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Overview
The bestselling author of thirty-nine books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry—including Dalva and Returning to Earth—Jim Harrison was one of our most beloved and acclaimed writers, adored by both readers and critics. In Just Before Dark, Harrison’s essays and articles have been selected from twenty-five years of work, from venues as diverse as Playboy, The Nation, Outside, and the American Poetry Review. They explore the passions and concerns of a classic American writer—from ice fishing to bar pool, nouvelle cuisine and night walks—with keen insight and great humanity. It is an exceptional reminder of why Harrison was one of our most cherished and important writers.
“One of the most interesting and entertaining bodies of work by any writer of his generation.” —Alan Cheuse, Chicago Tribune
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780802190079 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grove/Atlantic, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| Sales rank: | 491,989 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Sporting Food
Small portions are for small and inactive people. When it was all the rage, I was soundly criticized for saying that cuisine minceurwas the moral equivalent of the fox-trot. Life is too short for me to approach a meal with the mincing steps of a Japanese prostitute. The craving is for the genuine rather than the esoteric. It is far better to avoid expense-account restaurants than to carp about them. Who wants to be a John Simon of the credit-card feedbag? I'm afraid that eating in restaurants reflects our experiences with movies, art galleries, novels, music: that is, experiences that inspire mild amusement but mostly a feeling of stupidity and shame. Better to cook for yourself.
I eye the miniature Lake Superior brook trout I have grilled over an oak fire, the sliced tomatoes, fresh corn, and wild leeks vinaigrette, and think back to a winter day when it was a few degrees above zero and I was out on the ice of Bay de Noc near Escanaba in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, beyond the last of the fish shanties. It doesn't matter how far but rather how long it took to get there — an hour out and an hour back to my hotel, the House of Ludington. Unfortunately, I was caught in a whiteout, a sudden snow squall out of the northwest, and I couldn't see anything but my hands and cross-country skis, a short, broad type called Bushwhackers, which allow you to avoid the banality of trails. I turned myself around and tried to retrace my path, but it had quickly become covered with the fresh snow. I had to stand there and wait it out because the evening before a tanker and a Coast Guard icebreaker had come into the harbor, which meant there was a long path of open water or some very thin ice out there in the utter whiteness. I would most certainly die if I fell in, and that would mean, among other things, that I would miss a good dinner, and that's what I was doing out here in the first place — earning, or deserving, dinner.
I became very cold in the half an hour or so that it took for the air to clear. I thought about food and listened to the plane high above, which was circling and presumably looking for the airport. With the first brief glimpse of shore in the swirling snow, I creaked into action, and each shoosh of ski spoke to me: Oysters, snails, maybe a lobster or the Kasseler Rippchen, the braised lamb shanks, a simple porterhouse or Delmonico, with a bottle or two of the Firestone Merlot or the Freemark Abbey Cabernet I had for lunch ...
The idea is to eat well and not die from it — for the simple reason that that would be the end of my eating. I have to keep my cholesterol count down. There is abundant dreariness in even the smallest health detail. Skip butter and desserts, and toss all the obvious fat to the bird dogs. But as for the dinner that was earned by the brush with death, it was honest rather than great. As with Chinese food, any Teutonic food, in this case smoked pork loin, seems to prevent the drinking of good wine. In general, I don't care for German wines for the same reason I don't like the smell down at the Speedy Car Wash, but perhaps both are acquired tastes. The fact is, the meal required a couple of Heileman's Exports, even Budweisers, but that occurred to me only later.
Until recently, my home base in Leelanau County, in northern Michigan, was over sixty miles from the nearest first-rate restaurant, twice the range of the despised and outmoded atomic cannon. This calls for resourcefulness in the kitchen, or what the Tenzo in a Zen monastery would call "skillful means." I keep an inventory taped to the refrigerator of my current frozen possibilities: local barnyard capons; the latest shipment of prime veal from Summerfield Farms, which includes sweetbreads, shanks for osso bucco, liver, chops, kidneys; and a little seafood from Charles Morgan in Destin, Florida — triggerfish, a few small red snappers, conch for chowder and fritters. There are two shelves of favorites — rabbit, grouse, woodcock, snipe, venison, dove, chukar, duck, quail — and containers of fish fumet, various glacés, and stocks, including one made from sixteen woodcock that deserves its own armed guard. I also traded my alfalfa crop for a whole steer, which is stored at my secretary's home because of lack of space.
