The Hemingway Cookbook (26 page)

3 potatoes, peeled and quartered

2 small, ripe bananas, chopped

½
cup chopped fresh cilantro

Heat the olive oil in a large skillet. Add the onions, garlic, cumin, cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, red pepper, turmeric, and ginger. Stir until well mixed. Add the tomato puree and stock and simmer over low heat for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add the birds, cover, and cook for 10 minutes. Add the potatoes and bananas and cook, covered, for 15 minutes, or until the potatoes are just tender. Add the cilantro and cook, uncovered, for 5 minutes, or to desired consistency.

A good day in Sun Valley, Idaho.

Mike Reynolds, one of Hemingway’s preeminent biographers, and his wife, Ann, visited Marty Peterson, Hemingway Society member and codirector of the 1996 International Hemingway Conference, in Boise. Marty set out to host a small dinner party with a Hemingway theme. His cousin, Bill Tate, had a small breeding herd of eland at his ranch in Grandview, Idaho. He provided the meat for a memorable meal. Eland is remarkably similar to veal and he prepared it picata style. Given N’bebia’s training at the Governor’s house, it is likely that this dish was in his vast repertoire. Many thanks to Marty Peterson for sharing this recipe.

Eland Piccata

4
SERVINGS

1 yellow onion, diced

4 green onions, chopped

2 cloves garlic, chopped

2 tablespoons olive oil

2 pounds eland, cut into thin slices

Salt

Freshly ground pepper

All-purpose flour, for dredging

¼ cup butter

3 tablespoons dry sherry

3 tablespoons lemon juice

2 tablespoons capers, chopped

¼ cup chicken stock (optional)

Thin-cut lemon slices

¼
cup chopped Italian parsley

Sauté the yellow and green onions and garlic in olive oil until yellow onions begin to become transparent. Set aside. Pound the eland slices with a meat pounder until flat. Sprinkle them with salt and pepper to taste and dredge lightly in flour. Heat the butter in a large skillet over moderately high heat and lightly brown the eland, turning each piece once. Add the onions and garlic. Transfer the meat to a serving platter and keep in warm oven.

Place the skillet over high heat and add the sherry and lemon juice. Scrape up the brown particles in the pan. Add the capers. Allow the sauce to thicken. The chicken stock may be used to dilute the sauce or extend it if desired. Pour over the meat. Garnish with lemon slices and parsley and serve immediately.

Oxtail Stew

4
SERVINGS

2 pounds oxtails, cut into pieces

Salt

Freshly ground pepper

3 tablespoons peanut oil

4 cups water

2 onions, chopped

2 cloves garlic, minced

½
teaspoon crumbled dried oregano

1 green bell pepper, chopped

3 tomatoes, peeled and chopped

1 tablespoon capers

2 potatoes, peeled and cut into 1-inch pieces

Season the oxtails with salt and pepper to taste. Heat the peanut oil in a stockpot over medium heat. Add the tail pieces and brown thoroughly for 8–10 minutes. Add water, onions, garlic, oregano, and green peppers, and cook for about 1 hour, or until the tail meat is just tender. Add the tomatoes, capers, and potatoes and continue cooking until the potatoes are tender, about 15 minutes. Mash up some of the potatoes to thicken the stew. Cook for another 15–20 minutes and serve.

It was also over N’bebia’s campfire that Ernest and Mary cultivated their taste for lion, which they first ate raw after Ernest’s first kill in 1953:

Ernest’s lion was a young male in his prime, four or five years old, with immense fore- and hind-leg muscles and thick bones and muscles in his paws. Watching the skinning, Ernest bent down and with his pocketknife cut out a bit of the tenderloin beside the spine, chewed some and offered me a tidbit. We both thought the clean pink flesh delicious, steak tartare without the capers. Denis scoffed that it would make us sick and Philip (Percival) politely declined a taste. In Kenya neither the natives nor the whites ate lion, having against it some taboo which they would never define for me.
⁶

They would eventually develop several recipes for lion meat, which they found “firmer than Italian veal, but not tough, and as bland in flavor without a hint of the wilderness. Later [they] dressed it up with garlic and onion and various tomato and cheese sauces, as [they] had done with
vitello
in Italy.”
⁷
In December 1955, Ernest provided a recipe for a
Sports Illustrated
article entitled “A Christmas Choice of Fair and Fancy Game.” Receiving top billing above President Eisenhower’s Colorado Mountain Trout and Baron de Rothschild’s Hare a la Royale was the following dish by the most famous sportsman of them all. Although its creator is falsely claimed to be a “first-rate cook,” the recipe itself is pure Hemingway. To re-create this dish, simply follow Ernest’s instructions, substituting veal for the lion fillet.

Ernest Hemingway’s Fillet of Lion

First obtain your lion. Skin him out and remove the two strips of tenderloin from either side of the backbone. These should hang overnight in a tree out of reach of hyenas and should be wrapped in cheesecloth to prevent them being hit by blowflies.

