffalo and lived off the meat, and then the animals were wiped out by market hunters. And the people who killed the buffalo—or maybe their children or grandchildren—built this brick hotel. And now other people stay in the hotel and act civilized. They eat food that came in on trucks from places they’ve never been and will probably never go to. But there I was, beneath the stars, collecting a dinner that had never before been touched by human hands. It seemed like a miracle. At that moment, I was probably the only dude in Montana—maybe even the country—out catching squabs. That realization gave me a deep pleasure, as though I knew the greatest secret in the world.

Secrets are best when you can share them with friends. I climbed down the ladder and pulled the squabs out of my pockets. “Check these out,” I said to Drost. “There’s actually a recipe for squabs like these, right out of the nest.”

The recipe, number 3409 in Le Guide, is pigeonneaux gauthier au beurre d’écrevisse. Escoffier explains: “The word Gauthier does not indicate a particular species of pigeon but is the word once used to denote baby pigeons when they are taken from their nest.” The baby birds are split in half, then covered in butter and lemon juice and cooked very slowly. The nestlings are served with a velouté sauce thickened with egg yolks and flavored with crayfish butter.

Standing in the alleyway, we laughed about Escoffier’s persnickety personality. Drost said, “I can’t believe Escoffier could tell the difference between a squab that recently left the nest and a squab that’s just about to leave its nest.”

To Escoffier’s credit, there was a difference. We ate the nestlings, or gauthiers, on the third and final night of the feast. Kern and Julian did me the favor of handling the last-minute preparations so I could sit at the dining room table. Even though I worked on the dishes all day, it was still exciting and suspenseful to watch the various foods come rolling through the doorway. We started with caviar and poached oysters, followed by sweetbreads in a Madeira sauce and a braised mallard with a sauce of port wine, fresh-squeezed orange juice, cinnamon, ground cloves, and poached cherries. Julian presented the squab nestlings on a dinged-up silver platter that I had found in a Dumpster in Missoula. He had cooked the nestlings in butter and lemon and brought them to the table moistened with their own cooking liquid. The meat of the hatchlings was lighter in color than the meat of the other squabs we’d eaten on the first day: Red and Lil’ Red were like the color of slightly diluted blood, but these nestlings were pinkish. And the bones of the nestlings were softer, too. You could crunch them up and eat them like al dente pasta.

After the nestlings, we experienced a series of failed dishes. The elk and antelope kidney pudding coated our mouths with a faint taste of urine; the blue mussels were so gritty I about broke a tooth; the boar’s ear sausages were rubbery enough to defend themselves against the assaults of my knife and fork. Other dishes were delicious and beautiful. The frog legs from Traverse City were served on the bone; they were as light as olives on the ends of toothpicks. We had starlings stuffed and roasted inside hollowed potato casings. The birds fit as snugly as fighter pilots inside their cockpits. We had poached halibut with hollandaise; prawns and asparagus tips inside baked bowls made from creamed potatoes; black bear loin with sauerkraut; marinated roast leg of boar with plums and vegetables; and sausages of pheasant and boar tenderloin.

The snapping turtle soup was the second-to-last dish we ate. Since my first attempt at making snapping turtle soup had bombed, I was justifiably leery about how it would turn out. During the day I had browned the strips of turtle meat in butter and seasoned them with salt, pepper, and cayenne, then simmered them for thirty minutes in the cooking liquid. While I was working on the dish, I kept getting whiffs of the nasty, sea-monster smell that had permeated my initial attempt. I couldn’t tell if the smell was really there or if it was all in my imagination. Once you get an odor in your nose—or even in your mind—it’s hard to get away from it. The odor pops up like a psychosomatic symptom, a phantom odor.

I first discovered the existence of phantom odors when I shot a mule deer buck in the Missouri Breaks a few years ago. After it fell, the deer slid out of view down a steep, snow-covered hill. I walked to the place where I thought the deer had landed, but the animal had vanished. The trail in the snow simply ended in a patch of sagebrush. On close inspection, I found a small hole. The hole was actually the mouth of a large, bottle-shaped cave. The bottom of the cave was thirteen feet below the surface. I shone my light down there, and sure enough, there was the buck.

We didn’t get the animal out until the next night. With Matt holding my ankles, I was able to hang down into the cave and get a lasso around one of its antlers. The cave had insulated the deer, so its guts had begun to spoil. It stank to high hell. We took the meat home anyway and tried to salvage some of it. It was a lost cause.

Days after messing with the meat, I still couldn’t shake the odor. Even if I smelled a perfectly benign substance, such as a vodka tonic in a bar, I would get a whiff of those nasty undertones of rotten flesh. The sensation didn’t pass for a week.

So when Julian came into the room with the soup, I gave it a careful smell before anyone else had a chance to taste it. Julian had finished the dish with sherry; I could smell that. I could also smell that deathly, sea-monster odor that had permeated my first turtle soup effort. I couldn’t tell if it was a phantom odor or not, so I passed out the bowls. I’d let everyone else decide.

