M&M&HP the Finale and where you can get the Whole Story

[Guest guest]

VI. THE PERFECT MEAL

 

 

Two weeks later, I prepared my first-person feast: a meal I had

hunted, gathered and grown myself. The menu featured braised leg of

boar; morels I'd gathered in the Sierras; greens and fava beans from

my garden; bread baked from, O.K., store-bought flour, but leavened

with wild yeasts I'd gathered from the air outside my house; and a

galette made from Bing cherries I'd foraged from a neighborhood tree.

My guests included Angelo and Richard and a handful of other new

friends who'd taught me about hunting and gathering food. The meal

was, among other things, my way of saying thanks. And not just to

them.

 

Any dinner party is a little nervous-making, and I was more nervous

about this one than most. Would this rather haphazard assortment of

people gel? Would the meal be edible? I'd never cooked any of these

dishes; how would they taste? And, guests aside, would the hunter be

able to enjoy eating the animal he'd shot? Trimming and larding the

leg of boar that morning, I wasn't so sure.

 

Cooking is a wondrous process, truly, and that Saturday, spent

entirely in the kitchen, I appreciated its magic in a way I never

quite had before. It was a day of transformations, as one after

another of the raw stuffs of nature — chunks of animal; piles of wild

fungi; the leaves, pods and fruits of plants; and piles of pulverized

grain — took on whole new forms. Bread dough magically rose and

crisped; desiccated mushrooms came back to fleshy life; the leaves of

herbs from the garden inflected whatever they touched; animal flesh

browned and caramelized, turning into meat. All the various

techniques humans have devised for transforming the raw into the

cooked — nature into culture — do a lot more for us than make food

tastier and easier to digest; they interpose a welcome distance too.

It might be enough for other species that their food be good to eat,

but for us, as Claude Lévi-Strauss famously put it, food has to

be " good to think " as well; the alchemies of the kitchen help get us

there, by giving new, more human forms and flavors to the plants and

fungi and animals we bring out of nature. The long, civilizing braise

is a particularly effective one, rendering the meat bloodless and

fork tender. It was when I pulled the leg of boar from the oven to

check if it was done, and a deep, woodsy-winey aroma filled the

kitchen, that I felt my appetite begin to recover.

 

There comes a moment in the course of a dinner party when, with any

luck, you realize everything's going to be O.K. The food and the

company having sailed past the shoals of awkwardness and disaster,

the host can allow himself at last to slip into the warm currents of

the evening and actually begin to enjoy himself. For me that moment

came just around the time that the platter of wild pig made its

second circuit of the table and found many eager takers. The meat was

delicious, with a nutty sweetness that tasted nothing like store-

bought pork; the sauce I'd reduced from the braising liquid was

almost joltingly rich and earthy, powerfully reminiscent of the

forest. I was enjoying myself now, and that's when I realized that

this was, at least for me, the perfect meal, though it took me a

while to figure out exactly what that meant.

 

Was the perfect meal the one you made all by yourself? Not

necessarily; it had taken many hands to bring this one to the table.

The fact that nearly all those hands were at the table was the more

rare and important thing, that and the fact that every story about

the food on the table could be told in the first person. I prized too

the almost perfect transparency of this meal, the brevity and

simplicity of the chain that linked it to the natural world. Scarcely

an ingredient in it had ever worn a label or bar code or price tag,

and yet I knew almost everything there was to know about its

provenance and price. I knew and could picture the very oaks that had

nourished the pig that was nourishing us. I knew the true cost of

this food, the precise sacrifice of time and energy and life it had

entailed.

 

So perhaps that's what the perfect meal is: one that's been fully

paid for, that leaves no debts outstanding. This is almost impossible

ever to do, which is why, real as it was, there was nothing very

realistic about this meal. Yet as a sometimes thing, as a kind of

ritual, a meal that is eaten in full consciousness of what it took to

make is worth preparing every now and again, if only as a way to

remind us of the true cost of our food, and that, no matter what we

eat, we eat by the grace not of industry but of nature.

 

Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for the magazine, teaches

journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. This article

is adapted from his book " The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History

of Four Meals, " which will be published next month by The Penguin

Press.

 

.......bob