If You Are What You Eat, He's Dead Meat (cont.)

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Outside Magazine December 2004

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If You Are What You Eat, He's Dead Meat (cont.)

ESCOFFIER WAS VERY PARTICULAR about using only young pigeons, or squab: "Those older than one year should be viewed as being old and should be completely excluded from use except for the preparation of forcemeat." He purchased his squab in a market. In modern America, pigeons have carved out a ratlike existence for themselves. When I call the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife & Parks to clear my plans to net a couple, they tell me there are no laws regarding pigeons. In fact, many cities spend money to exterminate them. I decide on a captive-breeding program that will drown me in squab.

I've set my sights on two pigeons that live atop my apartment building. A dozen times every morning, they mount each other in explicit sexual displays. The one thing standing between the birds and me is the blond-haired dude who lives in the apartment above mine. He seems to fancy himself some sort of inner-city gangsta. I heard him tell a visiting police officer once that his name is Tom. I try to build up the nerve to ask Tom for trespass permission, but he falls into a perpetually shitty mood when two thugs destroy his van with baseball bats.

Instead, my buddy Matt Moisan offers to help me chase some pigeons downtown. Moisan's an actor, which allows him ample free time. After an admirably crafty operation highlighted by a death-defying climb up the wall of a brick building, we manage to capture a gang of pigeons napping behind a pub's air-conditioning unit. But the pigeons soon prove to be sexual duds.

The complications of urban food collection are bringing me down, so I decide to set off for the Bitterroot River, south of town. One day last August, Diana and I spent an afternoon floating a stretch of it on an inner tube, and I remember watching a bunch of crayfish feed on the carcass of a bloated sucker. Escoffier used crayfish to make a garnish: "Select 40 medium-sized crayfish that seem full of life; cook them in a highly seasoned mirepoix, moistened with one half-bottle of dry champagne."

I buy a roll of heavy-duty screen and fashion a crayfish trap with a funnel-shaped opening. The crayfish will make their way through the funnel to get to my bait of choice: hot dogs. Then, gorged, they will have neither the will nor the way to exit. In just a couple nights my trap yields about 40 crayfish.

As I'm setting my crayfish trap under a bridge, I notice a bunch of abandoned swallow nests hanging from the bridge supports. The domes of mud look like bull scrotums and are about that size. Swallows build nests by packing together bits of mud with their sticky saliva. Escoffier boiled the nests to extract the saliva, which lent a "characteristic viscidity," or thickness, to his consommés. He preferred the nests of tropical swallows, built with sticks instead of mud. But I figure swallow spit is swallow spit, so I chuck rocks at the empty nests and knock down a small pile of mud.

A few days later, I head up to Elbow Lake, a crooked body of water that fills a valley north of Missoula. Diana accompanies me. Our plan is to catch some yellow perch. My Subaru is loaded with rods and reels, and I've got a tobacco tin full of maggots in my hip pocket. In no time, we catch a small pile of perch in a weedy inlet. I bait a large hook and lower it to see if any pike are around; when you gut a pike, you can sometimes find a perch in its stomach that is still good to eat, which seems like something Escoffier would dig. I catch one the length and heft of a piece of firewood. Diana catches a mountain whitefish just a little smaller than the pike. The big fish have empty guts, but when we clean the perch we find a hidden surprise in ten of them: semen.

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