A Really Big Lunch by Jim Harrison

Author:Jim Harrison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Published: 2017-07-27T15:31:35+00:00

One Good Thing

Leads to Another

I am intensely knowledgeable on all matters nutritional but somewhat ineffective in applying this knowledge to myself. A friend, the novelist Tom McGuane, once said to me, “You can lecture a group of us on nutritional health while chain smoking and drinking a couple of bottles of wine in less than an hour.”

Sad but true, but how sad? Ben Franklin said, “Wine is constant proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.” Despite this many Americans own a hopeless puritanical streak that makes them beat on themselves as if they were building a tract house. The other day I took out a pound of side pork from the refrigerator, exemplary side pork raised by E.T. Poultry which I favor above all domestic pork. I put the package on the table and circled it nervously like a nun tempted to jump over the convent wall and indulge in the lusts of the body. My intellect warred against this side pork while my heart and taste buds surged. I was again modern man at the banal crossroads where he always finds himself bifurcated like Rumpelstiltskin.

Naturally the side pork won. My art needed it, plus I knew that a simple bottle of Domaine La Tour Vieille would win the battle with pork fat if drunk speedily enough to get down the gullet to disarm the gobbets of side pork. To achieve health one must be able to visualize such things in terms of the inner diorama.

A number of doctors have been amazed that I am still alive, but the explanation is simple: wine. I started out in a deep dark hole being born and raised in northern Michigan which demographically is the center of stomach cancer in the United States. Up home, as it were, they love to fry everything and when short on staples they favor fried fried. To be frank, the French raised me, though I didn’t get over there until my thirties due to a thin wallet. Since my mid-teens I loved and read studiously French literature so that at nineteen in Greenwich Village I was scarcely going to drink California plonk while reading Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Apollinaire. Instead I drank French plonk at less than two bucks a bottle, slightly acrid but it did the job, which was to set my Michigan peasant brain into a literary whirl.

Whiskey is lonely while wine has its lover, food. Last evening here at a remote hunting cabin in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula we ate an appetizer of moose liver (excellent and mild), goose, and woodcock with Le Sang des Cailloux Vacqueyras, Domaine Tempier Bandol, and Château La Roque with Joe Bastianich’s Vespa Bianco with our cheeses.

Wine leads us to the food that becomes our favorite. It would be unthinkable for a Frenchman to eat his bécasse (woodcock) without a fine wine, say a Clos de la Roche, beside his plate, though this fine Burgundy is mostly affordable to moguls who unlike me don’t have the time to hunt woodcock, grouse, doves, quail, and Hungarian partridge.

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