by Jim Harrison
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Product Description
Jim Harrison is one of this country's most beloved writers, a muscular, brilliantly economic stylist with a salty wisdom. For more than twenty years, he has also been writing some of the best essays on food around, now collected in a volume that caused the Santa Fe New Mexican to exclaim: "To read this book is to come away convinced that Harrison is a flat-out genius -- one who devours life with intensity, living it roughly and full-scale, then distills his experiences into passionate, opinionated prose. Food, in this context, is more than food: It is a metaphor for life." From his legendary Smart and Esquire columns, to present-day pieces including a correspondence with French gourmet Gerard Oberle, fabulous pieces on food in France and America for Men's Journal, and a paean to the humble meatball, The Raw and the Cooked is a nine-course meal that will satisfy every appetite. "Our 'poet laureate of appetite' [Harrison] may be, but the collected essays here reflect much more." -- John Gamino, The Dallas Morning News "[A] culinary combo plate of Hunter S. Thompson, Ernest Hemingway, Julian Schnabel, and Sam Peckinpah...." -- Jane and Michael Stern, The New York Times Book Review "Jim Harrison is the Henry Miller of food writing. His passion is infectious." -- Jeffrey Trachtenberg, The Wall Street Journal
Amazon.com Review
Jim Harrison's The Raw and the Cooked extols our profound (and precarious) relationship to what we eat, and to the natural world. Compiled from the author's much-loved Esquire, Smart, and Men's Journal columns, the book offers charging personal panoramas in the guise of food essays. In pieces with titles like "Conscious Dining," "Hunger, Real and Unreal," and "Repulsion and Grace," Harrison--a kind of dharma bum cum foodie--takes his readers into realms of taste and feeling, spirit and body. "We are often like autistic children," he writes, "unable to connect experiences, especially if we want something interesting to eat." A Michigan "outlander," he nonetheless travels wide and can tell of the "tummy thrills" engendered by trips to restaurants like Manhattan's Babbo, meals planned and meals remembered. But the journeys he likes best involve hunting or foraging, his personal salves: "I arrived home in a palsied state," he writes. "To set the brakes, I wandered for hours in the woods looking for morels. At one point I wandered three hours to find four morels. I did however gather enough to cook our annual spring rite, a simple sauté of the mushrooms, wild leeks and sweetbreads." A warning: Harrison can lick his spiritual wounds publicly for long stretches, and not all readers will find his swaggering muscularity to their taste. Those who follow him are, however, rewarded by contact with his passion and sly, world-colliding depictions: "The dinner was a mystical experience," he writes, "and as such you must live through it to fully understand the mysticality ... less apparent when I got up next morning in a driving rainstorm with the usual flooded freeways." --Arthur Boehm
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
 I love Jim Harrison, 2007-11-01
He's one of my all-time favorite writers AND great food with a great wine is one of my all-time favorite experiences in life (especially with great people), so I'm looking forward to reading this!
0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Hilarious, 2007-04-03
I have given this book to so many friends. It is terrific. Filled with tons of laughs and great stories of a true gourmand. Written in a no b.s. style that is pure enjoyment.
No recommendation could be high enough for what I think of The Raw and the Cooked.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Salacious, 2006-01-29
Jim Harrison coaxes glorious feasts from from Upper Peninsula game meats, honky tonks of many states, and celebrated restaurants; not the least from the currents of his own life and times. Read this book for tales of culinary euphoria, none of it precious. But be forewarned: this book will put at least 10 pounds on your frame. And be prepared for descriptions of meals that feature multiple many meats, followed by ever humbling gout. Yet, fatter and happier is Harrison's philosophical equation. He'll even provide scientific arguments for how the two conditions are truly inseparable. Its classic Harrison humor and writing though. If you liked True North, you'll like this.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Make the Meatballs!, 2005-01-27
Well, there certainly is more than enough erudition in all of these reviews. How about just enjoying the food, as Jim Harrison does? My copy is worn out from making the most fabulous meatball recipe on this earth! I have read all of Jim Harrison's books, but totally enjoy his take on life in his non-fiction particularly. Get over the fact that he overdoes the name-dropping.