In other words, it is important not to be caught short. It is my private opinion that many of our failures in politics, art, and domestic life come from our failure to eat vividly, though for the time being I will lighten up on this pet theory. It is also one of the writer's neuroses not to want to repeat himself — I recently combed a five-hundred-page galley proof of a novel, terrified that I may have used a specific adjective twice — and this urge toward variety in food can be enervating. If you want to be loved by your family and friends, it is important not to drive them crazy.
The flip side of the Health Bore is, after all, the Food Bully. Several years ago, when my oldest daughter visited from New York City, I overplanned and finally drove her to tears and illness by Christmas morning (grilled woodcock and truffled eggs). At the time, she was working at Dean & Deluca, so a seven-day feast was scarcely necessary. (New Yorkers, who are anyway a thankless lot, have no idea of the tummy thrills and quaking knees an outlander feels when walking into Dean & Deluca, Balducci's, Zabar's, Manganaro's, Lobel's, Schaller & Weber, etc.) I respected my daughter's tears, albeit tardily, having been brought to a similar condition by Orson Welles over a number of successive meals at Ma Maison, the last of which he "designed" and called me at dawn with the tentative menu as if he had just written the Ninth Symphony. We ate a half-pound of beluga with a bottle of Stolichnaya, a salmon in sorrel sauce, sweetbreads en croûte, and a miniature leg of lamb (the whole thing) with five wines, desserts, cheeses, ports. I stumbled to the toilet and rested my head in a greasy faint against the tiled walls. Welles told me to avoid hat-check girls, since they always prefer musicians. That piece of wisdom was all that Warner Brothers got for picking up the tab.
Later, John Huston told me he and Welles were always trying to stick each other with the tab and once faked simultaneous heart attacks at a restaurant in Paris. In many respects, Orson Welles was the successor to the Great Curnonsky, Prince of Gourmands. This thought occurred to me as I braced my boots against the rocker panel to haul the great director from his limousine.
When my oldest daughter, who had since moved to Montana (where the only sauce is a good appetite), came home to plan her wedding, her mother cautioned the Food Bully, threatening the usual fire extinguisher full of lithium which we keep in the kitchen for such purposes. While dozing, I heard my daughter go downstairs to check out the diminishing wine cellar. (I can't hear an alarm clock, but I can hear this.) Certain bottles had been preserved for a few guests the evening before the wedding: a '49 Latour, a '61 Lafite, a '47 Meursault (turned, but the disappointment was festive), a '69 Yquem, and a couple of '68 Heitz Martha's Vineyards for a kicker. It was a little bizarre to consider that these bottles are worth more than I made the year my daughter was born.
That first late evening, we fed her a winter vegetable soup with plenty of beef shanks and bone marrow. By the next evening, she was soothed enough for quail stuffed with lightly braised sweetbreads, followed by some gorgeous roasted wood ducks. This meal was a tad heavy, so we spent the next afternoon making some not-exactly-airy cannelloni from scratch. Later, I pieced up two rabbits and put them in a marinade of ample amounts of Tabasco and a quart of buttermilk, using the rabbit scraps to make half a cup of stock. The recipe is an altered version of a James Villas recipe for chicken (attribution is important in cooking).
The next evening, we floured and fried the rabbit, serving it with a sauce of the marinade, stock, and the copious brown bits from the skillet. I like the dish best with simple mashed potatoes and succotash made from frozen tiny limas and corn from the garden. The rabbit gave me a thickish feeling, so the next day I broiled two small red snappers with a biting Thai hot-and-sour sauce, which left me refreshingly hungry by midnight. My wife had preserved some lemon, so I went to the cellar for a capon as she planned a Paula Wolfert North African dish. Wolfert and Villas are food people whom you tend to "believe" rather than simply admire. In this same noble lineage is the recent Honey from a Weed by Patience Gray (Harper & Row), a fabulous cookbook. Gray's a wandering Bruce Chatwin of food.
