How to Cook a Moose (29 page)

While we ate, a ferocious rainstorm blew in and washed away the heavy heat and was gone in twenty minutes; afterwards, the air was golden and almost chilly. Fall had come, just like that.

When we woke up the next morning, the milkweed was growing tall again in the mown meadows, and the air was tinged with autumn. After breakfast, Brendan and I set off into the woods behind our house and, on a wooded path that will remain secret forevermore, we found
our own patch of black trumpets. Brendan spotted them. They were dried and black, like most of the ones Dorcas and I had found, but the fruiting body is there, and we'll watch it for fresh ones.

On the way home, Brendan stopped to look at an enormous scalloped fungus growing at the base of a tree.

“I think this is a hen of the woods,” he said.

I examined it. It looked exactly like a gigantic maitake mushroom, otherwise known as a hen of the woods, also known as the dancing mushroom, because people do a dance when they find it. I recognized it from seeing them for sale in supermarkets, neatly packaged, for around $20 a pound.

“I think you're right,” I said, excited. “You found a hen of the woods! A huge one! You're so good at this.”

“Beginner's luck,” he said.

I handed him the plastic bag I'd brought in my pocket just in case, and together, we gently harvested it and carried it away with us. We guessed from hefting it that it weighed about three pounds. When we got home, we identified it easily; there are no known toxic lookalikes, and it looks identical to its photographs.

A little while later, we dropped that big, fresh, beautiful hen of the woods off at Dorcas's, our first-ever mushroom find, with a note thanking her for showing us the way—a tribute to our mycology guru, and a sign of honor among thieves.

And now we have our own mushroom patches, two kinds, to guard jealously and possessively and secretively.

Chapter Nine

The Great Disappearing Codfish and the Perfect Oyster

One early summer afternoon in Portland, in the gold liquid sunlight and fresh, barely warm air, we took Dingo on a hike along a bluff. We passed a ruined stone villa in a copse, crumbled forts and batteries, and Portland Head Light, the oldest lighthouse in Maine. We watched small birds ride the swells where the waves crashed into the seaweedy rocky shore, stopped to sit on a stone wall so Dingo could loll in a patch of tender young dandelions like an odalisque, prompting us to call him Dingolion and Dandelingo because we were loopy with the beauty of it all—high on it, in fact. Across the bay, old summer houses sat cozily on an island in green scrub atop rocky cliffs. A solitary, blue, trim, old-style fishing trawler with a short mast chugged past the islands to the mouth of the harbor, beyond the lighthouse, out to sea, to catch . . . what? Smelts? What's left out there now, we wondered?

When we got home, I took things out of the fridge to make a sort of New England bouillabaisse, a savory fish stew with carrots, Old Bay, and smoked paprika instead of fennel, orange, and saffron.

I'd bought the cod and shrimp at Whole Foods. The guy at the seafood counter had assured me the cod had been wild-caught in Scandinavia, and the shrimp had been “responsibly” farmed, which I took to mean that it wasn't laden with dangerous bacteria, antibiotics, or shrimp food made of GMO corn and soy by-products.

Neither fish nor shrimp had come from the Gulf of Maine, as there are hardly any left in there anymore. Wild fish are so locally endangered, Whole Foods won't sell them (few people will; and if they do, it's mostly haddock and hake), and they're proud of that fact. It struck me as ironic that the store feels virtuous about importing fish from thousands of miles away; honestly, neither option—selling endangered fish nor selling fish that took a lot of petroleum to transport—seems like a good choice. In spite of my better instincts, being only human, I bought a pound of cod anyway.

As the pot of imported Scandinavian fish soup simmered away, smelling of New England no matter where the fish had come from, I thought of the old legend that the Gulf of Maine was once so full of enormous codfish, some of them weighing up to 700 pounds, you could walk across their backs on the surface of the water. Captain John Smith described the Gulf of Maine as laced with “silvered streams” of fish.

Because cod has almost no fat, unlike herring and other cold-water fish, it's easily cured and stored. In the early colonial days in New England, cod was a booming trade that involved enormous fishing boats and beachfront processing operations that would squeeze oil from cod livers; gut and dry the hundred-plus-pound behemoths caught by the hundreds every day by each boat; and then smoke them or preserve them in salt. This preserved cod was transported in 300-to 900-ton ships all over the world, including the Deep South, where
it was traded for cotton or rum, which was in turn shipped to England and traded for salt, which was brought back to preserve even more cod. This was called the “triangular fish trade”; along with felled lumber and quarried granite, as well as blocks of winter ice that were cut, stored in enormous warehouses, and shipped to the South and all over the world, codfish were the foundation of Maine's economy for hundreds of years.

By the late 1800s, the Gulf of Maine had all but been fished to extinction. Maine's economy started to collapse. Refrigeration made the ice trade moot, and railroads enabled lumber and granite and other goods to be transported more cheaply and efficiently from other places, rather than in the holds of Maine ships.

