Best Food Writing 2014 (17 page)

I
t was certainly the best meal I've ever eaten while sitting in snow. Maybe one of the best meals I've eaten anywhere.

A friend and I had spent a January morning ice fishing, then an afternoon with shotguns slung across our backs, snowshoeing the cedar-lined shore of one of those Boundary Waters lakes that look like claw scratches along the Canadian border.

The day's result: Zero fish. One snowshoe hare.

Back in camp we balanced a soup kettle on a teetering propane stove, melted some snow and slowly defrosted a frozen block of venison stew. By headlamp, in the late afternoon darkness, we scooped olive oil, turned gelatinous from the cold, into a camp skillet, browned the skinned and butchered hare, then added the thighs, shoulders and saddle to the bubbling, wine-rich stew.

An hour later, squatting outside a glowing tent, we improvised a table from an upside-down enamel pot in the snow, set the kettle of stew on top of it, and ladled out two steaming bowlfuls. Clouds of our own breath drifted through the cones of our headlamps, as we forked up gravy-glazed carrot and onion, and big, dripping cubes of venison shoulder, our forks clanking against the metal bowls with
our shivering. We peeled fat shreds of glistening hare from the bones with our brittle fingers, and agreed that there was really nowhere else we'd rather be.

The dish failed every test of Food Styling 101. This was not fine dining.

But it was many other kinds of fine, seated as we were at a stock-pot table, under a frozen dome of stars, as guests of that gruffly hospitable country, tasting meat that had been flavored by the willows and cedars rocking in the wind around us, before it had been flavored by garlic, red wine and a mirepoix.

It was a reminder, sometimes obscured by talk of gear, techniques and trophies, that hunting is not an end in itself, but a means to an end. And that end is the table—whether a turned-over cooking pot in a snowbank or candlelit white linen.

A reminder, as well, of what wild game can be when cleaned immediately, cooled quickly, butchered with care, and cooked with gratitude—not just lean and healthy, not just full of Omega-3s, not just ecologically sensible, but to many of us, quite simply, the best tasting meat in the world, and the most complete expression of our connection to wild places.

A Local World-Class Gift

During a recent extended stay in rural France, I was able to observe the hunter-cook connection at its most intimate. One day our neighbor, Jean-Luc, came home with a double brace of snipe from an undisclosed local wetland. He spent 15 minutes in the middle of the street, describing every detail of how he would roast them en brochette, as their long necks swung loosely from his hand.

Another day, I found myself leaning against a truck after a morning's mushroom forage with two hunter-farmers who would, in their way, fit seamlessly into a Stearns County bar. They were parsing the precise preparation of each type of mushroom in their baskets, arguing heatedly over whether lactaire mushrooms grilled over a vine-wood fire were best served with, or without, a persillade of finely chopped parsley and garlic.

That kind of thing doesn't happen in the Midwest as often as our game deserves.

Well cared for, the game of Minnesota is a world-class gift. Even a brief tour among its species might lead a culinary traveler past such wonders as seared wood duck breast with foie gras, pheasant cacciatore, cottontail hasenpfeffer, squirrel pad Thai, roast wild turkey stuffed with Honeycrisp apples, sautéed woodcock with chanterelles, a daube of whitetail venison or minted grouse breasts with wild mushroom risotto.

I merely mention these things. Of course, boneless, skinless chicken breasts are fine, too.

From Field to Kitchen

But let's be clear. “Well cared for” means you can't heave a gutted four-point buck in the back of your pickup and drive for four hours through the slush of Interstate 35. You can't walk trails all day with that morning's grouse in your vest pocket. And you can't leave a bag full of soggy mallards on the garage floor for very long and somehow expect to work a little Thomas Keller magic when you get to the kitchen.

Here, along those lines, are some very personal and noncomprehensive rules.

       
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Warmth in the field is the enemy of taste at the table. Put the gun down for just a minute, O Nimrod Son of Cush, and field-dress your animal right away. Meat lockers are cold for a reason.

       
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Save the heart and the liver. No, seriously, it's all concentrated right there. If you just can't bring yourself to eat them whole, mince them and add their rich flavor to a pan sauce.

       
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Use really short cooking times, or really long cooking times. Either medium-rare, or braised until it falls off the bone.

       
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Cook legs and thighs (furred or feathered) long, rich, wet and slow.

       
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Duck breast looks like steak. Cook it like steak.

       
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Venison looks like steak. Cook it like steak. That medium-well backstrap medallion that feels like a flexed quadricep and looks like a hockey puck? Yeah, it's gonna taste like a hockey puck.

       
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Wine is good.

       
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Grilling is good (but it isn't the only way).

Remember: They've been doing this for a long time in Italy and France.

They've been doing this for a long time in Mexico.

They've been doing this for a long time in the hills of Vietnam, Laos and Thailand.

We can all still learn a thing or two.

Back in the Woods

About 400 years ago, a party of pretty quirky Brits, somewhat newly arrived, took matchlocks and fowling pieces and headed into the New England woods with their native hosts. I'd like to think it was a congenial hunt, with flat November light filtering down through the beeches and chestnuts. I'd like to think there were some jocular insults tossed back and forth, and taken the right way, and that there was time afterward to lean against whatever the 17th century had to offer in the direction of a pickup truck, in order to talk over the day's events.

