So the final issue of Gourmet Magazine (ever?) just arrived.

I opened it up…

And, yes, my story “The Very Noble Train of the Huntsman” happens to be in it.

Read on…

THE VERY NOBLE TRAIN OF THE HUNTSMAN

“We’re getting coffee,” said Frédéric Morin, chef and co-owner of Montreal’s Joe Beef restaurant. His co-chef and fellow restaurateur, David McMillan, was already at the kitchenette at the rear of the train. Gazing at the painting of a moose silhouette on the wall next to McMillan was Robert Pobi, an antiques dealer and aspiring novelist who describes his current manuscript as the “next great American angling novel.” I headed down the aisle behind Kim Côté, a young farmer and chef from Kamouraska who moonlights as a professional guide on $1,500-an-hour helicopter caribou hunts.

The five of us were hundreds of miles from home, chugging through the mossy hinterland of northern Quebec. The steel blue seats and gray interior of this two-car train were straight out of the 1940s. So was its cheery stewardess, clad in a starched navy blue uniform and silk ascot. It was clear from our equipment that we were on a fishing trip, but she suspected that we weren’t her typical passengers. “Have you ever been this far north?” she asked, doling out a round of Styrofoam cups.

Not being a big fan of filtered coffee, I asked for a short espresso. The attendant’s smile faded. She looked me over with a mixture of pity and bemusement, her gaze lingering for a moment on my brand-new, crisply pleated Wrangler “angler” pants.

Forget macchiatos. VIA Rail’s Abitibi line barely has stations. Passengers taking this fall journey make reservations to detrain at any number of unmarked spots near their outfitters; on the way home, they simply flag down the train and head back with their catch. Morin refers to it as “The Very Noble Train of the Huntsman.” The spine of Quebec’s wilderness sporting country, it curves through what VIA calls a “vast hunting, fishing and outdoor adventure territory encompassing 460 km of railway.”

Settlers started building private hunting and fishing clubs as the tracks were being laid. They hacked their way through the forest primeval, naming lakes and inventing dishes like Biscuits à la Gregory (sailor biscuits cooked in bacon grease and topped with marmalade). The American painter Winslow Homer, an early and repeat visitor, said Quebec had the best fishing he’d ever encountered. By the late 1800s, gentlemen anglers from the United States and Europe were packing the railcars. Photos from the era show dapper sportsmen in fancy boots and cravats reclining while smoking cigars. Although train traffic has waned with the rise of air travel and SUVs, the Abitibi line continues to haul trophy antlers and wild venison through the countryside.

A month before we set out, I was looking at Joe Beef’s chalkboard menu and asked Morin about a dish called Dining Car Calf Liver. He told me that the recipe came from an old Canadian National Rail training manual for chefs. “During the golden age of rail travel, trains used to serve haute cuisine on fine china,” he explained. “My thing is food on trains.” Beneath the lanterns on his restaurant’s outdoor patio, he rhapsodized about how you see landscapes on the train you’d never see in a car. “You know, its beautiful to see the highway 20 out your window when you are plastered on Canadian Merlot.”

A self-proclaimed train-freak, Morin carries a VIA Railways timetable with him at all times. He started thumbing through the schedule to plan the trip we had agreed to take. Searching for hunting and fishing stations close to the end of the line, he settled on Club Kapitachuan, an 11-hour ride away. Because it’s so remote, there would likely be pristine fishing and, most importantly, ample time to enjoy his beloved train.

Most of Montreal’s finest restaurants tap into the mythology of the well-fed outdoorsman, whether it’s the “man-sized French Canadian cooking” of Martin Picard’s Au Pied de Cochon or of Old Montreal’s Le Club Chasse et Pêche, named after northern sporting lodges and decorated in kind. These restaurants, like the institutions they revere, are temples of hedonism. It’s as though overindulgence became a way of compensating for—or obliterating the memory of—the hardships endured by the coureurs de bois. As early as the 19th century, sporting periodicals were already describing larders bulging with baskets of Champagne, magnums of claret, a “fair allowance” of dry Sherry, barrels of India Pale Ale, and cases of “eau de vie pale et vieille for medicinal purposes.”

