The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [144]
“When I moved away I would call for recipes and for memory of smell and taste, and now I’m trying to replicate what I left behind.”
Several months after meeting Angelo he appeared again, this time, strangely enough, on my car radio. He was being interviewed on public radio for a segment on foraging produced by the Kitchen Sisters. Their microphones followed Angelo on a porcini hunt and then into a duck blind at dawn. While he waited for the sun and the ducks to rise, Angelo spoke in an accented whisper about his past and his passions. “In Sicily I could tell by the smell what time of the year it was,” he said. “Orange season, oranges, persimmons, olives, and olive oil.”
Angelo spends many of his days in California re-creating the calendar of life in Sicily, a calendar that is strictly organized around seasonal foods. “You know, food in Sicily doesn’t come from the Safeway,” he will say. “It comes from the garden, it comes from nature.” So there are eels to catch for the traditional seven-fish dinner on Christmas Eve (“You almost can’t have Christmas without eel”); chanterelles to hunt in January; wild fennel to gather in April; olives to pick and cure in August; grapes to harvest and crush in September; game to hunt and cure in October; and porcini to hunt after the first rains in November. Each of these rites is performed in the company of friends—and is accompanied by a good meal, homemade wine, and conversation.
“I have the passions of foraging, passion of hunting, opera, my work,” he told the Kitchen Sisters. “I have the passion of cooking, pickling, curing salamis, sausage, making wine in the fall. This is my life. I do this with my friends. It’s to my heart.”
Even before the radio segment ended I knew I had found my Virgil. The next time I bumped into Angelo I asked him if I could tag along on his next foraging expedition. “Sure, okay, we go hunt chanterelle in Sonoma. I call you when it’s time.” Emboldened, I asked about going hunting too. “Okay, we could hunt one day, maybe some duck, maybe the pig, but first you need license and learn to shoot.”
The pig? Clearly there was even more to learn than I had thought.
3. HUNTER ED.
It took me a couple of months to sort out the procedures for securing a hunter’s license, which involved enrolling in a hunter education course and taking a test. It seems they’ll sell a high-powered rifle to just about anybody in California, but it’s against the law to aim the thing at an animal without first enduring a fourteen-hour class and a one-hundred-question multiple-choice exam that demands some study. The next scheduled session was on a Saturday two months off.
Yet now that I knew I would be going hunting eventually, for game as well as for mushrooms, something peculiar happened. I became an incipient forager, a forager-in-waiting. The mere expectation of hunting and gathering abruptly changed what it meant—and what it felt like—to take a walk in the woods. All at once I started looking at, and thinking about, everything in the landscape in terms of its potential as a source of food. “Nature,” as the Woody Allen character says in Love and Death, “is like an enormous restaurant.”
It was almost as if I had donned a new pair of glasses that divided the natural world into the possibly good to eat and the probably not. Though in most cases of course I had no idea which was which; being so new to this, and to this place, my forager vision was far from perfect. Still, I began to notice things. I noticed the soft yellow globes of chamomile edging the path I hiked most afternoons, and spotted clumps of miner’s lettuce off in