November 21, 2011
Many cookbook authors claim to provide start-to-finish instructions, but rare is the collection that prefaces each recipe with the story of the hunt that brought down its main ingredient. Here, before there is poached dove and pears in brandy sauce, there is a field of men in camouflage. Before there is sweet porchetta sausage, there is a bone-handled knife in a boar’s midsection. Pellegrini, despite what the cover photo implies, is not your everyday Western gal with a frying pan in one hand and a rifle in the other. Her Hudson Valley childhood, Wellesley education, brief career on Wall Street, and her cooking skills (honed at New York’s French Culinary Institute), all inform her writing to create prose that falls somewhere between the culinary outdoorsiness of Jim Harrison and the urban insight of Candace Bushnell. Traveling through Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas, hunting turkey, duck, and hog, she explores the thrill of the chase (“I listen to the cartridge slip into the chamber, and walk sideways into the tall, cream grass”) and reflects on its denouement (“the casual way in which nature treats life and death”). And she is equally keen in observing the series of male companions who serve as hosts and guides for her outings. These range from a friendly lawyer who escorts her through a Louisiana Bayou to a scary poacher with an uncomfortable perspective on steak in Wyoming’s cattle country.
November 15, 2011
A bubbly combination hunting memoir and how-to guide, with some stellar recipes. Pellegrini (Food Heroes: 16 Culinary Artisans Preserving Tradition, 2010), whose popular blog chronicles her adventures hunting, cooking and globetrotting, focuses her book on the hunts. After college, the author forewent a career on Wall Street in favor of more schooling, at the French Culinary Institute. As a chef, she worked at Manhattan's gourmet Gramercy Tavern as well as Blue Hill at Stone Barns; her mouthwatering, meat-centric recipes are the stars of her stories. Pellegrini began hunting several years ago, when she was curious to determine if it was possible to eat only meat that she had killed. Her interest shares the same spirit as Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma, although her recounting of her hunts is more personal and less deadly serious than most. A large part of Pellegrini's identity as a hunter has been defined by her relative youth and striking, blond-haired beauty, and her toughness constantly surprises veteran male hunters. The author divides her book by prey, with separate chapters devoted to quail, squirrel, deer and turkey, among others. Pellegrini describes chasing wild hogs along the banks of the Mississippi while riding on the back of an ATV, as well as quieter moments spent drinking whiskey fireside and listening to the tales of grizzled hunters. The author isn't a particularly strong or compelling writer, but her enthusiastic stories are original and will appeal to chefs and foodies, especially women, who are interested in tracking their food all the way to the table. Entertaining for a specific audience.
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Starred review from December 1, 2011
Foodie blogger Pellegrini has crafted a memoir rich both in her hunting experiences and ruminations on what it means to kill what you eat. Hunting remains a bit of a literary minefieldall too often relegated to camouflage-covered self-congratulatory missives and talk-show jokes about tone-deaf politicians. As a chef, Pellegrini sees the separation between carnivore and plate as something hypocritical. So she goes into the wild with people intimately connected to the land and learns to shoot and field dress as well as prepare food. Her experiencessome comical; others rife with tradition and lush with descriptions of late-night conversations accompanied by tobacco and whiskeybring readers around campfires with sensitive men full of laughter. Individuals who value guns and food and find pleasure in patiently waiting with a dog for a bird to appear quicksilver in their sights. Although she does resist the tendency to romanticize, Pellegrini can't shake the fact she is part of something old, and that, aside from a Masterpiece Theatreesque foray into the English countryside, she is dipping deep into a level of Americana few have captured on the page. Like her, readers will not be able to look away. And she includes recipes.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)