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PrintHunting and Gathering with the Top Down
Couple celebrates time and place, spiced with the expertise and experience of others
Photos By Susan Traylor Lykes
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Hot, we agreed, though the day was really only mild. Long winters have a way of polishing even timid spring days into glorious altarpieces, days when everyone waves to everyone else on the highway through rolled-down windows, when the first drift boats queue at the landings, when the robins nested under your eaves fret their dappled children into the iced-pine breeze. People planted things that day, crops in fields and vegetables in gardens.
My wife Jeanne and I set out for a drive, convertible top down, through Teton Valley and Jackson Hole, down one side of the range and up the other. Our ambition was the collection of a meal.
Notably, it was our thirtieth wedding anniversary. Half of those three decades we’d spent at the base of the Tetons. Looking forward to spring, a conversation one wintry evening earlier in the year had pivoted on possibilities for a perfect dinner menu crafted from the fine range of foods now available in these high mountain valleys, whether grown regionally or brought from afar by dint of love and desire on the part of people who are celebratory about good food.
There’s much gastronomical talent and knowledge afoot out there in the restaurants and markets in our parallel valleys. That’s a wonderful surfeit for those, like us, who are more exuberant than epicurean when it comes to choosing ingredients and methods.
Ours is a place where people tend to live with purpose and eat with delight. These foodie resources are engaged in defining our region as much as are our local architects and artists.
No matter where you are, indigenous cuisine is an ongoing narrative. It’s the purveyors themselves, not just the foodstuffs, who tell the story. What better way, we wondered, to acknowledge the deep, rich passage the pair of us had made side by side in the Teton region than to share a snapshot meal sprung from that prodigious cultural bounty?
Each place we went, we sought out the expertise behind the counters and refrigerator cases. Instead of just examining shelved groceries and making private decisions, we lingered in conversations with the proprietors.
To ask the person who selected the side of beef and hand-cut the steaks, “What do you love about living here?” is after all as important a question as, “Do you recommend filet or tenderloin?” Different routes, but both get at the food, and the steak will be better if you know the answer to the first.
