How to Cook a Moose (26 page)

Maple syrup and venison, including moose meat, go hand in hand in native northeastern American cuisine. Both are available in the wild, and moose are hunted in the spring, the season when maple trees are tapped. Both demand skill and prowess as well as knowledge of the woods to obtain.

Venison cooked in maple syrup was considered by the indigenous tribes as a dish fit for the chief. An Algonquin legend has it that a chief's wife, needing water for that night's venison stew, accidentally grabbed a bucket that had been left by a maple tree, into which sap had dripped all day, after her husband had made a gash in the tree earlier with his tomahawk. The resulting stew was so delicious, he requested it thereafter.

Maple syrup was a mainstay of Wabanaki cuisine, much as salt was for the British. The Wabanaki legend about maple syrup is equally telling: Glooskap, their benign, caretaking, heroic trickster god, whose name has many variants, decided that the original abundance of sweet syrup oozing year-round from the broken branches of maple trees was making the people too lazy, and too fat, which was destroying their civilization. So he watered it down in the trees, one measure for each day between moons (creating the present-day ratio of sap to syrup), and made it harder to get and available only for a brief time each year. Then the Indians had to make buckets to catch it, collect wood for the fires, and heat rocks to boil it down. Thereafter, the Wabanaki tribes held an annual festival during the maple-sap season, honoring their Creator, who provided them with this precious sweet fluid.

Glooskap's mythological lesson—an appreciation of nature's bounty is necessary for survival, as well as a practical work ethic and generationally shared know-how—is reflected exactly in the values I see everywhere in Maine today, whether these skills are used for present-day sap gathering or moose hunting.

Most of the native Indians of Maine died out tragically, brutally fast, during a three-year period called “The Great Dying,” from 1613 to 1619, of smallpox and other European diseases against which they had no antibodies, no chance of recovery. Successive plagues in ensuing years killed most of the rest of them; by the end of the eighteenth century, the few Wabanaki who had survived had fled to Canada.

But before they were wiped out, they generously taught the newcomers many of their secrets, which live on here, still.

Chapter Eight

The Essential Blueberry and the Wild Mushroom

Like the moose and the maple, mushrooms and blueberries exist in the wild up here and are there for the taking to anyone intrepid enough to come and get them. Unlike the moose and the maple, though, they require no special skill to collect or hunt, beyond knowing where the blueberry patch is and which mushrooms are edible and where to find them. This turns out to be astonishingly easy. Throughout Maine and the White Mountains, there is a bounty of these edible plants; in fact, in the growing months, the northeast corner is a cornucopia of delicious, healthful, literally organic food, a free lunch just growing there, to be taken away by anyone lucky enough to find it. Foraging up here is easier than in places further south; it turns out that having a real, harsh winter causes plants to look the way they ought to once they finally grow again in the warmer months. (This strikes me as yet another reason to love the winters up here.)

I arrived here a city-slicker ignoramus about so many things. Amazingly, the only time I'd ever picked blueberries was back in August of 1969, the month I turned seven, the year before we moved from Berkeley to Tempe, when my mother and sisters and I spent the summer with my grandparents in their rented farmhouse in Midcoast Maine. It was near a beach whose name I don't remember; we called it Blue Boat Beach because of an upside-down dinghy that was always there. That summer, we picked wild blueberries that grew in a meadow near our house. They were warm and sweet and bursting with juice. We were West Coast kids, and had never had blueberries before. My sisters and I gorged on them as fast as we could pick them.

My scant lessons in foraging continued in 1980, when I lived in the Allier, the rural center of France, the year after high school. There, I picked up basketfuls of sweet, meaty chestnuts in the forest. We roasted them in the fireplace around Christmastime. Peeling them hurt our fingers, but the meat was so sweet and rich, it was worth it. In the spring, I gathered the peppery, bright-green watercress that grew in a large, stream-fed stone pool, and put it into salads with lamb's ear lettuce. It was a thrill to go outside and find food growing naturally.

A few years later, when I was in college, I spent summers on an island off Nantucket called Tuckernuck, where my mother's then husband's family had a house. The small island had no paved roads, electricity, or stores, nothing but twenty or so old shingled cottages scattered through grassy moors and scrubby woods. We went surf fishing at dawn for striped bass and bluefish, casting out into the waves, standing waist-deep in the water. When I reeled in a fish, I clonked it on the head to kill it, then slit its belly open with a sharp knife and reached in and pulled out its entrails, feeling as macho as Hemingway. Later, on the breezeway of our house, I attached it by the tail to a big,
rough clipboard and scaled it. We baked these fish with herbs and potatoes. They always tasted better than any other fish I'd ever eaten, because we'd caught them ourselves earlier that same day, straight out of the ocean.