Naturally, I had been floundering through the deep snow an hour or two a day with my bird dogs in order to deserve such meals. But enough was enough. I hadn't exactly been saving up for the big one. A cautionary note here, something Jack Nicholson said to me more than a decade ago after I had overfed a group in his home: "Only in the Midwest is overeating still considered an act of heroism." Still, I find it important to go on with eating, not forgetting the great Lermontov's dictum: eat or die.
So I eye the brook trout again and consider my options. It is almost the fall bird season, when the true outer limits of my compulsion are tested. Perhaps when winter comes I will resume running at night, all night long across frozen lakes, trying to avoid the holes left by the ice fishermen.
1988
CHAPTER 2Meals of Peace and Restoration
I believe it was the late John Wayne who said, "It pushes a man to the wall if he stands there in the buff and looks straight down and can't even see his own weenie." I think it was John Wayne who said that. However, I'm a poet and a novelist, not a John Wayne authority, and so what if I'm a tad burly? In my childhood we prayed every evening for the starving children in Europe, causing a primitive fear of hunger. There are also the scars from my youthful New York City art wars, when I thought I was Arthur Rimbaud and the average dumpster ate better than I did. And then there is the notion of the French surrealist poet Alfred Jarry: "I eat, or someone will eat in my place." In any case, I have decided it is time to escape the sodden mysteries of personality and try to help other folks. Not that I really wish to become the Baba Ram Jim of food advice, but something calls me to offer a handful of garlic along the way.
Times have changed. We have seen the passing of the blackjack and the accordion. Few of us sing alone on our porches on summer evenings, watching the sexual dance of fireflies in the burdocks beside the barn. The buzz of the airport metal detector is more familiar than the sound of the whippoorwill or coyote. The world gets to you with its big, heavy, sharp-toed boot. We are either "getting ready" or "getting over." Our essential and hereditary wildness slips, crippled, into the past. The jackhammer poised daily at our temples is not fictive, nor is the fact that all the ceilings have lowered, and the cold ozone that leaks under the door is merely a signal that the old life is over. There is a Native American prophecy that the end is near when trees die from their tops down (acid rain).
To be frank, this is not the time for the "less is more" school when it comes to eating. The world as we know it has always been ending, every day of our lives. Good food and good cooking are a struggle for the appropriate and, as such, a response to the total environment. Anyone who has spent an afternoon in New York has seen the sullen and distraught faces of those who have eaten julienned jicama with raspberry vinaigrette and a glass of European water for lunch.
But let's not dwell on the negative, the wine of illusion. You begin with simple truths in food: for instance, peeling sweetbreads is not really exercise. When you're trimming a two-pound porterhouse, don't make those false, hyperkinetic motions favored by countermen in delicatessens. Either trim it or skip trimming. Eat the delicious fat and take a ten-mile walk. Reach into your memory and look for what has restored you, what helps you recover from the sheer hellishness of life, what food actually regenerates your system, not so you can leap tall buildings but so you can turn off the alarm clock with vigor. Chances are you will come up with something Latin — I mean food that is quite different from our own in areas of fruit growth, food from a place where garlic and flowers abound, where there are blue water and hot sun. At the bottom of dampish arroyos are giant butterflies and moths, extravagantly plumed birds that feed on the remains of lightning and sunbeams, the unique maggots that feed only on the spleens of road kill. Farther up the cliffs, where the cacti are sparser, rattlers sun themselves. At first you are uncomfortable, then disarmed by the way the snakes contract over hot coals. They are particularly good with the salsa that goes by the brand name Pace.
Last March I was hiking out of the Seri Indian country, south of Caborca along the Sea of Cortés, with Douglas Peacock, the fabled grizzly-bear expert. We were both out of sorts: he, because he can't seem to make a living; I, because my sinus pain was so extreme that I had to bash my head against the car door and specific boulders we passed. Luckily, we were able to dig a full bushel of clams at a secret estuary and make a hearty chowder with a pound of chilies and garlic, which started me on the road to recovery. Broiled tripe from an unborn calf helped, as did giant Guaymas shrimp. After this infusion of health I was able to dance five hours with a maiden who resembled a beige bowling ball. She was, in fact, shaped rather like me. In the morning my clothes were crisp from exertion; my head, bell clear. The world seemed new again — like a warm rain after a movie.
