Game

A Hunger for the Real

I put on an apron and stood at the long butcher block counter. In front of me, three cookbooks lay open, but I wasn’t looking at the books. I was fixed on what I held in my wide-spread hands: a raw, fresh elk liver — smooth and dark, long as a baby seal. And just below it, in a stainless-steel pan, the deep pink heart from the same elk, laced over with veins and a skim of fat. I remember the rush of giddiness and nausea, fear and longing.

That October afternoon, I was newly the head cook on a remote, private Colorado ranch during elk hunting season. I’d gotten the job through a friend, a real chef, who’d run the kitchen all summer while the New England clan who owned the 36,000 acres vacationed there. My original job was to wash dishes, clear tables, make salads. But chef Andy—curly-haired, soft-spoken, and only a year older than me—was generous with what he knew and freely encouraged me to try my hand. Soon he’d taught me how to whisk flour and butter over heat to make a roux, how to choke up on the blade of a chef’s knife with one hand while feeding celery toward its edge with the knuckles of the other. Come September, Andy went back east to be with his sweetheart, and at his recommendation, I was put in charge.

~~~

When the hunters had arrived a few days earlier, a man named Vince had come into the kitchen. He was barely taller than I was with white hair, tanned hands, eager questions. An enthused boy scout in a corporate retiree’s body.

“You cook elk?” he asked.

“It’s dinner tonight,” I said. The walk-in freezer was full of elk stew meat, elk sausages, ground elk and elk roasts.

“You ever cook the organs? You know: liver, heart? From wild game, those organs are incredibly nourishing,” Vince said. “You can’t buy food that healthy.”

The truth was, I’d never even considered handling organ meat before, let alone cooking or eating it. But suddenly, I very much wanted that chance.

If Vince was lucky enough to take an elk, I told him, pardon the pun, that I was game.

~~~

I had never been hunting, but something about it felt profound to me. Like fishing and farming (neither of which I’d done either), it seemed that hunting pulled people close to an elemental quality I craved.

I don’t remember when the craving started, but I do remember being stunned the first time I tasted fresh orange juice. I may have been five or six. Until then, orange pop had been a favorite, but it was nothing at all like its original. I had this experience over and over in childhood. The pretend version was fine until I discovered the real one. By age eight or nine, I’d caught on that kid stuff was almost always fake: jewelry made of candy, dainty teacups that were just plastic, Velcro instead of buckles. Adults got the real thing while children were expected to “make believe.” But I didn’t want to pretend. I felt cheated by the knock-offs.

By thirteen, I fit into adult-sized clothes and had long been allowed to eat off the breakable plates as long as I washed my own dish. But just when I thought I was arriving, I saw that adult life was full of fakery, too: silk flower arrangements, faux brick, girdles. School kept promising the authentic: if I got competent at the basics I’d access primary sources. Textbooks would give way to true textures, a dissected frog instead of a diagram, a poem of my own instead of a term paper. I inched closer, but the classroom still screened the truer world.

Most of all, I wanted to be real. And being real required handling real things. If I was going to become more than an imitation human, I had to find my way to genuine articles.

So, by my mid-twenties when Andy told me about this job on 36,000 acres of protected wilderness, a job that could last into the autumn elk hunting season, I jumped at the chance. Finally, I could get away from the pavement and billboards of suburbia. Finally, I could immerse myself in a landscape that, with only a few primitive roads, would surely be truly, wildly real.

~~~

Once I got to the ranch, the long-time staff would casually mention something about “the hunts.” But elk season was still months away; summer kept everyone busy enough. With details vague, I kept imagining the hunts were a somber gathering at the edge of a high meadow, silent stalking, waiting while the wild slowly approached, aiming from somewhere close to your own heart to somewhere close to its heart. Then, cut to a campfire and roasting meat. I assumed everyone went out, that we’d cook in the open air.

But no.

When Andy finally explained how the hunting went, he described something far more like a tourist safari — with jeeps and guides and insulated picnic boxes of hot coffee and breakfast burritos. Also, the hunts were for guests only — business associates or close friends of the owners. Though the days would take on a more feral rhythm, with hunting parties out at dawn and again at dusk, their updates chattering in on walkie talkies, as cooking staff, we’d stay in the kitchen as usual.

This revelation was one of the last in a series of disabused notions of the authentic that summer. The original log structure of the ranch really had been a homesteading cabin in the 1800’s, but certain improvements had been made since then: a wet bar, a media room. Those ponds just beyond the lodge? They had been dredged with a backhoe and stocked with hatchery trout. The most cowboy-like of the family members was a surgeon in real life.

Beyond the lodge, thousands of acres of mountains and creeks and trees were mostly un-manicured and hard to get to. Only a few dirt roads had been forged through it all. It felt like I had imagined a frontier to be, but it was that way only because people had bought it, put up fences, protected it, and then kept it as a playground. It was vast and beautiful, and it was also a full-blown private resort.

And the fact that it was a resort was the only reason I could even be there in first place. To work all day in the kitchen.

~~~

The kitchen, however, was its own reality. A room filled with sunlight and radio music, with cinnamon and smoke. I’d arrived in Colorado thinking I’d find authenticity outdoors, among lupine and blue spruce. What I had not expected was the realness that filled that room where we tended to fire and water, air and earth, and all the things made from these.

