Snuffy meets Sufijan

There is much that seems laudable about Steven Rinella's project as outlined in DI/DO. In general, I'm a fan of anything that causes us to reflect on our relationships to the animals that provide the meat many of us choose to eat.  But in its execution, it seems about as sincere as a Von Dutch trucker hat. It may well be envy, in that I, too, would enjoy having a book deal with Miramax, and having Jay McInerney pick the wines for my dinner parties. Even correcting for such a distortion, there are several moments that are empirically, irrefutably, retarded:

FOR a big dinner party he gave in New York last week, Steven Rinella, who has lived in the city only since August, had trouble assembling some of the stuff he needed. He just about gave up on potassium nitrate, for example, which he wanted to use in curing a black bear ham he intended to smoke in a homemade smoker improvised from plywood and an electric hotplate. Then, at the last minute, a friend of his girlfriend’s, prowling drug stores, found a bottle with an expiration date of 1985. The druggist let her have it for nothing.

I'm all for improvised smokers, but I'd want to have an ambulance to hand if I was dining chez a-dude-who-is-curing-meats-and-does-not-know-where-to-find-a-basic-ingredient. A brief experiment yielded the following results. Google Potassium Nitrate. Get 1.5 million+ results. Add "cure" and "meat" The second result is the National Center for Home Food Preservation, which offers a helpful overview of nitrates and nitrites and their role in curing meat, including the tip that sodium nitrate is also known as saltpeter. Saltpeter, Google tells us is, $7.75/lb from the Penn Herb Co.* So, if you want to cure bear hams, you can hope to get lucky with your girlfriend's friend and an idle pharmacist, or you can spend three minutes on the freaking internets. There are people all over the world who lead fulfilling lives without any cognizance of saltpeter or where to buy it, but most of them choose not to write books about securing and preparing game.

Also,

He had better luck with squirrels — eight in all, though one had to be rejected for mange. He caught them in the same backyard using both a mink trap and a modified rat trap. The rat trap just knocked them out, he explained. “So then I went out and thumped them with a hammer."

(Technically, the state requires that if you want a squirrel for dinner you need to hunt it, not trap it.)

Without getting all Teddy, it would seem that someone who says   “If I’m not cooking with game, I don’t think it’s any fun,” would be aware of relevant game laws, especially the ones indended to prevent suffering of the kind a rat trap/hammer combo would inflict. Also, there is something insufferably droll in the use of "technically." The inference I take is "New York State game laws are beyond the concern of DI/DO readers, who are preoccupied with nanny poaching and where to get parts for the Viking, and are, as such, technicalities." One would never say, "technically, the state of Idaho requires trout to be taken with a fly or angling rod, rather than dynamite," or "technically, dogs die in hot cars."

And:

The result tasted awful, and Mr. Rinella didn’t know whether to blame his stock, which might have gone funny overnight, or the brandy.

Might have gone funny overnight? Was he keeping it in the trunk of his Jetta? This dude is Typhoid Mary for the HACCP age. Throughout,  there is what I can't help reading as a profound lack of respect for the animals he eats and the animals he feeds. Early in the article Rinella laments his bad luck catching sparrows: “It must be mating season or something,” Mr. Rinella said. “They’re like real jumpy.” This willful Spicoli affect, coupled with what appears to be the genuine ignorance outline above, is not what you want in a host.

Finally:

Next up was the first main course: squirrel pot pies in little ramekins, with tiny rabbit Wellingtons on the side. “Not just squirrel,” Mr. Rinella said, introducing the dish. “Brooklyn squirrel — the thinking man’s chicken.”

Squirrel! In Brooklyn! How recherche! Until recently, there were squirrel receipts in Joy, and the notion is still not so unfathomable for many. But the "Brooklyn Squirrel -- the thinking man's chicken" rankles. It bespeaks a sort of smugness "I can front like Snuffy Smith, secure in the awareness that a Pinkberry will be opening in my neighborhood soon." Perhaps the Cobrasnake set needs their own Bourdain, but they can do better than this.

*In real life, I would just hit up Butcher and Packer for curing salt, because they are still holding it down in the D, and they sell these fly neoprene aprons.

Comments

[Skeen]

I am in wholly supportive of your scorn for this guy, but I'm just wondering if the "technically" bit is intended as an explanation of why he does not use a lethal trap but must resort to the non-lethal-trap-plus-hammering technique, the idea being that the trap cannot do the killing, the human being must do the killing. (Which makes one wonder what the definition of "hunting" is, if hammering a trapped squirrel qualifies.)

[Skeen]

I mean, "I am wholly supportive." I don't know where that extra "in" came from.

[Tom]

Is it wrong that I want to trap that dude in my back yard, "technically" thump his head with a hammer (hopefully while he's sporting that smug grin), and then stuff is arse into some ramekins? Is it? I must admit, the thought makes me smile.

Give me a sec to whip up the evites to my Big Asshat Game party.

[Creative Recreation]

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