The Scavenger's Guide to Haute Cuisine - Hardcover

Steven Rinella

4.39

1,175 ratings by Goodreads

9781401352370: The Scavenger's Guide to Haute Cuisine

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1401352375 ISBN 13: 9781401352370

Publisher: Miramax, 2006

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A nature writer's obsession with a 100-year-old cookbook leads him on a fascinating journey into the American wilderness.

A hybrid of memoir, cookbook, and travelogue, and a love song to hunting and fishing and the American wild, The Scavenger's Guide to Haute Cuisine is about one man's quest to live off the land and recreate the recipes from Escoffier's Le Guide Culinaire, the 1903 magnum opus that still stands as one of the greatest haute cuisine cookbooks ever written.

Nature writer Steven Rinella takes along his vegetarian girlfriend and a cast of eccentric friends and embarks on a year-long journey across America, trying to locate the bizarre, often esoteric ingredients of Le Guide Culinaire, such as animal organs and the surprisingly elusive street pigeon. His adventures take him fishing for stingrays on a Florida beach; skinning eels with an upstate New Yorker who keeps an emu as company; hunting mountain goats on the snow-covered cliffs of Alaska's Chugach Range; and flying from Montana to Michigan to collect a fifteen pound snapping turtle his mother found on the highway. Originating in an article Rinella wrote for Outside magazine, The Scavenger's Guide is written in prose that's as clear and pleasing as a mountain stream and is ultimately an ode to mother nature. The result is a narrative that opens up a deeper understanding of the things we eat and how the natural world affects the way we live.

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About the Author:

Steven Rinella is a Michigan native and correspondent for Outside magazine. His essays and reporting have appeared in The New Yorker, Nerve, DoubleTake, The Best American Travel Writing (2004), and Field and Stream. He lives in Miles City, Montana. This is his first book.

From Publishers Weekly:

No, this is not a book about dumpster diving. Instead, it's the account of how Rinella, an Outside correspondent, set off on a quixotic year-long adventure in the wild with the end goal of preparing a three-day, 45-course banquet chosen from master chef Escoffier's classic 1903 Le Guide Culinaire, now considered (by most people) an exotic historical document rather than a working cookbook. Rinella intended to shoot, fish, slaughter, raise (as in pigeon husbandry), gather and otherwise procure the ingredients for these dishes himself, with help from his fishing and hunting buddies (also with the aid of freezers, which Escoffier would no doubt have envied). Rinella's girlfriend is a vegetarian, and he's aware that this project may seem distressing to some, but he offers a spirited defense of choosing to "make his own food." Rinella's year took him all over the U.S. and Canada with plenty of unusual outdoor adventures: frog gigging, eeling, "glassing" for elk, making headcheese and sparrow-trapping. Preparing the feast, with its huge list of ingredients, took more than a week, with hard-breathing last-minute tension. Some dishes worked, some didn't (e.g., Crayfish Mousse, and Elk and Antelope Kidney Pudding). This unusual memoir could serve as a tasty gift for sporting types. (Mar.)
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