Nom de Plume

I like to take Harry on his tromples late at night, usually around 9 or 10. We drive to different (read: better than ours) neighborhoods; I slip on my podcaster and away we go. Lately, I’ve been listening to a lot of Here on Earth. And that’s where I heard an interview with Steven Rinella. He was so enthusiastic that I placed The Scavenger’s Guide to Haute Cuisine on hold. I read it over the weekend, while we were in Soap Lake.

Basically, the premise is this: Rinella has always been what he calls a scavenger. He hunts, fishes, and lives pretty close to the land. He gets ahold of Escoffier’s Le Guide Culinaire, and decides to spend a year gathering the ingredients for a feast, which will be held on Thanksgiving. The book is the story of that year.

It was an entertaining read. Rinella writes as one would expect; his prose is vigorously and colloquially straightforward. He writes about trying to catch pigeons and sparrows, hunting for antelope and sheep, frog gigging, and, most of all, trying to convert his vegetarian girlfriend into a carnivore.

It was this last bit that finally did Rinella in for me. Because frankly, I liked his book just fine — but I thought he was a jerk. Like when he takes his girlfriend home to meet his folks for the first time and his father automatically takes them out fishing. Diana looks ill, but Rinella says nothing. She does it. She’s served up a huge plate of fish at dinner, and Rinella says nothing. She eats it. And all he says is, “Goodie, she’s changing her ways for me.” Finally, at the end of the book, he realizes that it’s fine if she’s a veggie. Of course, by the time he was on the radio, they had broken up altogether.

But jerkitude notwithstanding, I still enjoyed reading this.