This was not a “came-from-a-can” kind of kitchen. No instant mashed potatoes or pre-packaged seasoning mixes. Andy ordered flats of tomatoes, crates of fresh broccoli, bricks of butter and bags of dried beans. Carrots arrived with bits of dirt still clinging to the crevices. Peaches brought fresh from a Western Slope orchard had green leaves still attached to the stems. There were Galas and Granny smiths, Vidalias and slim green scallions, arugula and kale. None of these imitated anything. Each ingredient was exactly itself. The rest of what ended up on the plate came from our hands, our attention, our care. I learned to shave nutmeg with a grater, make steak sauce from roasted jalapeños, adobo and lime juice. Angel food cakes started by cracking and separating the whites from dozens of eggs.

Every morning we returned to the basics. Things like potatoes, curiosity, butter and willingness.

~~~

The first day of the hunt was for gun safety, sighting in rifles and scouting locations. In between meals that day, I scouted out how to cook organ meat. I’d heard of “liver and onions,” but I’d never eaten it, let alone cooked it.

Instruction came from a small stack of cookbooks by the window. It was easy enough to find recipes for liver in both Betty Crocker and the Joy of Cooking. They described how to cut the supple organ meat into half-inch slices, dredge in flour and spices, lightly pan fry in butter or bacon grease while sautéing masses of thin cut onions.

The heart was another story. Betty skipped it all together. And the only mention in the Joy was its inclusion in a list under the heading “Variety Meats,” that would have to be requested from a butcher. To find out what to do with one that was brought to me, I had to dig into more obscure cookbooks. Help came from an old spiral-bound volume from the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. Here, personal recipes collected from Betty Ann of Wyoming or Bob from Idaho instructed me in how to prepare a heart. Cut the organ open. Remove the arteries, the dense vessels at the top. Purge it clean or even soak it in salt water overnight if you want to flush out the wild taste of rust. Or just directly filet the muscle from the protective membrane. Slice into strips, pan fry quickly over high heat. The words were clear enough on the page: ingredients, temperatures, instructions.

The second morning, the men left in the dark for the first hunt. They came back mid-morning ravenous but with no success. We sent them out again late afternoon with thick ham sandwiches for the jeep ride up to an evening hunting site. When they got back after dark, still no luck.

But just before lunch on the third day, Vince came to the kitchen backdoor breathless, asking for a large pan. He returned later, and I smelled them before I saw them. A blunt odor like blood mixed with rotting leaves, wet animal fur and morning wind. It was the blooming rose heart, the burgundy liver of the elk he had shot on the morning hunt.

~~~

I set the pan on the kitchen counter. I took the cookbooks from the shelves, set out the cutting board, the onions and garlic, chose the sharpest knives.

I thought I had enough to go on. Now, here in front of me, was the heart of the heart of the Real. The most wild and elemental thing I’d ever touched.

I did what the cookbooks said. The directions were not complicated. The liver stretched out when I lifted it and set it on the cutting board. It must have weighed twelve pounds, but it sliced smoothly, with just the resistance of raw bread dough. I dredged the pieces in flour and salt. Heated a pan and rendered the bacon fat.

Then I took hold of the heart, heavy for its size, clenched as a fist. I thought it would be hollow, the chambers like a bellows. But the walls were thicker than the collapsed gaps. It resisted the knife edge until I bore down with all the strength of my skinny arm. Inside was full of pudding-thick blood. I rinsed away what I could, cut out the veins, sliced what remained and heated another frying pan.

The room filled up with familiar smells — hot oil, black pepper, garlic — and something else, something cold as iron and muck and spring water.

~~~

When it was time, I dished up the platters, nervous. Sides of fried potatoes and onions provided reassurance, salad and bread familiar as a hymn. But the main course was strange flesh, looking like nothing I’d ever seen before.

Out in the dining room, I was told, Vince filled his plate, chewed slowly, praised the nourishment in each bite.

I finally sat down with a small plate of my own. Forking a bit of heart meat, I closed my eyes and slid it onto my tongue.

The sheath of garlic and oil gave way to a mouthful of rust. I forced myself to bite down quick before I could spit it out. It was tough, all strong muscle, which I had most certainly over cooked after its lifetime of hot blood and hard work. I swallowed hard and reached for ice water to keep it from coming back up.

I ate spoonfuls of potatoes, a whole plate of greens, before I turned to the liver. Beneath caramelized onions, the oval slices looked grey instead of pink. Biting in, the meat felt dense, resistant to teeth, and filled with a bitter, wild flavor.

Gamey is the word people use for the meat of wildlife. It’s some aftertaste hinting of adrenaline, fermented grass, the sour edge of late winter on muddy hide. A flavor of something completely other, of majesty and darkness, of brute power with soft eyes. I had wanted it so long, I thought I was ready for it. But all I’d done was try to domesticate it with browned butter and caramelized onions. It refused to be tamed.

~~~

It’s been almost thirty years now since that October evening, and while my hunger for the real remains, continually complicated, I have not had the chance to cook organ meat again. These days, if the opportunity arose, I suspect I’d humbly demure.

But I have never really left the kitchen.

Now I have my own butcher block counter tops and that same copy of Joy of Cooking slouches with a broken binding on a shelf below my coffee maker. I don’t cook as much as I did that year at the ranch, but when I am drawn back to the herbs and the oil and the flame, it’s by the arrival of something unusual or fresh or a little wild: Dried chili pods from a friend’s family farm in New Mexico. Raw goat milk from a local herd. An abundance of native chokecherries from the bush outside my door.

My tastes have continued to expand. I seek out much more acid, crave more bitterness, though my tolerance for tough textures has been stubbornly slow to grow. It takes so much more time than I ever realized to savor what I don’t know. It will be another decade before I’m as old as Vince was that October he shot the elk. Maybe by then I’ll be ready? Maybe by then the heart of the heart of Real will find me again, and I will be game.

Photo by Christina Rumpf on Unsplash