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A review by sandyd
The Scavenger's Guide to Haute Cuisine by Steven Rinella
4.0
Interesting, but a bit uneven. This young guy who grew up in Michigan with a bunch of brothers (in family that does a lot of hunting and fishing) gets a copy of Escoffier's encyclopedic classic to French cuisine - Le Guide Culinaire (published in 1903). After a bad job making snapping turtle soup, he decides he needs to cook a feast using Escoffier's recipes and meats he has collected and hunted himself, with some help from friends.
A huge variety of foods were used then - weird organs that get thrown away or turned into catfood today. And lots of foods we don't eat now - sparrows, squabs (baby pigeons), all kinds of weird fish, etc. So the author describes the year he spent collecting all of this stuff - gigging for bullfrogs in Michigan, hunting bears in Alaska, fishing for shrimp and eels and rays, hunting elk in Montana (where he lives with his girlfriend - a vegetarian), wild boars in California, climbing on top of air conditioners in back alleys in various towns in Montana trying to find baby pigeons.
Rinella is not as skilled a writer as Anthony Bourdain, but if you like reading about unusual foods - and hunting - you'll probably enjoy this. I think this could have been fantastic if it had been edited a bit better - the narrative wanders a bit too much, and it gets confusing sometimes when he goes off on a tangent about his father and WWII and their food.
I would love to have been at the 3-day feast that he served all of his friends at the end - with 45 courses.
A huge variety of foods were used then - weird organs that get thrown away or turned into catfood today. And lots of foods we don't eat now - sparrows, squabs (baby pigeons), all kinds of weird fish, etc. So the author describes the year he spent collecting all of this stuff - gigging for bullfrogs in Michigan, hunting bears in Alaska, fishing for shrimp and eels and rays, hunting elk in Montana (where he lives with his girlfriend - a vegetarian), wild boars in California, climbing on top of air conditioners in back alleys in various towns in Montana trying to find baby pigeons.
Rinella is not as skilled a writer as Anthony Bourdain, but if you like reading about unusual foods - and hunting - you'll probably enjoy this. I think this could have been fantastic if it had been edited a bit better - the narrative wanders a bit too much, and it gets confusing sometimes when he goes off on a tangent about his father and WWII and their food.
I would love to have been at the 3-day feast that he served all of his friends at the end - with 45 courses.