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The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand

Jim Harrison

By Jesse Kornbluth
Published: Jul 23, 2017
Category: Food and Wine

I’ve never read Jim Harrison. I saw the film of Legends of the Fall, which is universally agreed to be a drop-dead masterpiece. I certainly knew the legend of Harrison: an outdoorsman with the soul of a poet and the prose style of an angel. I was aware that he’d lost an eye in an accident when he was seven, and that he had a good reason for drinking life by the gallon. From his obituary: “In the summer of 1962 his father and younger sister went on a hunting trip and were killed by a drunk driver in a car crash. Harrison had delayed their departure, dithering over whether to go with them; he blamed himself for not being there and for not letting them leave earlier. He also realized he needed to commit to his calling. ‘There couldn’t be any higher obligation on earth. Because if people you love die, what are you going to do?’”

A smart friend, understanding that I was going to be sleeping a lot and not eating much, gave me Harrison’s collection of magazine pieces about food. Smart thought. Read the account of one food adventure, set the book down, come back when you’re hungry again. It’s the right idea. If you avoid gluttony, “The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand” is almost as enjoyable as A.J. Liebling’s Between Meals. [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]

“Good food,” Harrison believed, “is a benign weapon against the sodden way we live.” By that he meant good food… in quantity. “Life is too short for me to approach a meal with the mincing steps of a Japanese prostitute,” he wrote. “On long road trips, I have a weakness for biscuits with sausage gravy, a nutritional holocaust unless you’re bucking bales or hand-digging well pits. When I order this dish, covering it with a fine pinkish haze of Tabasco, I remind myself that the following day is a fresh start.” It’s for this reason that his friend Tom McGuane said that if he added up all the weight Harrison had mentioned losing over their years of correspondence, it would top two thousand pounds.

For most readers, this level of consumption sounds like nothing less than slow-motion suicide. Harrison would disagree. He hunted and fished, on the theory that finding and killing dinner burned nearly as many calories as the meal. The evidence is contradictory. He flew to France for the day to eat a 37-course lunch for his food column in Esquire. And he once ate 144 oysters just to prove he could. “The idea is to eat well and not die from it — for the simple reason that that would be the end of your eating,” he wrote. “At age fifty that means I have to keep a cholesterol count down around 170. There is abundant dreariness in even the smallest health detail. Skip butter and desserts and toss all the obvious fat to your bird dogs.”

I read this book with a pen and marked line after line, as if eating popcorn shrimp.

“…a steak the size of the M volume of the Brittanica…”

“Writers are simply holes in the earth out of which is mined the raw material of stories.”

“Who needs to be hungry to eat?”

After a massive lunch at Ma Maison, in Beverly Hills, with Orson Welles: “I braced my boot on the limo’s doorsill to hoist the great director to the curb.”

“Sometimes the only answer to death is lunch.”

“The simple act of opening a bottle of wine has brought more happiness to the human race than all the collective governments in the history of earth.”

Rest in peace, bro.

[thanks to KMM]