The Raw and the Cooked - by Jim Harrison (Paperback)

About the Book

For the first time, all of Harrison's food writing is available in one volume. Any reader of Harrison's fiction is struck by the love for food, wine, and other sensual pleasures that permeates it--and anyone who has read his essays and journalism has encountered a food critic unlike any other: unpretentious, witty, and unabashedly passionate.

Book Synopsis

A cornucopia of culinary essays from "the Henry Miller of food writing. His passion is infectious" (Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, The Wall Street Journal).

Jim Harrison was one of this country's most beloved writers, a muscular, brilliantly economic stylist with a salty wisdom. For more than twenty years, he also wrote 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 Harrison's legendary Smart and Esquire columns, to current works 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.

"[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

Review Quotes

Praise for The Raw and the Cooked

"Jim Harrison is the Henry Miller of food writing. His passion is infectious. . . . By virtual of talent, Mr. Harrison would sit at the same table as A.J. Liebling and M.F.K. Fisher." --Jeffrey Trachtenberg, Wall Street Journal

"Crammed with aphorisms and oracular statements, these intemperate essays caper from willful paradox to moral outrage, embracing human frailties, delighting in pleasure and making a wise fool's case for the clarifying power of unmediated, physical experience. They're also screamingly funny. . . . Keep cooking, Jim. Your readers will want second helpings." --Chris Waddington, Minneapolis Star-Tribune

"Like [Harrison's] favorite kind of meal, this collection of food essays is rich, manly, and unabashedly self-centered." --Anne Stephenson, Arizona Republic

"Our "poet laureate of appetite [Harrison] may be, but the collected essays here reflect much more. They amount to a thinking man's guide to the universe, suffused on the whole with the broadmindedness that comes of a lifetime of journeyman experience. . . . His opinions are served up in a delightfully curmudgeonly tone, but he has both the credentials to back them up and the good sense not to exchange soapbox for high horse. He is exacting but not boorish." --John Gamino, Dallas Morning News

"Harrison is the American Rabelais, and he is at his irreverent and excessive best in this collection." --John Skowles, San Diego Union-Tribune

"Jim Harrison is the Homer, the Michelangelo, the Lamborghini, the Willie Mays, the Secretariat of words, the peak of perfection in all writing, but achieves Jimi Hendrix solo perfection when he waxes the gristle about our most primordial need and luxury. His words are not the mere musings of an effete intellectual: these are the lust-filled poems of an expert, a hunter, an eater, a stalker, a rabid mongrel, and a drinker not afraid to get excited about the kinds of nuts a particular partridge must have eaten this morning to taste so damned good for lunch. And that the occasional breakfast of sow's heart needs to be anointed with even an off-vintage Bordeaux is not hidden, nay, celebrated in the deeply starving heart of America's greatest living writer. It is with total joy that I share my dinner table with a hero so honest, so erudite, so poetic, so huge in stature and genius, and yet so much himself a cook in the chuckwagon on a moose hunt in British Columbia. Most important, Harrison's words bring me the most guttural, the most thirst quenching, itch scratching, and ultimately satisfying feeling that he really knows and appreciates what makes my job as a cook so filled with joy, the smell and anticipation of a perfect and divine edible and drinkable moment." --Mario Batali

"A rumination on the unholy trinity of sex, death and food, this long-awaited collection of gastronomic essays reads like the love child of M.F.K. Fisher and James Thorne--on acid. Harrison . . . writes with a passion for language equal to his passion for good food." --Publishers Weekly

"It is impossible to pigeonhole this collection of essays-they are about hunting and cooking, eating and drinking, and are written in a style that is simultaneously sophisticated and earthy. . . . Most of us will never be lucky enough to share a meal with this 'roving gourmand, ' but this volume provides a satisfying alternative. An essential purchase." --Wendy Miller, Library Journal

About the Author

Jim Harrison was born in 1937, in Grayling, Michigan. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Sports Illustrated, Playboy, and The New York Times. Harrison lived in Montana and Arizona before his death in 2016 at the age of seventy-eight.