Morin and McMillan grasped this intuitively. When I’d stopped by a few days before our trip, waitress Meredith Erickson told me they’d been arguing about how much wine to bring: 72 bottles or 84 bottles? I did the math: the five of us would each need to drink around four bottles per night. Erickson looked at me with sympathy: “I hope they don’t get too Deliverance on your ass.”

On the morning of our departure, the agent said he hadn’t printed tickets to Kapitachuan in the 37 years he’d worked at VIA. “It’s what they call a flag stop,” he said. “There’s just two poles in the ground. You’re right in the bush. There’s no electricity. You hear the wolves at night. The lakes are full of fish. It’s paradise.”

*

Morin had been in paradise from the moment we boarded the noble train in Montreal. Adjusting his striped railway engineer’s cap, he called our attention to “the romance of the bells tolling.” The stewardess forgot about my coffee gaffe, and we drank train-issued Merlot from individual juice boxes. Across the aisle was a rotund, gray-haired hunter who gave us a recipe for beaver tails “more tender than scallops.” (Boil them three times and then cook with bacon and butter. Otherwise, he warned, “They’ll just taste like oily aspen trees.”) We coasted through places like Grand-Mère, where the nearby mountain resembles a grandmother’s head, and Windigo Station, named after the mythical Algonquin creature said to have an insatiable appetite for human flesh. We glimpsed a large tepee, seemingly still in use.

It was dark by the time we arrived. Our outfitters picked us up at the flag stop and drove us through the dirt-road night. They were the manliest men we’d ever seen, with Tom of Finland hair-cuts, lumberjack shirts, and meaty hands the size of baseball mitts. They spoke in supernaturally deep voices, warning that we’d be competing for fish with an abundance of black bears. Our main quarry was the northern pike, a needle-toothed water wolf known to devour entire geese or dogs and to bite chunks out of canoe paddles. We’d also be trolling for walleye, a delicious aquatic tyrant whose mohawk of spines can stab through unsuspecting hands. There was even a chance that we’d catch ouananiches, fearsome combatants characterized by old-timers as “the bravest warrior of all creatures that swim.”

As we lifted our gear from the pickup truck, our senses tingled from the forest perfumes. Our cabin was sparsely furnished but had everything we needed: a table and chairs, beds, a fridge and a wood-burning oven. The club was three hours away from the nearest grocery store, so we’d packed all our victuals for the next five days. That meant bringing an entire side of bacon, a sack of potatoes, garlic cheese grits from South Carolina, and Puy lentils instead of the traditional fèves au lard (a classic Quebecois breakfast dish of baked brown beans with bacon fat and either molasses or maple syrup). McMillan began by unpacking the cases of wine. Côté hoisted the lid off a cooler full of guinea hens and pork thighs he’d raised on his farm. Alongside Côté’s meats, we’d be eating a panoply of flesh, including rabbit, beef tenderloin, and a pork and prune fricassee topped with unwieldy portions of foie gras from Joe Beef. “As they say: sinful,” winked Morin.

Periodically rubbing the small tattoo of a carrot on his shoulder, Morin fried up Côté’s guinea hens in cast-iron pans. McMillan uncorked premier cru Volnays and prepared a crisp, bubbling potato dish he’d been taught to make by the monks of Notre-Dame de Cîteaux, a Cistercian abbey in Burgundy. It was a gratin dauphinois type of concoction with a few secret ingredients: browned chicken wings, ham hocks, and cheese from the abbey. He placed the potatoes on top like a deck of fanned cards. After baking the dish, he broiled it so that the tips of each potato slice turned golden-brown while the interior remained a gooey mess. As they say: sinful. A day of fishing ahead of us, we fell asleep full and happy. A chamber orchestra of snoring soon filled the room.

