How to Cook a Moose (2 page)

Cooking and Eating at the End of the World

Maine has inspired many, many writers. Maybe it's the combination of the wild, beautiful landscape, the narrative drama of extreme seasons, and the human struggle to survive in such a rugged place, but there's a long literary tradition of people who've written books about their experiences of moving here, growing up here, coming back here, homesteading here, or living off the grid in the far remote North Woods.

And aside from the intrepid natives, this place also seems to be filled with people like me, people who came here “from away” and fell in love with Maine's strong sense of community and fierce work ethic, granite and hemlocks, cold north Atlantic, marshes and coves: people who arrived as newcomers and stayed because they felt a deep sense of belonging here, of being at home.

I grew up in the Arizona desert and always felt alienated by that stark, grandiose, arid land. Its beauty was undeniably awe-inspiring, but my soul craved trees, shadows, dark places to balance the light, texture and contrast. I love the seasons and climate in New England,
the geography and fauna, the changing light, the big, dramatic sky above and the intimate, invitingly human-scaled land below. I love the ghosts here, the powerful old worn-down mountains, scoured and rucked up by an ancient gigantic glacier more than a mile thick, and the rural roads cracked and bumpy with frost heaves, echoing the geography in miniature. My ancestors were all Northern Europeans—English, Norwegian, German—which might be part of why I feel so at home in this briny, rough, cold state. Maybe it's in my blood, maybe it's something else, but love begets obsession, and obsession is what makes books happen.

Hand in hand with my love for this place comes an obsessive, lifelong love of food. I'm not a foodie—I'm an eater: I'm hungry. I'm a girl from Arizona who grew up on hot dogs and Cheerios as well as my mother's homemade breads and soups. I love good food, and I don't care if it's high or low; in fact, I am not even sure what that means. Oysters used to be workmen's food, cheap and plentiful and sold from street carts. Lobster used to be considered a trash fish, back when enormous cod and haddock thronged the Gulf of Maine. Provençal, Roman, and Tuscan food, once the local, homespun fare of peasants and farmers, are all gourmet and expensive now, their ingredients sold in specialty shops. But if you cook those cuisines at home, they're as homey as they used to be, back when paysannes and nonnas cooked over open hearths in farmhouse kitchens.

Eating well and simply is a way of life I consider both a luxury and a necessity. I don't mind spending money on good ingredients or restaurant meals. Some people splurge on new clothes, trips to the spa, power tools, beauty items, cars. . . . I spend all the money I can afford on food and consider it well spent, and I never look back. When I'm not treating myself to a meal at one of Portland's 537 (at last count) astonishingly good restaurants, I prefer, and try to buy, local, organic produce, fish that isn't endangered and/or filled with toxins,
and meat that didn't have to fly around the world to get to my kitchen, from animals who were fed only foods they'd evolved to eat and who were raised and slaughtered as humanely as possible.

For everyday eating, I cook and eat simply, nothing fancy or overly ambitious. My favorite dishes tend to involve just a few ingredients: in summer, pasta with a sauce of fresh tomatoes, garlic, and basil, or a caprese salad of ripe tomatoes with buffalo mozzarella and torn-up fresh basil leaves, or chicken thighs poached in garlic, white wine, and olive oil with asparagus and boiled potatoes. In winter, at least once a week, I make a fantastic recipe I call Peace Chicken from Ottolenghi's
Jerusalem
cookbook, a chicken and basmati rice and onion one-pot stew with cinnamon sticks, cloves, cardamom, dill, cilantro, parsley, then yogurt on top at the end. If I'm in a hurry, I throw together a savory pureed vegetable soup in cold weather, a salad of fish and vegetables and cold boiled potatoes in hot. And one of my favorite summer suppers is a big plateful of nothing but zucchini—fresh off the vine, small and tender—cut into chunks and sautéed with plenty of garlic and good olive oil until it's velvety and luscious and melts on the tongue.

I'm a food populist, a curmudgeonly traditionalist, but emphatically not an elitist. In fact, I get something like a brain rash when I think about food snobbery. How dare anybody be a snob about food? We all eat to live; at its very foundation, it's the fuel of our lives. But in a larger sense, if we're lucky, it can be a source of community, joy, pleasure, and celebration. Eating well is the key to health, and health is the key to well-being. It's a sensual as well as a social and nourishing pleasure—a triple source of happiness.

This passion for eating well but simply seems to be something I share with many new and old Mainers. In recent years, Portland, Maine, has earned a culinary reputation that rivals that of any larger city in the country. But unlike many bigger cities, the feeling here is
down-to-earth and authentic. If they want to survive here, the local restaurants, no matter how esoteric their culinary vision or highly trained their chefs, have to hew to the native Maine honesty, which I would sum up as “no bullshit, no cynicism, no art for art's sake.” In other words, people here are serious about food in a traditional rather than a trendy or overt way. This seriousness takes the form of a respect for the old ways: Maine farmers and lobstermen, brewers of beer and mead, and bakers alike all look to the techniques and patterns of the past. Maine's climate and geography are tough to wrest a subsistence from; the knowledge and hard work of the people who came before, who grew crops in Maine's rocky, thin soil and who pulled a living's worth of fish out of the treacherous tides of the gulf, inform the people who are still doing it now. And so, even though I'm “from away,” and this is a place of long-standing generational continuity and ingrained, and wholly understandable, suspicion of outsiders, Mainers are my kind of people, and Portland's “hunted, fished, foraged, and farmed,” local-and-seasonal ethos is my kind of eating.

