Harrison was a fan of pretty much anything you could stuff into your mouth, but he was especially in love with French food. Sure, there’s so much more to Midwestern cuisine than that - I’ve had some of the best meals of my life in Chicago, Milwaukee and around the Twin Cities - but at its most basic, that’s a key to understanding what keeps people in the middle of the country going through the colder months. If you’ve ever spent an afternoon in late November hiking through a forest near one of the Great Lakes or even 30 minutes shoveling snow in December or beyond, nothing helps like a nice, hot casserole when you get inside. When somebody makes fun of Chicago deep dish, for instance, saying it’s just a casserole, I’ll ask them what’s wrong with that. That’s really a guiding philosophy of so much food from the middle of the country. Some pork, some kraut, some onions, salt and pepper. While I can’t say for sure, I’d be willing to bet a young Harrison, growing up in the upper part of lower Michigan (is that what I’d call it, Michiganders?), probably had meals like hunter’s stew on the regular. But I’ll also think those are the people that will say the way to make chili is wrong or your cassoulet recipe isn’t authentic. Some people will tell you there is a way to make it, and I won’t argue with them. Bigos, or hunter’s stew, you might call it. Go up to the Midwest, and you’ll maybe find something like this with apples and onions added, an old-school German- or Polish-American favorite consumed after long, cold days doing much of nothing. While he doesn’t go into many of the details, it’s easy to imagine what goes into making the pork loin and fermented cabbage - not much. It’s a pork loin made for the American Diller at a mission in Mexico in the novella’s first story, “Revenge.” We find that Diller “liked best the sauerkraut in the bottom soaked with pork fat” at the end of the meal. At least, that is, if you like pungent food. It only takes six pages in Legends of the Fall for Jim Harrison to make you hungry.

You sign up for our Book Club email to receive important updates, announcements and notifications here. This is the first in a series of pieces we’ll be running all month on Jim Harrison and Legends of the Fall, the InsideHook Book Club pick for November.

Chicken hunter stew