The following day, either for breakfast, lunch or dinner, slice the tenderloin as though you were cutting small tenderloin steaks. You may cut them as thin or as thick as you like, and if you should be fortunate enough to have eggs, which will usually be brought in by natives for whom you have killed the lion, if these natives possess chickens, dip the small steaks in beaten and seasoned egg and then in either corn meal or cracker meal or bread crumbs. Then grill the steaks over the coals of an open fire.

If you have no eggs, simply grill the steaks, basting them preferably with the lard made from eland fat, after having salted and peppered them liberally, but not using too much salt to destroy the delicate flavor.

If you are fortunate enough to have lemon or sour orange in camp, serve a half of lemon or sour orange with each portion of lion steak.
⁸

Sun Valley and Ketchum, Idaho

In September 1936, shortly before he left to cover the Spanish Civil War, Hemingway hunted grizzly bears near the Nordquist Ranch on the far edge of Yellowstone National Park near the Montana border. Ernest killed two bears and experienced that familiar yet fleeting elation when the hunting or the fishing or the writing went very well. When a third grizzly was killed a few days later, “he insisted on a lunch of bear steaks. … The meat was rank and stringy, cooked middling rare, and eaten in the form of sandwiches made from sourdough pancakes spread with orange marmalade. But Ernest consumed his portion with obvious gusto, chewing long and appreciatively, his black beard glossy with bear fat.”
⁹

This was Ernest Hemingway in his element. As much as he enjoyed living and fishing in Cuba, and as much as Spain drew him in the late 1930s, he felt most genuinely at home in the mountains and valleys of Wyoming and eventually in and around Sun Valley, Idaho, where Ernest lived the last few years of his life.

Ernest’s arrival in Idaho in 1939 coincided with the outbreak of war across Europe and the de facto end of his second marriage to Pauline Pfeiffer. Returned from war in Spain, working hard on
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, and having recently moved to Cuba with soon-to-be third wife Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway returned for another fall season of hunting in Wyoming. When Pauline joined him there, recently back from Europe with a bad cold, Hemingway’s fear of illness and desire to escape his marriage drove him to summon Martha to meet him at the newly opened Sun Valley resort in central Idaho.

Hemingway and the lion that succumbed to his bullet on the Serengeti Plain, January 1934.

Averell Harriman and the Union Pacific Rail-road developed the village of Sun Valley to be a world-class ski resort. Gene Van Guilder ran publicity for the resort, and Lloyd Arnold was its photographer. The chief publicity campaign for the resort involved attracting celebrities to show off the skiing and hunting that Sun Valley offered. Hemingway and Martha occupied suite 206 in the Sun Valley lodge, which he later renamed “Glamour House.” Although Ernest was suspicious of Gene and Lloyd at first, they quickly became good friends and hunted together regularly. When Gene was tragically killed in a hunting accident, Ernest delivered a stirring eulogy, part of which now graces Hemingway’s own memorial just outside Sun Valley, overlooking Trail Creek. Lloyd Arnold would eventually write a book about Hemingway’s days in Idaho,
High on the Wild
, which contains many of his wonderful photographs of Papa with his friends and family and other celebrities such as Gary Cooper, Ingrid Bergman, and Clark Gable.

In the late 1950s, when Ernest and his last wife, Mary, decided it was time to finally leave Cuba, they returned to Idaho to settle in the land they truly loved. They bought the Topping estate, with dramatic views of Ketchum, Adam’s Gulch, and the mountains. Hemingway lived out his final few years in Ketchum, until he ended it, on his own terms, on a sunny morning in July 1961. He is buried in the Ketchum Cemetery.

Hemingway was drawn to Idaho for the hunting. He did very little fishing and in fact hunted primarily birds, including duck, pheasant, sage hen, and partridge. Lloyd Arnold recounts one of his first hunting trips with Hemingway, who was characteristically enthusiastic about his forth-coming adventures:

My wife Tillie and I were barely out of bed the morning of September 22 [1939] when Ernest called about breakfast with us.

“Good morning, Chief. What a beauty Indian summer day….”

Ernest said that the ducks on the lagoon by the sun deck at Glamour House were his alarm clock that morning. “I came to, reaching for a gun….”

He’d gone to sleep on my Idaho Encyclopedia and had been absorbing it since first light. “A hell of a lot of state, this Idaho, that I don’t know about.”
¹⁰

Ernest’s standard western-ranch-style breakfast was a fried-egg sandwich, complete with the ubiquitous raw onion. He would later revive his taste for this breakfast while on safari in 1953, when the overabundance of exotic game dishes rekindled his appetite for the simple, hearty breakfast of his days in Wyoming and Idaho. To re-create Ernest’s hunting breakfast, fry up an egg in plenty of butter and make the sandwich of the egg, ham, some thickly sliced onion, ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, and a mustard pickle on slices of hearty bread.
¹¹

In the later years, the Hemingways rarely ate out in Ketchum. Occasionally they would have a steak at the Alpine, dine on leg of lamb prepared by Gloria, the Basque owner of the Rio Club, host a party at the Trail Creek Cabin, or have a special meal at the Christiania Restaurant on Sun Valley Road, where Ernest had his last meal on the evening of July 1,1961. But Ernest and Mary usually ate at home in the later years, or shared a meal with close friends like Duke MacMullen or Lloyd and Tillie Arnold.