“[A] warped, wonderful memoir” ( Men’s Journal ) from the #1 New York Times bestselling author and host of Netflix’s MeatEater, about his quest to turn wild game into the meal of a lifetime   “If Jack Kerouac had hung out with Julia Child instead of Neal Cassady, this book might have been written fifty years ago.”— The Wall Street Journal When outdoorsman, avid hunter, and nature writer Steven Rinella stumbles upon Auguste Escoffier’s 1903 milestone Le Guide Culinaire, he’s inspired to assemble an unusual feast: a forty-five-course meal born entirely of Escoffier’s esoteric wild game recipes. Over the course of one unforgettable year, he steadily procures his ingredients—fishing for stingrays in Florida, hunting mountain goats in Alaska, flying to Michigan to obtain a fifteen-pound snapping turtle—and encountering one colorful character after another. And as he introduces his vegetarian girlfriend to a huntsman’s lifestyle, Rinella must also come to terms with the loss of his lifelong mentor—his father.    An absorbing account of one man’s relationship with family, friends, food, and the natural world, The Scavenger’s Guide to Haute Cuisine is a rollicking tale of the American wild and its spoils. “If Jack Kerouac had hung out with Julia Child instead of Neal Cassady, this book might have been written fifty years ago. . . . Steven Rinella brings bohemian flair and flashes of poetic sensibility to his picaresque tale of a man, a cookbook, and the culinary open road.” — The Wall Street Journal   “If you rue the ‘depersonalization of food production,’ or you’re tired of chemical ingredients, [Rinella] will make you howl.” — Los Angeles Times   “A walk on the wild side of hunting and gathering, sure to repel a few professional food sissies but attract many more with its sheer in-your-face energy and fine storytelling.” —Jim Harrison, author of Legends of the Fall   “[A] warped, wonderful memoir of cooking and eating . . . [Rinella] recounts these madcap wilderness adventures with delicious verve and charm.” — Men’s Journal In addition to being an expert chef known for working with wild game,  Steven Rinella  is an outdoorsman, writer, and television and podcast personality with an exceptional ability to communicate the hunting lifestyle to a wide variety of audiences. The host of the television show and podcast  MeatEater,  he is also the author of two volumes of  The Complete Guide to Hunting, Butchering, and Cooking Wild Game;   Meat Eater: Adventures from the Life of an American Hunter ;  American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon;  and  The Scavenger’s Guide to Haute Cuisine . His writing has appeared in many publications, including  Outside, Field & Stream, The New Yorker, Glamour, The New York Times, Men’s Journal, Salon, O: The Oprah Magazine, Bowhunter,  and the anthologies  Best American Travel Writing  and  Best Food Writing. I SPEND A LOT OF TIME THINKING ABOUT FOOD. If I’m not thinking about food, there’s a good chance that I’m out collecting it. I scrounge around in the mountains for huckleberries and I search riverbanks for wild asparagus, though mostly I hunt and fish. I suppose you could say that getting my own food is a hobby of mine, but I’ve never looked at it that way. When I’m packing an elk down off a mountain on my back, and it feels like my knees are going to crack open and my shoulders are going to strip away like banana peels beneath the weight, I certainly don’t feel like I’m pursuing a hobby.   Don’t get me wrong, though; I love scavenging for my own food. I suppose it’s important to clear that up right away—that I think it’s exciting to hunt and fish. People will happily pay good money for dead animals, so long as the animals are killed by proxy executioners and sold in grocery stores. But many of those same people are suspicious of folks who enjoy killing their own food in the wild. So let this serve as a warning about what kind of guy I am, and what kind of book this is.   However, it’s an oversimplification to say that I enjoy killing for the sake of killing. I enjoy killing in the same way that I enjoy cooking and eating and doing all the other things that it takes to stay alive. One time, I spent a couple of days shitting my brains out on a riverbank in northern Alaska because I ate some wild mushrooms that I could have sworn were safe. I actually enjoyed getting poisoned by those unpredictable fungi, because I was living out an experience that usually only happens to characters in fairy tales. Another time, my brother Matt and I were hunting elk and heading up a mountain trail at the same time that a five-hundred-pound grizzly and her two cubs were heading down it. The sow stood up on her back feet as easily as a human rising out of a chair. She held her arms out, paws down, like she was showing us an engagement ring. She was right there, within striking distance. I enjoyed the hell out of that, too. I guess I just like the whole package of wild fo