Chicks and Ducks and Geese Better Scurry...

The Scavenger’s Guide to Haute Cuisine, by Steven Rinella

By Allen Jones, 3-19-06

I should wear my biases on both sleeves: Modern adventure writing, as an art form, feels to me about as lifeless as a bug on a board, skewered maybe by our universal access to jet travel and Lonely Planet guides. In a landscape once occupied by Burton and Speke, Ross and Franklin, we now have a hundred thousand "top ten" articles written by kids casting themselves as principals in their own heroic narratives. Exhibit A is the execrable post-Quammen, post-Cahill Outside. I’m young, I’m hip, and here’s what I’m doing with my time. Don’t you wish you were me. As a thirty-something, financially struggling outdoorsman and writer, the surest way for me to feel old and poor is pick up a copy of Outside, flip through page after page of Lycra pressed kayakers, climbers, bikers. Don’t any of these people have jobs?

All of which is to say, in a roundabout sort of way, that I came to Steven Rinella’s excellent new book, The Scavenger’s Guide to Haute Cuisine, with a skeptical eye. Another first person adventurish kind of narrative from a youngish Outside writer. Having recently met the guy (he currently lives in Miles City), had a few beers at Chico, I'm relieved now to say that my skepticism was misdirected. Crackling with enthusiasm and energy, alive with honest curiosity, here’s a book that’s an altogether unexpected kind of creature: Adventure writing ameliorated by cooking school and natural history, with maybe a soupcon of ethical philosophy thrown in for the salt.

Here’s the deal. A few years ago, Rinella, a young Michigan writer then living in Missoula, Montana, was handed a copy of “French master chef Auguste Escoffier’s 1903 magnum opus, Le Guide Culinaire, a 5,012-recipe compendium on haute quisine.” In his day, Escoffier was “known as the King of Chefs and the Chef of Kings; he cooked for the likes of Kaiser Wilhelm II, Frederick VIII, the Duke of Orleans, Queen Victoria, the Prince of Whales, the Khadid of Egypt, the emperors of Austria and Brazil, the shah of Persia, and the king of Greece.” He was also partnered up with the hotelier Cesar Ritz. “Ritz ran the hotels; Escoffier ran the kitchens in the hotels.” As a hunter and fisherman, someone preoccupied with filling his own freezer, Rinella resolves to spend a year putting together a forty-five course, Escoffier-guided feast. Turtle, sparrow, carp. Squab, boar, elk. Duck, salmon, stingray. “It was strange. Here was this big ol’ fantastic cookbook and most people wouldn’t even be able to buy this sort of stuff anymore. A lot of it would take a guy like me to make it. A guy who could find it himself.” While it's true that Rinella can be pretty pleased with himself (“a guy like me”), it's never in such a way that he diverts our interest. His meal will be an extended culinary piece de resistance, a trip down nineteenth century gastronomy lane. To make things more interesting, in the midst of his red in tooth and claw, stomach-filling project, it turns out that his girlfriend is a vegetarian. One of his hopes for the meal is that it will be tasty enough to distract her away from her chosen, meatless lifestyle.

Most of the book’s chapters are devoted, in one way or another, to harvesting the components of his future feast. Rinella wants to show us, often dramatically, what it means (in a physical as well as a moral sense) to take a living, breathing animal from its environment and put it on your table. “I got one elbow over the top of the support, and then the other. I had my pen light between my teeth, and I tried to get the beam pointing in the right direction. When I did, I was looking into a pigeon nest that was indeed made of drinking straws, both the big kind and the little ones you get in mixed drinks.” From a start with squab, he goes on to rabbit hunting (we learn how to determine a rabbit’s age, something to do with a loose bone in the leg as well as the fragility of the ears) and then to sparrow trapping. Turns out there’s a gentleman bird watcher in Iowa who, in the interests of preserving eastern bluebirds (English sparrows are outcompeting them) manufactures the best sparrow traps in the world. “When I told Floyd that I had been trying to catch sparrows with a stick-and-prop trap over the winter, he just rolled his eyes. Floyd builds his traps from scratch, right from stock pieces of metal.”

Rinella has a talent for narrative digression. A description of digging for clams, for instance, segues easily into a discussion of Jewish dietary law (kashrut). “At that moment, I was probably the only guy in the world who was digging shellfish, which are not kosher, with two Jewish girls.” He also has a novelist’s ability to capture a person’s character in only a few lines. The fisherman who takes him after halibut in Alaska is said to resemble, “in shape and strength, the pylons that support his house over the tidal waters of Saltry Cove, Alaska...His hair is white and slightly wavy. His mustache is neither trim nor out of control. On his left wrist is a tattoo of a stylized wolf head – the symbol for his clan. He wears canvas pants and heavy cotton shirts. He changes his shirt every two days, but he changes his pants on a slightly more flexible schedule...His suspenders are S&M grade – black and thick and trimmed with leather.”

Rinella’s other conspicuous strength is in building a certain kind of narrative tension. The clock is ticking on his coming feast, and the sailing is not always smooth. “One friend of mine, a painter, said she wanted to try it [the snapping turtle] just to see if it tasted as bad as it smelled. She dipped the ladle in and sipped. ‘It does,’ she said.” Other obstacles? A number of Escoffier’s recipes insist on including “the sacred trinity”: foie gras, Perigord truffles, beluga caviar. All three ingredients are, for various reasons, out of Rinella’s reach. About foie gras (goose liver fattened by force feeding), Rinella writes, “...in the foie gras battle, animal rights activists have an advantage; it’s hard to argue that the sponsorship of a painful, deadly disease in livestock is not an abomination of animal husbandry.” In lieu of foie gras, Rinella eventually substitutes a batch of wild goose livers he found in his freezer. For the Perigord truffles (a couple thousand dollars a pound), he substitutes a more affordable variety; and for Beluga caviar, he substitutes whitefish roe from the Great Lakes. Things are coming together.

In the final chapters, after frog-gigging and eel-smoking, after a brief discussion of crayfish catching and the aesthetics of grizzly bear turds (“As I turned a piece over in my hand, I was startled to see the hair was actually a small black bear’s finger and claw. I have a collection of wild animal shit, and I added that specimen as the centerpiece in my display case.”) he finally approaches the three days of his feast with a frenetic kind of angst, drafting a pair of friends as sous chefs to help spin the various plates. “My problem, I began to realize, was that the contents of the jam-packed freezer amounted to abstract, unknowable quantities. At night I started going out to the garage for the sole purpose of staring at all the boxes and shelves of ingredients. I couldn’t imagine where to begin.”

It’s a measure of the book’s success that, not unlike revealing an Agatha Christie denouement, it would feel wrong to give away too much about the meal’s success or failure. No matter. One way or another, you find yourself coming away from the reading with a deeper affinity for your food, a heightened consciousness about that bloodless, Saran-wrapped porkchop in your Albertson’s cart, maybe a little bit of shame regarding the obliviousness with which you set your own table. And while there are certainly flaws (Rinella’s cookbook preoccupation has about it the slightest, freezer-burn whiff of a stunt pulled off in order to write a book about it) they are insignificant when compared to the larger accomplishments. Elk liver to blue mussels, bighorn sheep to saddle of antelope larded with bear fat, The Scavenger’s Guide to Haute Cuisine is finally a full meal unto itself.

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