*

The following morning, we showered in freezing water and then headed out in motorboats. We drifted around, idly pitching our lures into the depths. Morin spoke about the way time seems different on a train—and when fishing out on the lake. I was learning what he likes to call “the lessons of the teachings.” Steam curled above unrippled black pools. Daggers of sunlight carved holes in the clouds. “See those reeds there?” exclaimed Pobi at one point, gesturing toward some bog myrtle. “I guarantee you there’s a monster pike in there with its gills flaring open, waiting to eat.” And indeed there was. McMillan fought hard to reel in an iridescent beast whose maw snapped at us with what seemed like thousands of razor-sharp teeth. One after another, we brought in walleye and pike the likes of which I’d never seen before.

The days evaporated in a meditative trance. There was a lot of storytelling, joking, and competition over who could catch the biggest fish. The winner was Bobby Moore, our Cree guide. The odds were in his favor: He’d been fishing these lakes since 1972. “How amazing that there are still native guides who know the water and the land,” Morin marveled.

As we drifted through the wide-open beauty of rural Quebec, Moore pointed out mink scampering into the pines and eagles circling overhead. Burly black bears hightailed it whenever they heard us approaching. Our boats brought us deeper and deeper into the wilderness, each new lake as still as a mirror. “It’s like this until the Arctic Circle,” Moore said. “The trees get smaller and smaller until you finally hit the tundra.”

We caught so many fish that hunting would have been pointless. We didn’t end up having Moore’s special “shore lunch,” which consists of walleye deep-fried in shortening. (“It’s hard on the arteries, but everybody likes it.”) Instead, McMillan and Morin baked buttered walleye fillets in a Le Creuset gratin dish they’d found in a junk store before pulling out of Montreal’s Central Station. Over lunch, Moore told us that moose meat doesn’t taste good—although he and Côté agreed that reindeer is maudit bon (cursedly delicious).

We ended each day with meals as simple as they were unforgettable. Morin covered the massive tenderloin with coriander seeds and cooked it over an open fire he’d built outdoors. Watching him work, I learned that everything goes better with mustard and bacon. Morin explained that he operates according to the “Big Mac theory,” the idea that each mouthful should be “sweet, creamy, salty, fatty, smoky, and umami all at the same time.” His food activates all your taste buds, through whatever means necessary, including ingredients many “serious” chefs might sniff at. He uses crushed potato chips as a garnish and cooks with heads of ornamental chard or cabbage his sous-chefs sometimes steal from city parks. (It’s his signature prank.) He recommends marinating meats in no-name supermarket salad dressing and will greet guests at the bar with a just-deep-fried lobster Montecristo sandwich. Melding high and low in almost preposterous ways, he likes to stuff éclair buns with lobes of foie gras and Velveeta. I’ve dropped into Joe Beef’s backyard to find him smoking fish inside a tin garbage can or cooking omelets in a wheelbarrow.

At least one serious chef—David Chang, of New York’s illustrious Momofuku—understands: “There’s no rhyme or reason to their menu—it’s whatever they want to do—and God bless them for that,” he told me just before our trip. Chang, who recently spent four consecutive nights eating at Joe Beef, also said: “There’s nowhere in the world like it. It’s one of my favorite places of all time.” Morin and McMillan’s food is even better in the woods. One night, after eating eight homemade sausages each, we had rabbit stew, mashed potatoes, and lentils, which we ate with bottle after bottle of wines from Alsace, Jura, and Graves. As we feasted, we listened to shortwave radio. Morin spoke about his penchant for food in unexpected places. “I’d like to fill the city’s birdbaths with shrimp cocktails,” he pontificated, opening another bottle of dry Sherry. “We should set up three tables in the abandoned green space beside an old church whose doors are always locked. People could eat in the tall grass behind a wrought-iron fence.”

