How to Cook a Moose (24 page)

Maple Oatmeal

We eat this for breakfast on icebound winter mornings. It warms the inside of the rib cage and keeps us full for hours.

In a saucepan, stir 1/2 cup organic steel-cut oats into 1 cup of water with a pinch of salt. Add 1 T or more of maple syrup and 1/2 tsp of cinnamon. Simmer, covered, according to the oatmeal directions. Stir a few times while it cooks, adding more water as necessary. When the oats are almost done, add 3/4 cup fresh or frozen wild low-bush blueberries and stir well. Let simmer a few more minutes. Serves 2.

Maple syrup is native to North America. The Indians made incisions in trees during the spring thaw and tapped them with reeds and collected the sap either in birch buckets or hollowed-out trees; they produced syrup either the way Tom Earle described, with hot rocks, or
by letting the sap freeze overnight and skimming off the water ice that rose to the top in the mornings, leaving the sugars below.

When the first colonists arrived, the Natives taught them to collect sap; instead of making incisions, they drilled holes into the trees and extracted it with spouts. Maple syrup and maple sugar were the primary sources of sweetness in early New England cuisine, since cane sugar had to be imported from the West Indies.

Maple syrup is more nutritious than either cane sugar or honey, containing manganese and zinc, as well as small amounts of potassium and calcium and trace amounts of amino acids. It's also delicious.

When I was little, we ate Aunt Jemima or Log Cabin imitation maple syrup in our family, or, when money was especially tight, Caro corn syrup heated and mixed with imitation maple flavoring. When I read about sugaring in the
Little House on the Prairie
books, I instinctively craved the maple candy Ma made by pouring hot maple syrup into the snow. We used to get maple candy from our grandmother, who often summered in Maine, and I loved it madly. It was a rare and treasured treat. I couldn't believe how good it was, how light, how full of flavor. It melted on the tongue into a memory of pure sweetness, a clean taste, unlike the usual chemical candy we ate, Jolly Ranchers and Sweet Tarts, Pop Rocks and Hot Tamales.

My first taste of real maple syrup was another such happy shock. It was so different from Aunt Jemima, which was thick and sweet and simple-tasting. I don't remember when this happened, exactly, but I do remember the puzzled excitement I felt: Real maple syrup had a complex, rich flavor, mixed caramel and vanilla and plant life, a vegetal, fresh taste with some of the dark earthiness of mushrooms, as well as the tang of applesauce. It was amazing stuff, I knew right away.

Tom had asked us to keep an eye on the buckets, to make sure the tops stayed on in the wind and that they didn't overflow. We peered into several of them over the next few days, but nothing much seemed to be happening with regard to output.

We watched Tom come by and empty the buckets periodically. He told us that this particular spring was turning out to be a bad one for maple sugaring, even though the nights were nice and cold, since the days didn't warm up enough to make the sap rise. He was disappointed, he said, but next year would probably be better. I told him I looked forward to watching him tap the trees again next spring and boil down the sap in his sugarhouse.

It was (and is) amazing to me—a former New Yorker who spent my entire post-school life in the city before I first came up here—to live in such close proximity to people who know how to do stuff—who've learned, and who practice, the old traditional ways.

When my ex-husband and I renovated our nineteenth-century row house in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, we did most of the work ourselves, in part because there was no one to hire. He had worked for about fifteen years after college as a building contractor, but when his joints gave out and he left that business, there was no one to hand it on to. All the young kids were now in IT and media.

Up here, that's not the case. The contractors who renovated our Portland house were our tenants' best friends; finding them was the easiest thing in the world. Likewise, I had just been wanting to watch someone tap a maple tree, and Tom Earle came walking up to our front door one warmish late-winter morning.

Sometimes I feel like all I have to do is ask, and I meet someone who has what I want.

One winter in Portland, at the first meeting of our newly formed Scotch Club, which is exactly what it sounds like, I idly expressed a yearning to cook moose. It turned out that one member, who lives
two blocks away from us, had a freezer full that she wasn't sure what to do with (her girlfriend's father is a hunter).

“I'll make you a deal,” I said. “If you give me some of that moose, I'll cook it for the next Scotch Club meeting.”

When I went to her house to collect it, she handed me three packages of frozen meat marked
BACKSTRAP, NEW YORK SIRLOIN
, and
STEW MEAT
. I was so excited I could hardly contain myself. I took them straight home and thawed the packages in a pot of hot water. The meat was a deep ruby-purple, with no fat on it. It smelled mineral-fresh, not gamey at all. I reserved all the liquid that pooled in the bags from thawing.

I had decided to bourguignon the hell out of the moose, so I used Ina Garten's recipe, substituting moose for beef. I used plenty of thyme, butter, lardons, cognac, and an entire bottle of dry red wine. I set the cognac aflame, too, which was exciting.