We also took quahog rakes and a bucket out in the dory at low tide to pull huge, knobby clams from just under the sand on the shallow seafloor. A bucketful of them yielded a big pot of chowder, with some effort and time, and it was always worth it. Just as with the wild blueberries in Maine and the chestnuts and watercress in France, it was even more exciting to eat the food we'd found or caught than it was to eat lettuce, tomatoes, and cucumbers from the little kitchen garden. Gardening takes a lot of ongoing work, whereas foraging in any form feels romantically primitive and elemental and is instantly rewarding. The taste of the wild is seductive. Those blueberries I ate as a little kid have stayed with me like a visceral, instructive taste-memory: The act of eating food straight from its source, raw, unprocessed, still warm from the sun or briny from the ocean, is possibly the best eating experience there is.

Blueberries are so easy to find and identify, a seven-year-old can do it. But hunting mushrooms always struck me as a scary process best left to the experts. Never having hunted them, I imagined mushrooming as something like an Easter egg hunt—you prowl around the woods until a glowing white or pearlescent orb leaps at your eye. Of course, as a novice, I planned to invest in guidebooks and exercise extreme, obsessive caution, but what I was really gunning for was to tag along with a local experienced guide, someone to teach me the difference between edible and toxic fungi: morels and “false morels,” chanterelles and jack o'lanterns, chicken of the woods and the intriguingly (and no doubt accurately) named sulphur shelf.

Fresh mushrooms are amazing, sautéed very briefly in olive oil with garlic, thyme, lemon juice and zest, tossed with hot linguine and
topped with parsley and Parmesan cheese, but they're not worth dying for, or even spending a night doubled up in acute gastrological pain for. Very few things are.

Even though they're associated with Maine, the first time I picked wild blueberries after I moved up here was in New Hampshire, on Foss Mountain.

It was late August, and I had spent that whole summer learning to drive. I took my test three days before my fifty-second birthday; I had never gotten my driver's license before. No one taught me as a teenager, and once I got into my twenties, I developed some sort of phobia about it: I didn't want to learn. I was irrationally convinced I'd crash and die if I got behind the wheel. My college boyfriend taught me, but I never took the driver's test, and then, after I moved to New York, it was moot, because I took subways or walked everywhere, or my husband drove.

But now that I lived up here, it seemed ridiculous that I couldn't drive myself to the grocery store, couldn't take Dingo to the Eastern Prom when Brendan was out of town. Everyone—even cretins and nincompoops—had driver's licenses. Why not me? So I learned, which is to say, Brendan taught me, all over again. I parallel-parked around the Western Prom, angle-parked in the mall parking lot, and tootled us around town and back and forth, to and from the farmhouse, all summer long.

Although Brendan was an excellent and thorough teacher, and I had been the principal driver of the family for three months, I hardly slept the night before my driver's test. I lay awake, going over parallel parking in my mind: cut hard to the right, reverse, gradually straighten it out to back in at a diagonal, cut hard to the left, ease it
in, straighten it out . . . all night long. In my mind's ear, I heard my hard-ass driving instructor saying, “What are you DOING?!” and “You have to pay attention!” and “NOOOO!!”

We got up the next morning at six o'clock, which for us is pre–crack of dawn. I showered, then fed and walked a sleepy and perplexed Dingo while Brendan made coffee. There was a sepulchral silence in the kitchen as we ate our toast. Shaky from insomnia and nerves, I drove us the hour and a half from Portland to the DMV in Tamworth, New Hampshire. I made so many uncharacteristically nerve-wracked mistakes on the way that if it had been my driving test, I would have failed several times over.

“I'm going to flunk,” I wailed.

Dingo, his head in the rearview mirror, ears at half-mast, seemed to concur, if his consternated expression was anything to go by.

“I'll probably hit a tree on my test.”

“You'll be fine,” said my instructor. “You know what you're doing. Just relax. I promise, you will pass.”

He later told me that he knew exactly what the test would entail; this was the same DMV where he had gotten his driver's license, sixteen years before.

My examiner was a taciturn, portly man with a short white Afro who had me drive for fifteen minutes on gently rolling country roads. Remembering to signal, stop, check my mirrors, and obey the speed limits, I took a right, another right, a left, then a right, and another right. Then came the hard part: He asked me to back the car into a spot in an empty church parking lot. I couldn't see the white lines I was supposed to park between and had no other cars to guide me, so I fucked it up not once, but twice; I'd asked for a do-over. After all that anxiety, he hadn't had me parallel-park at all; unfortunately, I'd practiced reverse parking exactly twice.

I drove out of the parking lot in disgrace, took a left turn onto the sleepy road, a right turn onto the two-lane route I'd started on, and suddenly, there we were, back at the DMV. It was over.

“I took some points off for your parking,” said the examiner. “Because frankly, that was”—he paused, as if searching for the correct word—“terrible.”

With a dour expression, he handed me the score sheet. And then I saw that he had checked the box next to pass.

I leapt from the car, giddy with joy, threw my arms around my strict, demanding, handsome driving instructor, who was waiting there with Dingo, and waltzed inside. As she took my beaming photo, the DMV lady told me, “Oh, honey, no one can park; we all park like crap. I practically hit my own garage every night.”