I waited and watched: The soup was received with almost universal favor. I decided to taste it myself; when I did, the nasty odor disappeared. It was like being cured of an ailment. And it wasn’t that the broth was hiding the turtle, either. In fact, the broth delivered and cradled the turtle, so that the flavor of the actual meat burst right through. The meat had a little spring to it, but not too bad. It had just enough texture to let you know it was there. The broth was warm and salty and had an almost primordial quality. Elegant and primordial, all at once. I was astonished. I felt as though my quest to re-create Le Guide Culinaire had come full circle in a beautiful, brilliant way. It had begun with a turtle crossing the road; it was ending all these months later, with a turtle making its way around a table of my closest friends.

But there was still one dish left, the most beautiful of them all. Just as we finished the turtle, Julian was putting wraps on the carpe à l’ancienne. If Escoffier had included pictures in Le Guide, you’d have needed a team of oxen to move the book around. Still, a couple of pictures would have come in handy while we were working on the carp. It was difficult to understand what exactly Escoffier was describing. But when Julian brought out the carpe à l’ancienne, I was glad that I didn’t have any preconceived notions of what it was supposed to look like. If I had, it might have been like reading a book after watching the movie; my imagination would have been hostage to someone else’s ideal. Instead, the fish struck me as a pure surprise. Nina had molded the fish’s body out of creamed carp meat and butter, then reattached the body to the carp’s real head and tail. The scales were made of thinly sliced truffles, and the fish was surrounded by poached oysters, morels, and rockfish quenelles. The whole thing was floating in a bath of rich, red wine sauce. It looked like nothing I’d ever seen, but it was everything I could have hoped for. It was big. It was glorious. It was the most beautiful food item I had ever laid eyes on.

As I admired the carp, I was reminded of my dad. I think he would have gotten a big kick out of carpe à l’ancienne. Not that my dad liked carp. In fact, he wouldn’t touch it. But he had a story about a strange run-in he’d had with a carp. After World War II, he was working for the Metropolitan Insurance Company as a door-to-door salesman on Chicago’s South Side, in some of the poorer neighborhoods. Back then, you didn’t need to send your monthly insurance premium through the mail; instead, a salesman like my dad would come by once a month to pick it up. Because he went to his clients’ homes every month, he got to know some of them pretty well. One time he was visiting with an older woman and he noticed a big roasting pan on top of the heating pipes in her living room. The pan was steaming. My dad was curious, so he lifted the lid. He was shocked to find a gutted carp and vegetable greens cooking inside.

My dad told that story for the rest of his life. In his mind, it was a story about human resilience and ingenuity. He’d say, “Hell, the heater was running anyway. Might as well cook something on there!” I eventually picked up the story for my own use. But I just told it because I thought it was weird to eat carp. I never knew what had put that in my head, but Le Guide Culinaire provided me with a theory. In the introduction to Le Guide’s fish section, Escoffier complains that many excellent fishes are considered by the public to be inferior, for no good reason. He writes, “No doubt, fashion—ever illogical and wayward—exercises her tyrannical sway here, as in other matters of opinion.” When I tasted that organic, free-range, wild carp, I knew what Escoffier meant about the “illogical and wayward” tastes that we all share. It was good, some of the best fish I’ve eaten. I actually felt a little embarrassed about all the foods I’ve passed up over the years for one stupid reason or another.

When I’m about to die, I’ll probably look back on my life and admire certain moments: my first sexual experience, graduating from high school, graduating from college. And if I get married and have kids, I’ll surely look back on those days, too. Also, I think I’ll always remember the day I discovered Le Guide Culinaire. The book is like a tangible manifestation of a recurring dream of mine. In the dream, I’ve been renting an apartment for a year or so. One day I notice a little door in the hallway. I haven’t seen the door before, but I’m not surprised by it. I open the door, and I see that my apartment is five times bigger than I thought it was. There’s a bar and bookshelves, a huge bedroom, a pool table and a balcony. The space has been there all along, waiting for me, but I just never noticed it. And that’s how Le Guide Culinaire made me feel about the world I live in. It opened that door and invited me to see another, bigger side of things.

In that way, I now think of Le Guide as a great argument for biodiversity. To preserve biodiversity, we must learn to embrace differences. And thinking about differences is what got me involved with Le Guide in the first place. I remember standing with my dad in his barn and marveling at Le Guide’s detailed description of turtle slaughtering and wondering what the difference was between fried snapping turtle and snapping turtle soup. That question led to other questions: What’s the difference between a skate and a ray? What’s the difference between a cliff swallow’s nest and a tropical swallow’s nest? What’s the difference between a pig’s bladder and an antelope’s bladder? For some things, the differences were difficult to discern; for others, the differences were remarkable. Either way, Escoffier opened my eyes to the beauty of small differences and to the importance of variety. I want the world to be as big and glorious and varied as possible, and packed full of animals. There’s that old saying, “You are what you eat.” If that’s the case, then I’m many of the animals that live in this world, and I don’t want to give any part of myself up.