Prime Cuts

Editor’s Note: American poet and writer Jim Harrison, died on March 26, 2016. In a career spanning more than 50 years, he produced 21 volumes of fiction, 14 books of poetry, two books of essays, a children’s book and a memoir. Harrison remains popular among sportsmen who both appreciate his fine writing and identify with any number of his indulgences, of which he partook as if ignorant of the word moderation. The essays in Just Before Dark give a taste of his appetites. Here are some excerpts from a few of them.

- Jim Harrison

"Sporting Food”

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.