The Civil War also disrupted the trade routes between the North and South. Lumbermen, fishermen, and granite quarry workers went off to fight—73,000 Mainers in all, the highest proportion of the population of any Northern state. And while the war raged on, 18,000 other Maine men left the coast to take lower-paying, harder jobs in huge offshore fishing industries; even more moved away to farm the rich land in the Midwest, whose soil was deeper and more fertile.

“But,” writes Colin Woodward in
The Lobster Coast
, “a great number of them decided to stick it out on the rockbound coast. Building their own small boats, they set about fishing whatever would provide a living on their own terms. Few would have guessed that the American lobster, that ungainly crawler who infested the bottoms of the coves and harbors outside their bedroom windows, would prove their lasting salvation.”

And it still does—at least these days, at least for now. And when the lobsters are gone, the hardy, scrappy Maine fishermen will find another way to wrest a living from the sea: possibly by cultivating oysters, and possibly by harvesting or farming highly nutritious and ubiquitous seaweed, which is even more humble than lobsters ever were.

Meanwhile, the Maine cod, haddock, and halibut populations have never recovered from all those feverish decades of systematic decimation and profit, and it's likely they never will. But even so, there is still nothing that tastes more purely and traditionally of this wild maritime region to me than fish soup.

New England Fish Soup

Mince 1 large onion, 3 medium carrots, 2 celery ribs, and 7 or so garlic cloves. In a big sturdy soup pot, heat a good dollop of oil. When it's hot, add the vegetables with a dash of Old Bay seasoning, a teaspoon or two, and another of smoked paprika, and stir well.

Thinly slice 2 or 3 spicy pork sausages, ideally chorizo, and throw them in. Add a dash of salt and another of black pepper. Turn the heat down low and let it all simmer, stirring often, for about half an hour, till everything is soft and melded into an aromatic wad of flavor.

Small-dice 4 small red potatoes. Add them to the pot and stir well. Pour in half a bottle of easygoing, dry white wine (Pinot Grigio works well). Turn up the heat till it bubbles, then turn down and let it simmer a while until the alcohol has cooked off and it's reduced a bit.

Add 2 cups of fire-roasted tomatoes or very good tomato sauce, and an 8-oz. jar of clam juice. Add enough broth—vegetable, fish, or chicken—to cover the solids, just over an inch. Bring to a boil and turn down and let simmer. Taste, adjust the seasonings, adding more broth as required.

Chop 1 lb. of cod, haddock, or other firm, white sea fish into bite-size pieces. Peel and likewise chop 3/4 lb. of shrimp. Finely chop a bunch of flat-leaf parsley. When it feels like a nearly finished soup, everything tender and the flavors just right, add the seafood and parsley to the pot and let it simmer, stirring a few times, for 10 more minutes.

Mince 3 to 4 cloves of garlic. Add them to a bowl with a dollop of good-quality mayonnaise and another of olive oil. Mix this quick aioli together and spread on 2 to 4 pieces of hot toast and cut them into triangles. Serve with big bowls of soup. Serves 4.

One fall day a couple of years ago, a USPS Flat Rate Priority box of two dozen oysters in ice packs arrived in the mail from Cape Cod. Beau, a college acquaintance turned Facebook friend, and a fellow food lover, had gathered them himself near Wellfleet, where he lives. When he'd posted a general offer to send oysters for bartered items, I pounced on it within seconds, trying to come up with something to swap.

The postmistress joked with us that we were lucky she hadn't eaten the oysters herself and pretended they'd never arrived. We certainly felt lucky. They were some of the freshest, sweetest oysters either of us had ever eaten. The instant we got home from the post office, Brendan put them on ice and got out the shucker while I made a shallot-vinegar sauce and a ketchup-horseradish-Tabasco-Worcestershire sauce mixture. We poured ourselves some cold white wine and stood at the counter and downed all twenty-four of those oysters with wild gusto. When they were gone, we grinned with dazed, chops-licking glee at each other.

Oysters in this country have a rich and fascinating history. According to
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America
:

The changing role that oysters played in American cuisine, from the wigwams of the Wampanoags to the famous New York City oyster saloons and gradually to the dining rooms from Boston to San Francisco, is a saga that progressed from sheer necessity to serendipity. The Indians taught the colonists to harvest and cook oysters in a stew that staved off hunger, and in 1610 food shortages in Jamestown, Virginia, led settlers to travel to the mouth of the James River, where oysters sustained them. Two centuries later, a feature of the American diet became a between-meal snack at a vendor's stand, and a dozen or two half shells became a prelude to a more substantial oyster pie or, on the West Coast, an oyster omelet known as Hangtown Fry. By 1840, annual shipments of oysters from the Chesapeake Bay to Philadelphia had reached four thousand tons. By 1859, residents in New York City spent more on oysters than on butchers' meat.

I've always had trouble writing about my passion for eating raw oysters. It's akin to writing a good sex scene: both are purely sensual pleasures, immediate and universal at the same time. Putting the particulars into words can feel a little silly and potentially over-the-top if the words aren't absolutely and unswervingly wed to a visceral truth. And there are only so many ways you can describe either experience.