After a final night in the snoretex, we said good-bye to our outfitters and Bobby Moore, flagged down the train, and clambered aboard. A few hours later, the conductor let us disembark while we waited for a freight train to pass. We found ourselves in a misty timber yard, surrounded by thousands of enormous logs stacked like a giant’s toothpicks. We were poised between nature and civilization, woodsmen returning home.

The Fruit Hunters is an October pick for the CBC Book Club. They are accepting questions until October 22, and then a Q&A will air on October 23.

C u on the airwaves!

***UPDATE! Here’s a prelim interview I did while cooking purple broccoli and anchovies (Oh Puglia) with the CBC’s Hannah Sung. And here’s the actual recording of the full interview. There’s even a part where we spoke about Borges’ library and how there’s a massive book with a certain word in it that happens to literally be God and everybody’s been looking for it for years…

While that search continues, other write-ups keep on tricklin’ in…

“Brilliant and eye-opening,” says the Telegraph in London, in their report about the Grapple. Let it be said, for the record, that Grapple inventor Gary Snyder reminded me of Baudelaire: when he spoke, “he was like the princess from the fairy tale who, from her half-open lips, pours out a flood of diamonds and precious stones.”

“Adam Gollner’s kind of great – I recommend his weird, wonderful book ‘The Fruit Hunters,‘” says Pulitzer-winning Los Angeles writer Jonathan Gold (aka God) in this interview (I must admit that without Gold’s writing I don’t think I coulda survived LA. Seriously.)

The New Agriculturalist notes the book’s “linguistic originality,” calling it “an amazing, and highly recommended debut: irreverent, informed and surprisingly hard to put down… It’s an act of homage to the myriad of little known fruits, and the people whose lives they touch, across far-flung parts of the planet.”

“He writes like a contemporary Dr. David Fairchild,” say the plant-freaks. “If they gave out a Pulitzer prize strictly for gardening books, Adam Leith Gollner would win it with this book!” And the Vice President of the Santa Cruz chapter of the California Rare Fruit Growers Association calls the book “so right on the money about all the issues and, alas about the California Rare Fruit Growers too, we have way too many grouchy people.”

This is what the blogosphere has to say:
“Sometimes we chance upon a piece of writing so evocative, beautiful, rich and real, that we are transported into the experience of the writer… This book’s got it all – superb writing, sex, sensuality, history, agriculture, obsession, history, botany, mythology, and more fruits than we’ll encounter in a lifetime. Read this, and you’ll be yearning for exotica, culinary diversity, and noisy, foetid, fragrant marketplaces in lands-afar.”

As is this, and I must agree that as disconcerting as it is for those of us with nerves barely covered by flesh, there does seem to be a deeper meaning to the world than any of us could have ever hoped for – even though it will always remain out of reach: “Around the middle of the book I started obsessively reading chapters like some junkie mainlining heroin (which, by the way, is a product of the fruit of the opium poppy). I knew then I’d be giving this book a great review… The man has a way with words. Describing slugs eating coco-de-mer blossoms: “It’s like watching an educational film about venereal diseases in outer space.” Be forewarned that this fruit is not entirely work-safe. The further I got into the book, the greater my sense that somehow there’s a deeper meaning to the world than I’d ever hoped for. That has to be the rarest fruit of all. This is Adam Leith Gollner’s first book—I hope to see many more from him in future. For now, do yourselves a favour and read The Fruit Hunters.”

Passionate Foodie is more homeostatic about things, and calls it “an excellent read, one that will keep you interested from start to finish… an eclectic blend of plentiful and fascinating information deserving of my highest recommendation.”

