Birds of a Feather

In her 1987 work A Birdwatcher's Cookbook, late author and ornithologist Erma Fisk ("Jonnie" to her friends) doesn't have much to say about the sophisticated, discriminating concept of appetite. Instead, she caters to people who cook out of hunger: to those for whom it is a hobby and a pleasure but also a necessity, to those who can't run to the store when their three perfect courses don't go as planned, to cooks whose lives beyond the kitchen sometimes override those within it, and to those who have to improvise when culinary disaster strikes. In other words, she's practical.

Yet what constitutes "practical" changes with time, and after 21 years, many of the recipes in A Birdwatcher's Cookbook are dated. Canned cream-of-mushroom and instant onion soups, both of which make appearances throughout, just don't play like they used to. Despite such shortcomings, the book's appeal lives on nonetheless. Chalk it up to Fisk's one-of-a-kind charisma.

Her unique brand of kitchen wisdom includes wisecracks, rants, lessons in natural history, and philosophical meanderings--all alongside recipe instructions that border on stream-of-consciousness, with rhetorical questions scattered here and there, like birdseed, for the reader ("Did I mention that already?" she wonders aloud, midway through steps). The bookflap of the original edition even includes a photo of Fisk in which she looks like a wise, ornery owl, surrounded by darkness and peering out suspiciously from the right edge of the frame.

That quirky attitude fills the book. At its very beginning, Fisk dispenses with a foreword and instead gives the reader a warning, which she divides into statements, like a manifesto. One in particular sets the tone for the chapters to come:

If guests are hungry, they will eat anything, I've found, especially if they are sitting about the kitchen or standing (usually in the way) while you bustle about, tantalizing them with fragrances from your kettles. I've tested most of these dishes. Some I don't particularly like, but others do, so maybe you will.

It's easy to disregard remarks like that as glib. But press on through the stories and travelogues (cleverly disguised as recipes), and you discover that Fisk really does mean it. She's certainly had plenty of hungry guests to test her theory on: For decades, she moved through the western hemisphere, along with the seasonal bird migrations, crossing two continents and a handful of islands, from the arctic to the tropics. All the while, she cooked whatever she got her hands on--for her peers, mentors, family, friends, and, eventually, her students.

A colleague in Belize taught her how to roast the armadillos that had terrorized her garden; another, in the Caribbean, informed her that a well-cooked termite tastes like shrimp, and that a raw one tastes like pineapple (understandably, the latter claim is from one of the recipes that the author herself didn't test). A farm woman in Pennsylvania passed on her recipe for scrapple, a regional specialty, which calls for a 48-gallon kettle, three pigs, one steer, two pounds of coriander, and enough cornmeal and flour that the long-simmered mixture pulls away from the pot when stirred. At the end of the recipe, Fisk nonchalantly suggests that the reader may want to scale down the proportions for his or her own purposes.

Fisk also relates firsthand how the intimacy that birders share with nature leads them to waste nothing--even if it means consuming the occasional subject. At a birdbanding station she ran in south Florida, where the locals brought her fresh birds that had met accidental deaths, she found "mourning-dove breasts wrapped in bacon excellent, grosbeaks tough, cedar waxwings and robins tender." When a friend of hers, a well-known ornithologist, found out she was compiling a cookbook, he refused to disclose his method for cooking the white ibis that native guides liked to supply on research trips in the tropics. His grant money depended too much on his image as a conservationist.

That's the extreme end of things. Your taste for birds doesn't need to be quite so literal to enjoy the rest of the book. Plenty of recipes offer sustenance for early-rising birders: overnight oatmeal prepared directly in the thermos; a slapdash affair called Lazy Biscuits, stuffed with ham or cheese; and Bus Breakfast Spread, a vaguely Mediterranean blend of bananas, honey, walnuts, raisins, and cream cheese, favored by young, itinerant Audubon researchers. None of the dishes will win you a Beard Award, but that's missing Fisk's point. Regardless of what you're hungry for, be it market-fresh nettles, hand-picked morels, or a glimpse at a white-eyed vireo during the great spring migrations that are just winding up for the year, Fisk's ultimate commandment is this: Get outside, appreciate the season, and take in the bounty it offers.