A Really Big Lunch: The Roving Gourmand on Food and Life

by Jim Harrison

Overview

“A Really Big Lunch showcases Harrison’s enthusiastic, funny, and uncompromising views on how to eat, drink, and live well . . . His writing is bodily, bawdy, sharp. The more we have of his voice, the better.”—Boston Globe

A national bestseller and an Amazon Best Book of the Month in the Cookbook/Food & Wine category, now in paperback, A Really Big Lunch collects many of New York Times bestselling author Jim Harrison’s essays on food for the first time—and taps into his larger-than-life appetite with wit and verve. In these pieces, Harrison muses on the relationship between hunter and prey, interrogates the obscure language of wine reviews, and delivers a manifesto against the bland, mass-produced food of our time, proposing instead what he calls the Vivid Diet. He delights in food from the most outré indulgence (a French lunch that went to thirty-seven courses) to a simple bowl of menudo. Harrison’s food writing is a program for living, and A Really Big Lunch is shot through with his pointed aperçus and keen delight in the pleasures of the senses. And between the lines the pieces give glimpses of Harrison’s life over the last fifteen years. Lovingly introduced by master chef Mario Batali, A Really Big Lunch is a literary delight that will satisfy every appetite.

“The collection is chockablock with . . . zingers as well as plenty of half-baked, hilarious theories you can ponder while planning your first summer barbecue.”—The Paris Review

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802127662
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	03/20/2018
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	585,708
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Jim Harrison (1937–2016) was the New York Times-bestselling author of thirty-nine previous books of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, including Legends of the Fall, Dalva, and Returning to Earth. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and winner of a National Endowment for the Arts grant, his work was published in twenty-seven languages.

Table of Contents

Introduction by Mario Batali ix

Eat Your Heart Out (Smoke Signals, 1981) 1

Food for Thought (Smoke Signals, 1982) 4

The Dead Food Scrolls (Smoke Signals, 1983) 9

The Vivid Diet (Unpublished, 1986) 14

Father-in-Law (Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 1995) 22

Wine Notes (Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 2002) 24

Is Winemaking an Art? (Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 2002) 28

My Problems with White Wine (Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 2002) 31

Eat or Die (Brick, 2003) 35

Paris Rebellion (Brick, 2003) 39

Odious Comparisons (Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 2004) 44

Wine Criticism and Literary Criticism (Part II) (Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 2004) 47

Food, Sex, and Death (Brick, 2004) 52

A Really Big Lunch (New Yorker, 2004) 58

Carte 69

Tongue (Brick, 2004) 82

Ducks (Molto Italiano, 2005) 88

Wine Strategies (Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 2005) 91

Resuming the Pleasure (Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 2005) 95

Snake-Eating (Brick, 2005) 100

Bear Posole (The Montana Writers' Cookbook, 2005) 106

Food, Fitness, and Death (Brick, 2005) 107

The Fisherman Gourmand (Big Sky Cooking, 2006) 113

Food and Mood (Brick, 2006) 116

Vin Blanc (Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 2006) 122

Eternity and Food (Brick, 2006) 128

The Spirit of Wine (Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 2007) 135

Here I Stand for a Few Minutes (Brick, 2007) 141

One Good Thing Leads to Another (Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 2007) 147

Don't Go Out Over Your Head (Brick, 2007) 151

Rage and Appetite (Brick, 2008) 158

Close to the Bone (Martha Stewart Living, 2008) 166

Food, Finance, and Spirit (Brick, 2009) 169

The Body Is a Temple (Brick, 2009) 176

Food and Music (Brick, 2010) 183

The Arts Versus Food and Birds (Brick, 2010) 191

Wine and Poetry (Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 2010) 201

Caregiver (Brick, 2011) 207

Chef English Major (Playboy, June 2011) 216

The Logic of Birds and Fishes As It Relates to Shingles (Brick, 2011) 223

Pain (Brick, 2012) 229

Courage and Survival (Brick, 2013) 236

San Rafael (Brick, 2013) 243

Eat Where You Live (Edible Baja Arizona, 2014) 250

Gramps le Fou (Brick, 2014) 252

Truly Older (Brick, 2014) 262

Real Old Food (Brick, 2015) 267

Everyday Life: The Question of Zen (Brick, 2001) 272

Photo Credits 276

Editorial Reviews

Praise for A Really Big Lunch:

“A Really Big Lunch showcases Harrison’s enthusiastic, funny, and uncompromising views on how to eat, drink, and live well. His tone is conversational, generous, the sort of person with whom you’d want to share a 37-course lunch that lasts 11 hours . . . His writing is bodily, bawdy, sharp. The more we have of his voice, the better.”—Nina MacLaughlin, Boston Globe

“Dry wit and mordant insight are on glorious display in this new collection of essays . . . Nearly every piece . . . has a saying wise enough to carry in your wallet. Some will flat out break your heart.”—Ann Levin, Associated Press

“Jim Harrison lived as he wrote, vividly . . . A Really Big Lunch, whose publication marks the first anniversary of Harrison’s death, brings him roaring to the page again in all his unapologetic immoderacy, with spicy bon mots and salty language . . . His language is punch-drunk lively . . . Snacking on classic Harrisonisms . . . is deliciously filling.”—Heller McAlpin, NPR

