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December 15th, 2006 Sarah - Alicia Ashman

Those of you who have no stomach for the idea of hunting, scavenging, or in any way catching your own food before you eat it, will have no use for Steven Rinella’s The Scavenger’s Guide to Haute Cuisine.

Everyone else, including lifelong deer hunters and wild game enthusiasts, will find lots to love about this little book.  Inspired by Auguste Escoffier’s 1903 haute cuisine masterpiece, Le Guide Culinaire, Rinella decided to spend a year assembling and freezing his own wild ingredients, all with the goal of compiling them into a three-day Thanksgiving feast for his family and friends.

So what’s on the menu?  Well, wild boar, salmon, squab (pigeon), oysters, duck soup, smoked eel, fried stingray, and cottontail rabbit.  And, please note: that’s just the menu for the first day.

Rinella’s a UP native, and although much of his book is set in the west, his Midwestern upbringing is apparent in both the good humor and understatement of his narrative.  Sure, not everyone’s going to get out there and bag their own supper, but maybe, just maybe, we’d appreciate and honor our food a bit more if we did.

Entry Filed under: Memoir & Biography, Nonfiction