Finally, here we are, you who have hacked your way this far through all that dense hype (geez, should I really be keeping track of all this stuff? But if I don’t, who will? The internet, I guess…) The last thing I want to mention is also the best. My talk at Cornell University was a lot of fun, and I’ll be posting footage of it to youtube as soon as I got a copy of the VHS. (!) After the lecture, I had the pleasure of spending a day in their magical garden (flowers that smell like chocolate???) and checking out Professor Howard E. Evans’ cabinet of curiosity in the animal veterinary department. (Dr. Evans is the author of Guide to the Dissection of the Dog. As one comment puts it, “DO NOT attempt to dissect a dog without this book!” I won’t). His incredible office was crammed with skeletons, snake fangs, cyclops sheep heads floating in formaldehyde, fetal sloths he’d found in its dead mother’s belly, and botanical anomalies of every sort. Intrepid Ithaca Times Arts Editor Natasha Pickowicz came along for the trip, and posted a Q and A here

Psychic soot…

Her article in the Ithaca Times traces the contours of unknowable territories here

If you are in Montreal, join us for the world premiere of “Goblin Market” at Pop Montreal next Saturday Oct. 3rd at 7pm at La Place Ubisoft: L’Espace Reunion, 6600 Hutchison.

The Montreal Gazette calls it an “exquisite… 12-minute Victorian hothouse gothic adaptation of the Christina Rossetti poem, featuring enchanted forests, forbidden fruit, scary goblins and fair maidens, represented in part, by famed actor Liane Balaban. It’s all quite perfect, and gorgeously shot by the Sanchez brothers.”

An 8mm fairy tale about the temptations of fruits, the film takes place in a forbidden forest and was made with an all-star cast and crew of Montreal beatniks. The film’s magical score is by Roger Tellier Craig. It was shot by the Sanchez Brothers, who are in Alberta right now filming a Western feature film with our male lead, Dave Lawrence. Beautiful damsels Liane Balaban, Tamar Amir, and Tracy Martin light up the screen. Miska Gollner and Jonathan Shatzky are unforgettable as the Goblins. It was produced by Sarah Resnick, who also unearthed a bounty of costumes alongside Alexandra Houston Smith. Raf Katigbak did the art direction, Pascal Bartschat was the production designer, Dan Lafleche styled the hair, Natalie Riviere created the makeup, her bro Daniel “Donny Doo Dai Day” Riviere edited it with Jason Sanchez, D.A.D.D.Y did the titles, and Brett Stabler, Esq funded it by hiring yours truly as a DJ at the W Hotel for a year. There’s even an illustrated cameo by Oscar-nominated animator James Braithwaite! If you live here, you probably know at least one person who worked on it – whether it’s Sefi Amir (Art Dept), Warren Auld (Engineer), Nora Harun (Aesthetics), Alexandre St-Onge (Wolf Howls), Miriam Streiman (Victuals), Steve Zylbergold (Glowing Fruits), or Darren Curtis (Kidnapper). The first screening will be at Pop Montreal next Saturday, Oct. 3rd at 7pm at La Place Ubisoft: L’Espace Reunion, 6600 Hutchison.

There’ll be another screening in late October, and after that, we’ll put it up on youtube.

As the dead season nears, here are some missives from the fruit underworld.

The New York Times heard about The Fruit Hunters’ film adaptation, and is already lining up for popcorn. Full story here

I’ll be at Cornell University on Wednesday night, giving the annual Elizabeth E. Rowley Lecture, so please join us if you are in upstate New York. More info here

The halls of the academy might blush, but some of the topics I’ll be discussing are in this Good Magazine story about fruits and sex

The Fruit Hunters’ investigation of Grapples – an apple that tastes like artificial grapes – is discussed in a piece in London’s Telegraph newspaper. Read more here

The Telegraph also has a story on an apple that is a half red and half green chimera

And Russians are using melons for curative purposes, reports the Times. The best quote is at the end, from a doctor, on the truth about the restorative qualities of melon: “It is not medicine,” he said. “It is not like cleaning out a pipe. But it is a very pleasant way to stimulate the kidneys.”

