The Author & The Chef

Gastronomic Heaven: The Menu

Jim Harrison’s appetite is nearly as legendary as his fiction. During summers at his farm house in southwest Montana, near Livingston, the poet and novelist eats multi-course meals that city-dwelling gourmands would envy.

When friend and fellow food lover Chef Mario Batali visited Montana last year, they feasted for days. Mr. Harrison published what they ate during Mr. Batali’s stay in the current issue of the literary journal “Brick.” A version of the menu appears below.

Monday:
Rib-eye steaks
Potatoes with sweet garlic and truffles
Salad with gorgonzola
Grilled onions

Tuesday:
Boquerones (marinated white Spanish anchovies)
Kumamoto oysters
Manchego and morcilla (traditional beef blood sausage) and berberechos (tiny Galician clams)
Nantucket bay scallops
Fideua (paella with noodles) with rock shrimp, octopus and Dungeness crab
Torta de la serena (soft, flavorful Spanish sheep’s milk cheese) and tetilla with arrope (a Spanish cow’s milk cheese, with grape syrup)

Wednesday:
Lardo bruschetta
Robiola cheese ravioli with duck ragu
Veal chops Modenese
Cipolline with vincotto (small, sweet onions, with a sweet grape condiment)

and from a previous feast in New York;

Jim and Mario

By DWIGHT GARNER

Do you ever get the feeling there are great parties going on that you haven’t been invited to?

Yeah, me too.

Witness the menu below, for a dinner Mario Batali gave last month, at his Del Posto Ristorante, for the novelist Jim Harrison and a bunch of his elite lit-world friends. (Batali and Harrison have been big-eating amigos for years.)

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2007/06/19/books/papercuts-menu.html

The occasion for this feast: Harrison’s belated entry into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. If there’s an American novelist who eats better than Harrison, I’d like to meet (and dine with) him or her. Tonight if possible. I’m suddenly very hungry.