The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [199]
Whichever it was, here was the warm sun of fortune smiling on me, this sudden shower of forest flesh, and I felt, again, the gratitude I’d felt in that other forest, the moment that wild pig first appeared to me on the top of that ridge. Oh, it can be hard work, hunting and gathering, but in the end it isn’t really the work that produces the food you’re after, this effort for that result, for there’s no sure correlation between effort and result. And no deserving of this: I felt none of the sense of achievement you feel at the end of a season in the garden, when all your work has paid off in the bounty of the harvest. No, this felt more like something for nothing, a wondrous and unaccountable gift.
BY THE END of the afternoon we’d all ended up down by Beaver Creek, and at around four we made our way back to the car. We changed our soaking socks on the tailgate and filled the entire cargo area of Anthony’s SUV with morels, trying as best we could to hide them from view. No reason, really, but a big haul of mushrooms just isn’t something you want to advertise. (Earlier that afternoon a couple of mushroom hunters in an old conversion van stopped to ask if I was having any luck. For no good reason I had lied through my teeth.) We’d found sixty pounds of morels, it turned out—a personal best for Anthony and Ben. Before we climbed into the car to head home, Paulie took a picture of the three of us holding a crate loaded with morels, an obscenely huge one propped up on top of the pile. We were filthy and exhausted, but felt rich as kings. It was a Friday, and as we drove out of the forest, we passed dozens of cars and vans and trucks driving in; the word on the Eldorado flush was apparently out on the Web, and the weekend morel hunters were arriving in force. That meant the price—now twenty dollars a pound—would probably collapse by Monday, so Anthony wasted no time. He started working the cell phone, calling his chefs in Berkeley and San Francisco, taking orders for delivery tonight, and by the time we hit traffic outside of Stockton, all the wild mushrooms had been sold.
TWENTY
THE PERFECT MEAL
Perfect?! A dangerous boast, you must be thinking. And, in truth, there was much about my personally hunted, gathered, and grown meal that tended more toward the ridiculous than the sublime. I burned, just slightly, the crust of the cherry galette, the morels were a little gritty, and the salt, which in keeping with the conceit of the meal I’d gathered myself in San Francisco Bay, tasted so toxic I didn’t dare put it on the table. So I seriously doubt that any of my guests, assuming I was out of earshot, would declare this a “great meal.” But for me it was the perfect meal, which is not quite the same thing.
I set the date for the dinner—Saturday, June 18—as soon as my animal was in the bag: Wild California pig would be the main course. Now I had a couple of weeks, while the pig hung in Angelo’s walk-in, to coordinate the entrée with whatever else I could find to serve. In planning the menu the rules I imposed on myself were as follows (and the exceptions thereto follow what follows):
Everything on the menu must have been hunted, gathered, or grown by me.
The menu should feature at least one representative of each edible kingdom: animal, vegetable, and fungus, as well as an edible mineral (the salt).
Everything served must be in season and fresh. The meal would reflect not only the places that supplied its ingredients, but a particular moment in time.
No money may be spent on the meal, though already purchased items in the pantry could be deployed as needed.
The guest list is limited to those people who helped me in my for aging and their significant others. This included Angelo, Anthony, Richard, and a friend named Sue who took me on an unsuccessful chanterelle