That night's Scotch Club meeting began in the living room with cheese, crackers, and a tasting of the night's first single malt, Glenfiddich, which we all pronounced smooth and tasty. Then we thronged into the kitchen and filled our plates with fresh buttered gluten-free fettuccine topped with moose bourguignon and buttered peas, and alongside, a salad of herb mix and fennel with a strong vinaigrette. The moose meat was tender and savory and stalwart enough to sop up all the rest of the single malts that followed that night.

Moose Bourguignon (adapted from Ina Garten)

2 T rendered duck fat

8 ounces dry-cured, center-cut, applewood-smoked bacon, diced

2 1/2 lbs. moose meat cut into 1-inch cubes

Kosher salt

Freshly ground black pepper

1 lb. carrots, sliced diagonally into 1-inch chunks

2 yellow onions, sliced

2 tsp chopped garlic (2 cloves)

1/2 cup cognac

1 (750 ml) bottle good dry red wine, such as Cotes du Rhone or Pinot Noir

1 can (2 cups) beef broth

1 T tomato paste

1 tsp fresh thyme leaves (1/2 tsp dried)

4 T unsalted butter at room temperature, divided

3 T fine-milled Acadian buckwheat flour (I used Bouchard)

1 lb. frozen pearl onions

1 lb. fresh mushrooms, stems discarded, caps thickly sliced

For serving:

2 lbs. gluten-free fettuccine, boiled according to directions and tossed with salt to taste and 4 T butter

1/2 cup chopped fresh parsley

Preheat the oven to 250 degrees F. Heat the duck fat in a large Dutch oven. Add the bacon and cook over medium heat for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the bacon is lightly browned. Remove the bacon with a slotted spoon to a large plate.

Dry the moose meat with paper towels and then sprinkle with salt and pepper.

In batches in single layers, sear the moose in the hot fat for 3 to 5 minutes, turning to brown on all sides. Remove the seared cubes to the plate with the bacon and continue searing until all the moose is browned. Set aside.

Toss the carrots, and onions, 1 T of salt and 2 tsp of pepper in the fat in the pan and cook for 10 to 15 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the onions are lightly browned. Add the garlic and cook for 1
more minute. Add the cognac, stand back, and ignite with a match to burn off the alcohol. (This part is a lot of fun, and very dramatic.)

Put the meat and bacon back into the pot with the juices. Add the bottle of wine plus enough beef broth to almost cover the meat. Add the tomato paste and thyme. Bring to a simmer, cover the pot with a tight-fitting lid, and place it in the oven for about 1 1/4 hours, or until the meat and vegetables are very tender when pierced with a fork.

Combine 2 T of butter and the buckwheat flour with a fork and stir into the stew. Add the frozen onions. Sauté the mushrooms in 2 T of butter for 10 minutes, until lightly browned, and then add to the stew. Bring the stew to a boil on top of the stove, then lower the heat and simmer for 15 minutes. Season to taste. Serve over buttered fettuccine. Sprinkle each plate with parsley. Serves 6 to 8.

Moose are delicious, there's no doubt about that. Humans have hunted and enjoyed their meat for thousands of years. The Native Americans, in addition to enjoying the fresh meat, made pemmican, a portable, concentrated dried jerky made of game meat, fat, and wild berries that kept indefinitely. The Europeans adapted the pemmican recipe for their own uses, which included long ocean voyages and dogsled trips into the wilderness. Moose can generally be incorporated into regular recipes calling for any type of red meat; my bourguignon was the perfect case in point.

Since that particular moose was already dead, its meat already butchered and frozen in neat packets, it was easy to remove myself from the idea of an actual moose, as I cooked and ate it—easy to separate this meat from the fantastical beast I'd seen on that dirt road by
the lake in New Hampshire almost four years before. Of course, when an animal's body has been dressed and prepared for cooking offstage, it's been turned into food and is no longer strictly the flesh of a once-living thing. Language helps with the larger, more problematically sentient-seeming mammals: Cows become beef; pigs, pork; sheep, mutton. Deer, when eaten, are called venison, as are all members of the deer family, including moose.

But it's complicated at its core, the idea of eating (and cooking) a moose. They're lovely wild animals, and they seem to be dying out.

Moose are loners, except during mating season. Like all members of the deer family, they are herbivores; the word
moose
comes from an Algonquin word for
twig eater
. They browse through the woods, eating leaves, twigs, and buds off trees, long grasses, and shrubs, and they also love to wade into ponds and marshes and eat aquatic plants. In winter, they forage for pinecones and lichen, scraping the snow with their wide, flat hooves, which also function as snowshoes. They can run up to thirty-five miles an hour for short bursts, and they're excellent, fast swimmers.