I lived in the U.P. for many years, but never heard of him till I moved to New York and discovered his books and magazine writing. An amateur food writer? I beg to disagree. If measured by how badly he makes you want to frequent the dives (even more than the four star restaurants) to try the meals and experience the ambience he so deliciously describes, then he is the best of food writers. He also solved a mystery my husband and I both suffered from - gout! This book is a steal at any price, and a joy to read for food and wine lovers.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Very Personal and Very Erudite Amateur's take on Food, 2004-11-27
`The Raw and the Cooked' by poet, playwright, and novelist Jim Harrison is quite properly subtitled `Adventures of a Roving Gourmand'. The author makes a very careful point of saying that he is not a very good cook, and his involvement in writing about cooking is definitely not his primary occupation. His `day job' is creative writing of poetry, drama, and narrative fiction, so his choice of words can be expected to be especially careful. His role as `roving gourmand' is a case in point. The first meaning of `gourmand' in my Merriam-Webster unabridged dictionary is `a greedy and ravenous eater'. This is definitely not the same as `gourmet', a secondary meaning of the word, and it is much more appropriate to the author's style than the more genteel `gourmet'.
As a writer on culinary matters, Harrison seems to be in a class by himself. He is quite definitely not in the same class as the students of cookery such as Jeffrey Steingarten, John Thorne, and Jim Villas. He is also not in the same class as professional observers of the culinary world such as Calvin Trillin, Robb Walsh, and Alan Richman. The most similar writer who comes to mind is R. W. Appel whose culinary writing is secondary to his news writing at the New York Times. But, even Appel is more of a professional journalist, so his food writing is part and parcel of his `day job'.
As an amateur writer on eating, Harrison has a deep respect for all these writers plus the great cookbook authors of the day such as Paula Wolfert, Marcella Hazan, and Julia Child, upon whom he depends for his recipes. His greatest respect seems to be reserved for M.F.K. Fisher, who also seems to earn the respect of every other major culinary journalist.
In a nutshell then, Harrison writes about less about food and food preparation than he does about eating and the enjoyment of food, wine, spirits, and hunting. And, he spends a lot of time writing about the writing about food, with a level of reflection you do not find in any writer I have read (with the caveat that I have not yet spend a reasonable amount of time with the writings of M.F.K. Fisher to compare Harrison and Fisher). This writing is done with an eye to the careful selection of words that may be unmatched among modern food writers. One example of this circumspection is his questioning the description of a pork chop with superlatives. The problem with this practice is that if the chop is praised with effusive adjectives, what is left to describe Bach or Rembrant or Shakespeare. Can a pork chop really measure up to `Hamlet'?
One of the consequences of this careful language is that Harrison may be difficult to read when he uses unfamiliar locutions. Contrary to an anti-intellectual complaint about erudite discourse, it is not the `big words' on which one may choke, but the statements which are so packed with meaning that we actually have to stop reading and take some time to parse the words to be sure we have gotten the full sense of the writer's words.
This means that Harrison may not be for everyone. As a writer who is entirely aware of his amateur status, his writing is almost entirely based on his personal experiences and his own choices and reactions to food, and his relating reactions of others to specific culinary situations. This has the advantage of avoiding making false generalizations about the food world. It has the weakness of being essays that are much closer to fiction than they are to journalism.
As almost all essays in this book have been published elsewhere in major periodicals, major editors with a good knowledge of their audience's taste have vetted almost all essays in this book. Therefore, I personally have found almost all essays quite enjoyable to read. It is no accident that the only pieces I found wanting were previously unpublished.
If you simply enjoy reading about food, especially writings by Fisher, Trillin, and Walsh, the chances are very good that you will find this book very entertaining. To all of you with these tastes in words, I heartily recommend this book.
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