A Really Big Lunch
The Roving Gourmand on Food and Life
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4.8 • 8 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
An essay collection from "the Henry Miller of food writing" and New York Times–bestselling author of The Raw and the Cooked (The Wall Street Journal).
Jim Harrison was beloved for his untamed prose and larger-than-life appetite. Collecting many of his most entertaining and inspired food pieces for the first time, A Really Big Lunch "brings him roaring to the page again in all his unapologetic immoderacy, with spicy bon mots and salty language augmented by family photographs" (NPR).
From the titular New Yorker article about a French lunch that went to thirty-seven courses, to essays on the relationship between hunter and prey, or the obscure language of wine reviews, A Really Big Lunch is shot through with Harrison's aperçus and delight in the pleasures of the senses. Between the lines the pieces give glimpses of Harrison's life over the last three decades.
Including articles that first appeared in Brick, Playboy, Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, and more, as well as an introduction by Mario Batali, A Really Big Lunch offers "sage and succulent essays" for the literary gourmand (Shelf Awareness, starred review).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The late poet and novelist Harrison (Legends of the Fall), known for sagas of frontier existentialists, was also a devotee of fine and not-so-fine dining, and his gusto sparkles throughout this collection of magazine essays on food. Harrison writes of a vast range of meals and foodstuffs in disparate settings: fresh-caught rattlesnakes; a dinner of "artisanal salamis, lamb and duck prosciutto" flown in for a fishing trip; innumerable sojourns through France eating at bistros and ogling women; the title feast, an 11-hour, 37-course, 19-wine lunch featuring three centuries of French delicacies including poached eel with chicken wing tips and testicles in a pool of tarragon butter. Woven around the food descriptions (complete with a recipe for bear-meat cubes) are the author's rambling ruminations and poems on just about everything, including the similarities of wine criticism and literary criticism, Wall Street's odiousness, Buddhist moral lacunae, and death and dying. As his aging body succumbs to diabetes, shingles, kidney stones, and other afflictions, food becomes a last redoubt of sensual pleasure amid waning physicality. Harrison treats all these subjects with his usual earthy wit and delighted curiosity; the result is a tasty nosh for foodies with a literary bent.
