The Ultimate Man's Man Describes His Perfect Woman
What hunting, cooking, and food all have to do with love.
Jakob Owens, Mathieu Odin, Lucija Ros | Unsplash Despite what they claim, not many guys would kill for a woman. Steven Rinella will. He’s a hunter, a fisherman, a Montana-bred man of the wild. He cooks. He writes. He makes hearts beat a little faster. And for his book, The Scavenger's Guide to Haute Cuisine, he sets out to recreate 45 dishes from Auguste Escoffier's 1903 classic, Le Guide Culinare — with a twist.
Traveling from Alaska to Florida, the 49-year-old Rinella captured all his ingredients (stingrays, pigeons, snapping turtles), while somehow managing to hold on to a vegetarian girlfriend.
Here is the ultimate man's man take on love:
YourTango: Why do you think people equate food and being intimate? For instance, you call Le Guide Culinaire the Kama Sutra of food.
Steven Rinella: Well, the Kama Sutra is a comprehensive exploration of all the different things two bodies could do. Escoffier brought that thoroughness to the culinary arts. Generally, I think people equate intimacy and food because they're both finite. A lot of effort and thought goes into something very fleeting.
There's also this sense when you eat something that you shouldn't: "It was so good, but I shouldn't have done it." That feeling surrounds the intimate realm for people. And food is a physical creation; it's organic and it's captivating on all these different levels — taste, smell, and feel. So in that way, it's also like intimacy.
Escoffier had all of these ideas about aphrodisiacs, food that was visceral, decadent, and rich. Truffles, for one. And different organ meats. Can you imagine? "I'm going to get so-and-so hot tonight. I'm going to fill her up with a heart, some big mushrooms, and oysters."
YT: Do you crave any dishes you made for your book?
S: This summer, I couldn't stop eating bone marrow. It was just me and my brother. We had a big bag of bones. Femurs. We'd cut them into little two-inch disks, line a cookie sheet, and bake them. We'd just sit around eating the marrow with little mini caviar spoons. And then we were like, "We gotta stop. This stuff kills you." Cholesterol. I would have never thought to do that if it wasn't for this book.
YT: You write about your girlfriend: "Because I almost instantly fell in love and couldn’t stand to be without her, I knew that the only logical course of action was to convert her to a meat eater." Did it work?
S: No. I was this close, though. We had this deal. I was like, "How 'bout once every week you eat a meat meal just to get used to it?" And then it was once every two weeks, then it was once every month, and now it's just never. It pains me. When you shoot an elk, you have 200 pounds of organic, free-range meat.
If it's there and I'm willing to cook it for you, why wouldn't you eat it? For a while, I'd try to figure out some way in which to take half of a dish and turn it into a meat dish. I'd have vegetarian lettuce wraps and almost-the-same elk lettuce wraps. But I always felt limited. I like food with bones and stuff sticking out of it. So now I cook two dinners. The other night I made all-vegetarian sushi and a big buffalo pot roast with demi-glace and candied carrots. I wish I had a girlfriend who would eat whatever I made.
YT: You also write: "I used to dream of clawing my way back into the past, back to a time when things were more real." Do you think relationships used to be more real?
S: I have this Rousseauist ideal that by being close to nature two people could somehow make a culture. It'd be great to meet someone and go off to a cabin up in the mountains and just rough it. You'd grow and hunt your food, and it'd just be you two against everything. It's a ridiculous idea, but I can't give it up. At the same time, I also live in the contemporary world.
People can't be that close; you don't want to be that close anymore. You're two things very much in your orbits. This book's a lot about how those orbits clash. As for relationships being more real in the past — and I'm speaking of a survivalist past — they were more joined. Your physical well-being was tied up in how well you got along. If you're a hunter-gatherer and you've been with someone for four years, you're not thinking about breaking up. It's just not an option.
Y: Describe the perfect woman.
S: I guess my ideal woman would be a good-looking, female version of my brothers. Someone who eats whatever I make goes on trips with me, never turns on the TV, reads a lot, likes the movies I like, and wants to live in different places. That's what I want, but I'm fooling myself. This is not going to happen. In my life, I equate women with the intellectual side and guys with the nonintellectual side. Dating someone who is intelligent, and who I can relate to emotionally, is more important to me than anything else.
Samantha Lagoon is a freelance writer and former contributor to YourTango.