Rinella - The Scavengers Guide to Haute Cuisine: How I Spent a Year in the American Wild to Re-create a Feast from the Classic Recipes of French Master Chef Auguste Escoffier

ITS ALMOST TIME FOR THANKSGIVING dinner and Im just now beginning to stuff the bird. But no matter how hard I stuff, I cant get it to fit inside the bladder. Im following a recipe from French master chef Auguste Escoffiers 1903 magnum opus, Le Guide Culinaire, a 5,012-recipe compendium on haute cuisine. The book is pinned open on the counter with a one-quart jar of stingray marinade. Technically, the dish Im making calls for a duck to be poached inside a pigs bladder. But when I killed a wild boar in Northern California last summer, I accidentally punctured its bladder with my skinning knife. So Im trying to make do with an antelope bladder and half a duck. I push and pull and stretch, but it wont go.

The poached bladder is just one of the courses from Le Guide Culinaire that Im attempting to construct tonight. Altogether, I have the ingredients for fifteen dishes scattered throughout the kitchen here in Miles City, Montana. Or, I should say, I have the ingredients for thirteen dishes scattered around; the makings of the other two courses are still wearing their feathers and fur.

My two squabs, or baby pigeons, are cooing and preening in the coop that I built last summer. The birds names are Red and Lil Red, and Ill be using them in Escoffiers pigeonneauxen crapaudine. In an hour they need to be plucked, flattened, dipped in butter, grilled, then served with gherkins and Escoffiers sauce diable, or devil sauce.

The remaining dish is a pt of cottontail rabbit. For all I know, the key ingredient is still hopping around south of town. My two brothers, Matt and Danny, left this morning with a group of our friends to hunt pheasants and rabbits along the Powder River, but its getting dark and they still havent returned.

I keep busy as I wait for the rabbit. After lifting some strips of black bear fat out of a bowl of brandy, I refill the bowl with a handful of wild boar sausage. Then I begin prepping the fixings for a freshwater matelote, a soup made from white wine, stock, and a medley of fish. Ive already peeled the crayfish tails, so I trim some fillets of smallmouth bass, walleye, and bluegills and remove the long, serpentine spine from an eel.

If everything goes right, I will prepare forty-five courses from Le Guide Culinaire over the next three nights. I have at my fingertips a collection of the books ingredients, which I gathered from all corners of the country over the past year. As I work along, converting raw material to food, the last year of my life literally passes through my fingers. The stingray marinade takes me back to a Florida beach, where my buddy Kern and I wrestled in a stingray amid a throng of hostile tourists. The black bear fat makes me remember the glaciers of Alaskas Chugach Range, which turn the eerie blue color of gel toothpaste when the sun breaks through the clouds. The eel makes me think of Ray Turner, a self-proclaimed old hairbag by the river who operates an eel weir in upstate New York, keeps an emu for company, and once built a fireplace from a rock that he found by the grave site of an Indian princess.

Back when I first discovered Le Guide Culinaire, I knew Id stumbled into a strange, lost world. In his day, Escoffier was known as the King of Chefs and the Chef of Kings; he cooked for the likes of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the Duke of Orleans, Queen Victoria, the Prince of Wales, the Khedive of Egypt, the emperors of Austria and Brazil, the shah of Persia, and the kings of Denmark and Greece. If Escoffiers list of clients just sounds like a bunch of people who figured into World War I, you might approach him through the more familiar lens of American music:

Why dont you go where fashion sits

Puttin on the Ritz

That ditty from 1929 was written by Irving Berlin, the same guy who wrote God Bless America. In Puttin On the Ritz, Berlin is referring to the Ritz hotels created by Csar Ritz, whose name is synonymous with taste and class and ostentatious display. In large part, Ritzs reputation rested on his long partnership with Auguste Escoffier. Ritz ran the hotels; Escoffier ran the kitchens in the hotels. When Escoffier collected his methods in Le Guide Culinaire, he produced a work that single-handedly revolutionized French haute, or high, cuisine.

As old as it is, the book didnt seem to me like a historical document when I found it. Instead, I saw it immediately as a scavengers guide, an inventory of all that is bizarre and glorious and tantalizing about procuring your own food and living off the wild. I tore into it, hell-bent on re-creating as many of its recipes as I could. I allowed myself a year, and now all that time has come down to these moments, these three nights, and Im filled with overwhelming anxiety along with a touch of giddiness. Ive got friends here from all over the country tonight. If I cant pull off this feast, this last year of my life will seem a little less extraordinary.

I go outside to see if my brothers are back yet with some rabbits. Theyre not. I take a peek into the pigeon coop. Its dark out, and the two squabs are sitting on their perches, oblivious to what lies ahead. The older pigeon, Red, has one of the younger pigeons feathers stuck in his bill. Theres plenty of room for the two to spread out, but they make a sport of pecking at each other in a ritualistic sort of dance. They usually shadowbox, but now and then Red connects. Im visited by this weird sense of guilt every time I look at them. Catching the squabs required almost a years time and several near-death experiences. When I first started chasing pigeons with the thought of trying some of Escoffiers thirty-four squab recipes, I thought of the birds as dirty pests. But after catching a few and raising the squabs by hand, I came to see the birds as a metaphor for the contradictions of a society that has distanced itself from the production of its food. Now that Im moments away from prepping the birds, I lament that its going to be an awfully abrupt ending for such a long story. In Escoffiers day, people killed squabs by smothering them. The ancient Romans drowned their squabs in red wine. I might use a hatchet.