In 1942, the great food writer M. F. K. Fisher published a treatise on how to survive poverty and hardship called
How to Cook a Wolf.
Written during the wartime era of rations, shortages, and scrimping, the title refers to the proverbial beast with open jaws that shows up, slavering with hunger, in times of need and poverty, privation and sacrifice. To keep the wolf from the door means to have enough money, barely, to eat and live. Throughout the book, Fisher provides techniques and recipes with limited ingredients for surviving the lean times the country had fallen into in the 1930s and early '40s. These recipes have humble names like Quick Potato Soup, War Cake, Addie's Quick Bucket-Bread; there's also a very basic but serviceable Boeuf Tartare. Chapter headings include “How to Keep Alive,” “How to Comfort Sorrow,” and “How to Be Content with Vegetable Love.”

It's an unusually (for Fisher) straightforward, didactic book about “living as decently as possible with the ration cards and blackouts and like miseries of World War II.” But her tone is anything but grim, or rather, any grimness it contains is undergirded with humor. In the introduction, Fisher writes, “War is a beastly business, it is true, but one proof that we are human is our ability to learn, even from it, how better to exist.” Her optimism is as comforting as any I've ever found in literature, as is her final chapter, “How to Practice True Economy.” The title is ironic; she ends with the most luxurious, decadent recipes she can think of: Shrimp Pâté that calls for butter and mayonnaise and four pounds of fresh shrimp; savory Eggs with Anchovies, which involves quantities of eggs, cream, mushrooms, and Parmesan; and a fabulously rich Colonial Dessert, made of two cups thick cream, four egg yolks, and one cup brown sugar, that sounds like a sort of American crème brûlée.

In one of the book's final lines, Fisher writes, “I believe that one of the most dignified ways we are capable of, to assert and then reassert our dignity in the face of poverty and war's fears and pains, is to nourish ourselves with all possible skill, delicacy, and ever-increasing enjoyment.”

This last sentence echoes one of my own most deeply held convictions: that eating both well and wholesomely, insofar as it can be done within one's budget and means, with elegant balance and the occasional indulgent luxury, is an expression of hope and dignity as well as a cause of happiness.

Fisher was writing about wartime deprivations, a bygone era when food was scarce and money was tight. But when the Great Depression hit the United States, people in Maine were largely unaffected, or rather, they'd always been in a depression, a perpetual three-hundred-year one, so they had already developed their own means of combating and surviving it. A book like
How to Cook a Wolf
would have taught
these Mainers nothing; they had been cooking the proverbial wolf for centuries. And long before the first Europeans settled here in the 1600s, the native Indian tribes who lived in this barely habitable northeastern corner of the country had eked out a subsistence with seasonal migration, moving inland, where they hunted deer, moose, and smaller mammals, then back to the ocean, where they caught fish, porpoises, seals, and mollusks.

Up here in the northeast corner, life is hard but sweet. Happiness is simple when you don't need much in the way of material possessions or glitz, when you work hard for what you have and stay true to your roots, your community, yourself. As I wrote this book, I came across a lot of amazing people, some natives, some “from away,” many of them young, all of them interesting, smart as hell, and down-to-earth. I talked to them and ate meals they'd cooked and saw how they live and work—chefs, fishermen, farmers, and “ordinary” New Englanders who know as a matter of course how to forage for mushrooms and oysters, grow and can vegetables, tap maple trees, hunt and fish, build houses and chop wood, and get through a long winter without going nuts. I loved meeting them all.

This region is populated by people with a resourceful ability to make do in hard times, to figure out solutions to seemingly insoluble problems, and to survive. For me, the people themselves are the greatest resource in this abundant and generous place. I'm honored to be able to live among them and to write about them.

The things I've learned here can be applied many other places, too, of course, and the people I've met have their counterparts in many other regions: New Mexico, Minnesota, British Columbia, and Georgia, for example. I moved here from Brooklyn, New York; even there, in that urban hotbed of hipster cool, people are going back to the old ways: pickling, canning, growing vegetables, fishing, hunting,
and cooking food from scratch, with whole ingredients that are as local and seasonal as possible.

Common sense is returning to American food and eating habits after decades of prevalent, glamorous, easy, cheap junk-food technology, packaged chemicals that mimic real food. Even so, it's not so simple to combat the entrenched and super-powerful forces of corporate food and agribusiness: The wolf is back at the door these days, but this time, he's howling and hungry for food that's not only cheap, but also delicious, nourishing, and not unduly harmful to the ecosystem and natural environment. In the face of the complexities of balanced decision-making that go into every meal I shop for or cook or order, I find myself asking, in general, “What should I eat?”

I think I've found some answers here in Maine.

Chapter One

Landing in New England

The wolf was usually at our door when I was growing up in Arizona in the 1970s. However, by dint of various scrappy techniques Fisher would have lauded, such as economical cooking and thrift-store shopping and a knack for joy and festivity that made mealtimes fun, no matter what hardships we were facing, our mother got us through our childhood in good health and spirits. She mixed powdered milk into real milk, disguised cheap, tasty beef tongue in stews, and served beans in every way, shape, and form. From my mother, I learned how to dine well on very little. I also learned that, while it's preferable to have plenty of money, being poor can be an adventure if you have the right attitude about it.

Even so, as a little kid and on into high school, during all those years when my family was poor as hell, I wanted very badly to be rich. In fact, I yearned to be an English aristocrat, a character in a Jane Austen novel, maybe, a more contemporary version of one of her beautiful, vapid heiresses; being stupid seemed like an okay trade-off for the wealth I'd have, as long as I was gorgeous as well. I dreamed of
living in a palace or mansion or great hall, with servants, a canopy bed, a breakfast room, balls and parties. I didn't see why this shouldn't be; it seemed unfair that I hadn't been born a duchess, a cruel trick of fate. I had the aspirations of a child who devoured heaps of books about rich people, past and present, and instinctively craved the opulent trappings of luxury, but whose real-life circumstances and family philosophy ran counter to her tastes.