98 NOVEMBER 2019
Action Camo coat, happily carrying a few of the day’s kills to
the little boat that will take us back to base camp.
McCrory, Arkansas, lies roughly 1,200 miles southwest of
(and a universe removed from) The Beatrice Inn, Mar’s swag-
geringly urbane chophouse on a twee cobblestone block in the
West Village. In a candlelit 19th-century townhouse, she serves
Russian caviar on buttered brioche points and $1,000 whiskey-
aged steaks cooked to order. Bridging this topological chasm,
however, is a shared primal desire to get closer to the animals
we eat. It’s one thing to put the name of a farm or purveyor on
a menu; it’s another to travel to a place to participate in the act
of pulling these creatures out of the sky, to help track and kill
and cook them in the place they’re from.
“I grew up going to the gun range with my dad and brothers
in Seattle,” says Mar, “but I’ve never been hunting before. My
cooking is about using the whole animal. Nothing is wasted. I
had the head of the eight-point buck I served to the critic Pete
Wells when the restaurant opened stuffed, [and it’s] hanging in
the foyer of my apartment. I’m always begging Pat, who shot that
buck, to take me hunting, but he was sure I’d be eaten by a bear.”
Pat is Pat LaFrieda, the fourth-generation butcher and CEO
of Pat LaFrieda Meat Purveyors who’s with us in the swamp. An
experienced hunter, he is responsible for a few of this morning’s
kills (unlike your intrepid correspondent, who managed to jam
his weapon by loading the ammo in backward). Shooting at
Coca-Cola Woods is about who you know. In
this case, we’re here because LaFrieda knows
Trey Zoeller, founder of Jefferson’s Bourbon,
and Zoeller knows a friend of Dobbs.
Zoeller is a voluble Kentuckian who’s been
called both “the Marco Polo of bourbon” and a
heretic for his penchant for putting barrels of
young bourbon in compromising situations—on
a riverboat thrashed about by tropical storms,
say, or in the hold of a shark-tagging cargo ship
on years-long voyages crisscrossing the equator—to see how shifts
in temperature and radical agitation accelerate the maturing
process. Zoeller had gotten to talking to Dobbs about stashing a
barrel of bourbon in a duck blind somewhere and forgetting it
there for a couple of intensely humid summers and bleak winters—
just to see what would happen to it. In the meantime, LaFrieda
and Zoeller had gotten to talking about doing some shooting as
well as maybe collaborating on a line of Jefferson’s-branded steaks
made from animals fed on the spent mash from the whiskey-
making process (“a protein shake for cattle,” Zoeller calls it).
Now that Zoeller’s bourbon had sat in marshy seclusion for
two years, it was a good time to tap the barrel and a good excuse
to do a little hunting. And if you’re going to have whiskey and
ducks, then it only made sense to invite along a chef who knows
her way around both and is also a master of fire and smoke as
well as dramatic cooking situations—which is how we find our-
selves here in this flooded woodland, just after dawn, with a haul
of freshly dispatched mallards and a barrel of mystery whiskey.
THIS IS A STORY ABOUT hunting and drinking and campfire
cooking. But the secret hero, the unifying character that ties
all the disparate narrative strands together, is both self-evident
and weirdly unheralded: wood. It’s everywhere, but we don’t
always give it its due. This is really a story about wood: the reedy
tall trees that offer a haven for hunters and an enticing trap for
their prey; the charred new white oak barrels that give bourbon
its caramel hues and bosky bite; the range of wood and vine
smoke that Mar deploys to bring out layers of flavor you didn’t
know a steak or whole bird had to offer.
Creasey guides us out in a small boat down flooded trails to a
miniature cabin near the edge of a clearing bobbing with decoys.
Zoeller finds his barrel, drills into it, and tips out corn whiskey
the color of maple syrup. “Pretty damned good,” he declares,
sampling it at cask strength before cutting it down to proof
with a splash of water. “That’s a 2-year-old bourbon that tastes
like a 6-year-old [one]. The humidity pushes it into the wood.”
Meanwhile, in a field back at the lodge, Mar and LaFrieda have
assembled a large makeshift A-frame grill out of birch logs and
are prepping for the day’s culinary main event, a massive wood-
fired feast. Utilizing the morning’s take, there will be hunter’s
stew with duck legs and cannellini beans, smoked duck breasts
with apples cooked with duck jus, and tartiflette. (In addition
to the local catch, the menu contains a few out-of-town ringers
to channel a bit of The Beatrice Inn’s no-fats-barred approach:
LaFrieda’s dry-aged rib eyes, truffle butter, and a sauce slicked
with reduced red wine, snails, and pork trotters.)
At her restaurant, Mar treats steaks and chops to a preliminary
cold smoke over knotted, aged grapevines, such as slow-burning
Garnacha from Spain and Pinot Meunier from the Champagne
region (especially well-suited to côte de boeuf.) In the spirit of
the day, now she’s smoking rib eyes and whole ducks hung
from the A-frame over staves from a broken-down bourbon
barrel. “The different flavors of these woods really blow my
mind,” Mar says. “It’s the terroir of wood. Once I was introduced
to thinking of vines and wood as ingredients, it really changed
the way I cook.”
As the ducks and steaks sway and soak up the steady plume
of smoke, the duck blind–aged whiskey begins to flow. Mar
serves a duck liver pâté made with Champagne, unaccountably
light given its indecent amount of sage-scented melted butter.
“Sometimes I think there’s an old Frenchman trapped in my
body,” Mar says of her penchant for unreformed classics. Ducks
make Angie Mar—and her inner lusty Frenchman—very happy.
So, to quote the Marx brothers: Why a duck? “People talk
about how ‘giving’ the pig is in terms of using the whole animal,”
Mar says. “And I agree, but that’s so true of a duck, too. They’ve
got the ratio of fat to lean we’re all looking for, which is to say
a lot of fat. And duck fat is the ultimate fat.”
“If you could eat only one bird for the rest of your life?” Mar
asks rhetorically, the A-frame fires exhausted now, bourbon
giving way to Barbaresco.
“Pheasant? Forget it. Squab? Sorry, I can live without you.
Chicken? Chicken is a vegetable. But ducks? Ducks are magic.”
This is a story about wood: the barrels that
give bourbon its bite; the smoke that brings out
flavors you didn’t know a bird had to offer.
FOOD STYLING: GORDON SAWYER; PROP STYLING: CLAIRE SPOLLEN