“This collection of essays on food and drink showcases [Harrison’s] irascible wit and lust for life.”—Tom Beer, Newsday

“Sage and succulent essays . . . Simply to call Harrison salty is to ignore the myriad flavors of Harrison's searing wit and capacious heart. He was a consummate poet with an appetite to match, and his food writing is among his best and most fun . . . In this collection, Harrison’s wisdom shines throughout . . . We can add Harrison's writing to this list of life's pleasures.”— Katie Weed, Shelf Awareness (starred review)

“If anyone could pull off eating in the afterlife, it would probably be Harrison, well known for all kinds of appetites here on Earth . . . Harrison saw a clear subterranean connection between mortality, language, the good meals he’d eaten along the way, and those to come . . . A new collection, A Really Big Lunch: Meditations on Food and Life from the Roving Gourmand, offers one last look at what he ate, felt, reveled in, and raged about in the last of his swashbuckling years.”—Melanie Rehak, Bookforum

“It’s a pleasure to dive headlong into his vivid recounting of these appetites . . . It’s a pity Harrison never had a documentary show à la Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations . . . Funny, pithy essays . . . What an omnivore—and what a writer.”—Molly Boyle, Santa Fe New Mexican

“A celebration of eating well and drinking even better as a recipe for the good life . . . The author waxes wickedly funny over matters of art, politics, spirituality, sex, and the commingling of all of them. His advice: ‘Your meals in life are numbered and the number is diminishing. Get at it.’ If this is the last we get from Harrison, it serves as a fitting memorial.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“One of America’s greatest writers . . . The intimacy and enthusiasm of Harrison’s food correspondent style makes reading A Really Big Lunch feel like sitting at a table during a really big lunch with the best, and smartest, and most entertaining of friends.”—David Masciotra, Salon

“Transcendent . . . Devour this book one course (or chapter) at a time. It’s like a rich meal, best savored so that no word goes unappreciated . . . In a life too short for all the adventures, drinks, lunches, loves and books we desire to consume, Jim Harrison reminds us not to waste another day. Wake up. Go too far. Dig in.”—Melissa Stephenson, Missoula Independent

“[Harrison’s] gusto sparkles throughout this collection . . . 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.”—Publishers Weekly

“Impure, unadulterated Jim Harrison . . . A Really Big Lunch is such a gem . . . Let’s hope there are more collections of the work of this unique and uniquely American writer to come.”—John Greenya, The Washington Times

“[Harrison’s] playful quotability is boundless . . . With an introduction from Harrison’s longtime friend Mario Batali, this is for Harrison fans as well as a great addition to popular food and wine collections.”—Annie Bostrom, Booklist

“There’s much more to the book than its author’s enormous appetite—just as there was more to Harrison than his appetite, and more to his appetite than mere indulgence.”—Peter Nowogrodzki, Literary Hub

“Get this. That’s my earnest advice. If you merely have a passing interest in the revolution in food writing of the past 50 years, you need to know about the most macho food writer of them all . . . He is the best cure for nouvelle cuisine prose ever.”—Jeff Simon, Buffalo News (Editor’s Choice)

“The world lost one of its most unique and gifted food writers when Jim Harrison passed away last March . . . A must buy for any Harrison fans.”—Noah Rothbaum, Daily Beast

“One final homage to the pleasures of living.”—Kristen Inbody, Great Falls Tribune

“Harrison realized new possibilities for food writing, convincing me that food writing could touch on so many vectors and subjects while remaining vivid, insightful, and wryly funny.”—Mayukh Sen, Food52

“That food can bring together history and geography, not to mention love and desire, is the purpose of A Really Big Lunch . . . Longtime readers who appreciate his coda to ‘eat vividly,’ will savor this new collection. Good Reading.”—Petoskey News

From the Publisher

02/06/2017
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. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 2017-01-10
A celebration of eating well and drinking even better as a recipe for the good life.This posthumous collection of food pieces (very broadly defined) by the award-winning novelist serves as a sequel of sorts to The Raw and the Cooked (2001), which documented his insatiable hunger for food, from the mundane to the exotic to the exquisite, and so much more. The linchpin of a collection that holds together surprisingly well is the title piece that he wrote for the New Yorker in 2004, an essay that scandalized some readers in its embrace of excess. "Is there an interior logic to overeating, or does gluttony, like sex, wander around in a messy void, utterly resistant to our attempts to make sense of it?" he wonders. "Not very deep within us, the hungry heart howls, ‘Supersize me!' " Some of the other essays also reference this piece, in its vivid description of its 37 courses, along with his ironic complaint that only 19 wines accompanied it. He later writes, "I have often thought that if I received an early warning that I would pass on sooner than later, I'd get myself to Lyon and eat for a solid month, after which they could tip me from a gurney into the blessed Rhone. Maybe I'd swim all the way downstream to Arles for my last supper." In the latter half of the collection, Harrison proceeds through just the kind of extended warning that the author had suggested, with the thoughts on the way he has lived his life underscored by the ravages he is experiencing. Along the way, the author waxes wickedly funny over matters of art, politics, spirituality, sex, and the commingling of all of them. His advice: "Your meals in life are numbered and the number is diminishing. Get at it." If this is the last we get from Harrison, it serves as a fitting memorial.

Kirkus Reviews