The Fruit Hunters is launched in Japan this week, translated by Mitsuko Tateishi and published by Hakusuisha. For more info, please go here

Artist Wendy Martinez is documenting the Children of Light, the beloved date-growing immortalist virgins and eunuchs readers encounter towards the end of “The Fruit Hunters.”

You can see her beautiful photos over here

Elect Star & Elect David recently checked out a show of the photos in Phoenix and they “even brought they’re own water from their well lol,” reports Wendy. “Did you know that the reason people know them in town is because they’re the only ones with a pool? They’re pretty much the unofficial local public pool in the area. Locals go there to swim and have never bothered to ask much about them. That’s where I learned to swim too!”

Here’s a color polaroid Liane and I snapped on our visit

I will never forget sitting on the lawn in front of the Fairchild Botanical Garden with Graftin’ Crafton Clift, a very wise man (and avid grafter – as you can see over here ). Having been informed that Graftin’ Crafton walks through the world in a “complete naïve wonderland of fruit,” I asked him why he liked fruit so much. He seemed flummoxed by the question, and said that he had no idea – adding only that “kids like fruit.”

It’s true – kids do like fruit. Even as adults, biting into a really delicious ripe fruit can transport us to a state childlike innocence. In that spirit, check out “Get Fruity,” a new album of children’s songs all about fruit. You can learn more about it here .

The artist’s name is Apple Brains, and he was kind enough to drop by a Fruit Hunters reading in California and he even wrote this nice note about the book.

Be sure to give the songs a listen, and pick up a copy of the CD for a fruity kids in your life!

To research my upcoming book, I’ve been reading Geza Roheim’s (very) seminal work of psychoanalytical anthropology The Eternal Ones of the Dream about aboriginal Australian rituals and magic. It’s full of terrifying, transformative stories of youths undergoing bloody rites of passage from adolescence to adulthood. Arms are cut open with wallaby bones. Elders produce quartz crystals out of their stomachs. Blood is mixed with dust and drunk communally. There are rainbow serpents, water ancestors, impossible incisions and the possibility of getting stuck in the Milky Way.

I can almost imagine an echo of those magical rites in the final melody of the song “Blood” by The Middle East (from Townsville, Australia). Listen to it and their other songs here. So much talent, so much beauty, cut your heart open with quartz crystals…

Lots happening in the United Fruit Kingdom… Click here for a piece in The Guardian about the top 10 literary fruit scenes in history

The Daily Telegraph ran a sweet review, calling the book “a poetic exploration of the world’s many and spectacularly varied fruits… Gollner’s passion for his subject bursts through in every line.” You can click through here or else check out the actual clipping below.

The Financial Times’ description of the book is the best one yet: It’s “a celebration of all fruit everywhere.”

The BBC reported on how the author “really travels around the world and meets these absolute nutcases who live their life searching for the most delicious, fantastical fruits… They are insane eccentric characters sort of leaping around the jungles in homemade pith helmets, plucking these things from the trees… This is a book to inspire you to travel the world and have succulent delights straight off the tree.”

And, although it’s not in the UK, here’s a piece from the colonies about fruit hunting and mushroom hunting — in the suburban newspaper I used to deliver as a child. (Fond memories of age 8 waking up at 5AM in the middle of the winter darkness and riding my bmx through waist-high snow to go pick up my bagfull of Chronicles, and Montreal Gazettes too).

Here’s a couple of others:

Foodtripper says: “Reading the book is such an intense experience it’s a bit of a shock to come to the end and return to the real world- like going from full-colour to black and white.” More here

Passionate Foodie says: “Throughout this comprehensive journey, Adam peppers the book with a plethora of fascinating facts and anecdotes “

The Ecologist praises the book’s delightful and often downright dirty snippets

Wim Wenders is helping director Yung Chang turn “The Fruit Hunters” into a film! Click here — and stay tuned. More info on this soon!