Such talk, I'm certain, would have been heavy with more or less accurate recountings of soft-footed stalking, sharp reflexes, misfires and cold toes.

But it's worth noting that history has forgotten the particular exploits of the hunters on that occasion. It has not forgotten the work of the cooks.

Which leads me to the second best wild meal I've ever eaten—the tenderloin of a Michigan whitetail, grilled and served medium-rare on an ancient table in a white cedar cabin with no electricity. The chef was a Marquette hunter and friend, who cares to get things right.

There were six or eight of us at the table. Not a particularly sentimental crew. But we did know instinctively what word to use at the end of the meal.

It's not a bad word to have in mind when thinking about good cooks. Or about the deer you're eating. Or the snowshoe hare. Or their wild, native country. Or, for that matter, about olive oil and garlic. Or thyme and rosemary. Or chile peppers. Or lemon grass. Or the wanderers who brought such things with them from so far away, and then decided to stay and add their flavor to the communal pot.

At the end of the meal in Michigan, we turned to the cook and said, “Thanks.”

I
once asked the manager of one of those small, influential shops where groupies Instagram their drinks, to describe his ideal customer. We were a few beers into the afternoon and he took a moment to collect his thoughts before giving a description of a generic somebody with urbane tastes (good palate, good income) and an open mind (willing to try anything once, even coffee without milk). Then I asked him to describe his nightmare customer. He shot back: “An old Italian man who thinks he knows everything about coffee just because he was fucking born in Italy.”

The moment that old Italian man places an order, the manager said, the lectures start: hold it like this, there's too much of that, there's not enough of this, it should taste like that, you're doing it all wrong. At some point, the old man grows exasperated and fatherly and tells the staff that if they want to understand the soul of espresso, they need to go to Italy.

The way the manager told it, that was the punchline. Conventional wisdom might hold that the coffee in Italy is an art form, but
that's just folklore—nobody at the cutting edge of the coffee industry cares about the coffee in Italy.

To be sure, there's a reverence for illycaffé—the official if unnecessarily slickly branded name for the company better known as illy—and their ability to produce quality coffee on a large scale. (
Espresso Coffee: The Science of Quality
by Andrea Illy and Rinantonio Viani, a dry, textbook-like tract of detailed information, is required reading for any serious professional.) But that's it. There's no interest in other big coffee roasters, or small coffee roasters, or coffee buyers, or coffee bars or baristas. This rising generation of coffee artisans looks to Melbourne, Oslo or San Francisco, not Milan, Rome or Turin.

In part, it's because the mystique of espresso has faded. A well-made shot is always a pleasure, but it's no longer thought of as the highest expression of the roasted bean. Instead, we're living in an age of filter coffee, and the tastemakers who are reshaping the industry tend to be more interested in how the brilliant clarity of a simple cup of brewed coffee illuminates the strange, delicate flavors you can find in the beans from a particular region, or farm, or lot on that farm, than in a syrupy espresso. If a roaster or buyer travels to origin (industry speak for the countries where coffee is grown), and goes through the trouble and expense of sourcing high-quality ingredients, it's with the goal of presenting a coffee that's distinctive, unusual, maybe even challenging. You go halfway around the world and sample 400 coffees in a week in search of something beautiful and unique, not familiar and safe.

But even if you take filter coffee out of the picture and only look at espresso, the scene in Italy is ossified, the coffee a relic from an era that might have been at the apex of quality and flavor back when televisions used antennas nut that hasn't evolved much since. Mystery blends, regional roasts, beans stored for months or even years: this was fine when Americans were drinking watery swill from a percolator, and the Swedes used coffee as a mixer for their morning aquavit, and the British had to take a hovercraft to Calais to see an espresso machine, but the world caught up, and then it moved on. Go to The Coffee Collective in Copenhagen, or Heart Coffee Roasters in Portland, or Coffee Lab in São Paulo, and you'll have a shot so elegant and floral that it will bend your mind and reshape your understanding of what you can find in an espresso; go to the
peach-colored marble counter of a coffee bar in Verona, and you'll enter a flavor time machine set to 1975.

Although if you do go to The Coffee Collective, or Heart Coffee Roasters, or Coffee Lab and you order an espresso, it won't be prepared on a machine made in Denmark, or in the United States, or in Brazil. It will be pulled on an Italian machine, with beans pulverized by an Italian grinder. Faema, Mazzer, La Marzocco, Nuova Simonelli, la Pavoni, La San Marco: these are the names of manufacturers so admired that they end up on t-shirts and in tattoos. In the convoluted relationship that high-end coffee has with Italy, nobody follows Italian coffee, but everybody pays close attention to Italian machines.

Last October, the manufacturer Nuova Simonelli unveiled a prototype called the Black Eagle 0388, the newest model in the Victoria Arduino line. It's a handsome object. While many espresso machines have the boxy silhouette of an air conditioner, the Black Eagle has the low-slung profile of a fast, jumpy car: slim chassis, lattice side panels, wishbone legs. It's two axles and one drivetrain away from going for a couple of laps around a test track.