One late-November night, on the Navajo reservation in Arizona, I was camping out with two old men who I was reasonably sure were witches, although kind witches. I was researching a film on the life of Edward Curtis and that morning had received word that the studio had fired me again. But that night there was a big moon through the intermittent snow, and above the fire a posole was cooking, with its dark freight of several different chiles, a head of garlic, sun-dried hominy, and the neck, ribs, and shanks of a young goat. After eating the posole, we hiked in the moonlight, and one of the old men showed me his raven and coyote imitations, jumping in bounds the length of which would have shamed Carl Lewis.
Posole is a generic dish, and I've eaten dozens of versions and made an equal number of my own. The best are to be found in Mexico. Menudo is a similar dish and a fabulous restorative, the main ingredient being tripe. I would offer specific recipes, but you should immediately buy Authentic Mexican by Rick and Deann Bayless, published by William Morrow. And if you are in Chicago, you can literally eat your way through the book at their splendid restaurant, Frontera Grill. I've made a good start on the project.
Curiously, though, menudo has specific effects around which you can design a day. Picture yourself waking on Sunday morning with a terminal hangover and perhaps a nosebleed, though the latter has fallen from favor. You have a late-afternoon assignation with a fashion model you don't want to disappoint with shakes and vomiting rather than love. Just eat a couple of bowls of menudo sprinkled with chopped cilantro and scallions, wild Sonoran chiltepines, and a squeeze of lemon. The results are guaranteed by the tripe cartel, which has not yet been a victim of arbitrage.
Last fall I felt intense sympathy for a friend, Guy de la Valdène, who was arriving in Michigan for bird season after a circuitous road trip through Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota. If you've ever passed through them, you doubtless know that these are not food states. On the phone I could tell that Valdène's spirit was utterly broken, so three days before his arrival I began making Paula Wolfert's salmis de cuisses de canard, from her Cooking of SouthWest France. Since there were to be two of us, I increased the recipe, using nineteen duck legs and thighs, a couple of heads of garlic, two pounds of lean salt pork (homemade by my butcher), a half-cup of Armagnac, a bottle of Echêzeaux, and so on. (Wolfert's new effort, World of Food, can also be read as an edible novel.) During the three days of preparation, it occurred to me how Ronald Reagan was outsmarted by François Mitterrand a few years back. Reagan purportedly concentrates on a diet of lean fish, turkey breast, raw zucchini, and jelly beans, while Mitterrand snacks on caviar, truffles, foie gras, and jellied calves' feet and drinks fine bordeaux and burgundy (rather than Reagan's habitual Riunite on the rocks with seltzer). At least George Bush eats pork rinds — a step in the right direction. Anyway, I helped my friend directly to the table, and within twenty-four hours we had finished the dish, his health completely restored.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Just Before Dark"
by .
Copyright © 1991 Jim Harrison.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
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Table of Contents
Introduction,
Part I: Food,
Sporting Food,
Meals of Peace and Restoration,
Hunger, Real and Unreal,
Then and Now,
Consciousness Dining,
The Tugboats of Costa Rica,
Midrange Road Kill,
The Panic Hole,
Piggies Come to Market,
The Fast,
What Have We Done with the Thighs?,
Part II: Travel & Sport,
A Plaster Trout in Worm Heaven,
The Violators,
Ice Fishing, the Moronic Sport,
La Véncrie Françise,
A Memoir of Horse Pulling,
Bar Pool,
Guiding Light in the Keys,
Canada,
Night Games,
Okeechobee,
A Day in May,
A Sporting Life,
The Last Good Country,
The Preparation of Thomas Hearns,
Bird Hunting,
Log of the Earthtoy Drifthumper,
Going Places,
Don't Fence Me In,
Part III: Literary Matters,
A Natural History of Some Poems,
Bending the Bow, by Robert Duncan,
A Chat with a Novelist,
The Nick Adams Stories, by Ernest Hemingway,
Afterimages: Zen Poems, by Shinkichi Takahashi,
The Dreadful Lemon Sky, by John D. MacDonald,
The Snow Walker, by Farley Mowat,
The Snow Leopard, by Peter Matthiessen,
Fording and Dread,
Passacaglia on Getting Lost,
Revenge,
Night Walking,
From the Dalva Notebooks, 1985-1987,
Everyday Life: The Question of Zen,
Poetry as Survival,
Paul Strand,
Dream as a Metaphor of Survival,
Bibliography,