Excluding the specter of facing your own death row execution, what would you choose as your “last meal?” If faced with much more pleasant circumstances, such as your final evening’s meal on a long ocean cruise, what would you order up for your table and plate? Lobster? Abalone, scallops or caviar? Or, maybe just a soul-filling final slice of the chef’s lemon meringue pie?
Have you ever thought about this question before? It’s a little different from just choosing your favorite food, dish or sandwich. Sure, you might want the greatest hamburger you’ve ever had. But eating, and food, are about much more than just what goes in your mouth, on your tongue or down your stomach.
Almost no other subject is more prickly than food. It’s the source of hot debates, disagreements and rivalries. It’s not just a subject of flavors and calories. If “we are what we eat,” as the saying goes, then think very carefully about what you’ll be digesting as you head off into eternity.
More than a meal
Hey, we get it. Nobody wants to contemplate their last day on Earth. But who wants to die the day after just eating some leftovers from the fridge?
Maybe you’ll want to replicate a favorite dish attached to a special memory from a “first date” or anniversary or birthday celebration. Or, it could be a tailgate spread or BBQ where you can still remember everyone who was there and the score of the ballgame. (Over-stuffed hot Reuben sandwiches, authentic rye bread, Budweisers; Notre Dame 34, Stanford 31.)
Don’t fall into the trap that your last or best-ever meal has to be the most expensive. Sure, you could wish for a seven-course wine country meal at Napa’s French Laundry for $600 per person, plus wine flights. But you might have complications from the long waiting period for a reservation that can take six months to a year.
Pick one
It looks like Last Meal Choices fall into three categories. One; there’s the death row mentality to include a final contrition or a “fuck you” sentiment, with fries on the side. Two; there’s the “make-a-wish” request for a haute cuisine three-star experience you reconstructed from an article you read in Bon Appetite. And, three; you could emulate Jesus Christ who’s Last Supper was a Seder table at Passover of unleavened bread and wine.
One approach you might want to avoid, if at all possible, is to have your last meal in a hospital, nursing home or assisted living facility. If that happens, your menu choices will be limited to over-steamed vegetables, broiled fish or chicken and pudding or applesauce.
The Raw and the Cooked
It wasn’t his last meal, but novelist and poet Jim Harrison (“Legends of the Fall”) put a lot of thinking into a meal he once had, that probably no one’s last meal could ever top.
In 2003, Harrison took an 11-hour flight to France and found his way to the village of Saint-Peré-sous-Vézelay and a Michelin three-star restaurant where he shared a 37-course feast with a dozen other gourmands. The meal was prepared from dishes and recipes from 17 cookbooks, published between 1654 and 1823.
Harrison’s all-day train of courses included tartines of foie gras, truffles and lard, cock-crest fritters, chilled jellied loaf of poultry on sorrel cream, tart of calf’s brain, sole in champagne sauce, monkfish livers, stew of suckling pig, poached eel with chicken wing tips and testicles in tarragon butter, eggs poached in ale, gray squab stuffed with sweetbreads, hare cooked inside a calf’s bladder, cucumbers stewed in wine and radishes in vinegar. Harrison and the others consumed 14 bottles of wine and Harrison said the bill for the meal “cost as much as a new Volvo station wagon.” It wasn’t a complaint.
Harrison and his writings would be a good source for anyone researching choices for their own last meal. For several years he wrote food columns for Esquire and New Yorker magazines and in 1992 he compiled many of them with other food-related writings in his book, “The Raw and the Cooked.”
Maybe the best advice on food and menu choices Harrison ever gave was, “Just remember, your meals are numbered.” Harrison died in 2016 at the age of 78. His last meal is unrecorded, but his Arizona neighbors said he had grown fond in his later years of Albertson’s fried chicken.
Murderer’s menu choices
Death row murderer Thomas Grasso, who brutally killed an elderly couple for their Social Security checks, may have tried to delay his execution in 1995 by a few hours by ordering a very super-sized meal that consisted of two dozen steamed mussels, two dozen steamed clams, a double cheeseburger from Burger King, half a dozen barbecue spare ribs, two strawberry milkshakes, half a pumpkin pie with whipped cream and diced strawberries, and a 16-ounce can of spaghetti with meatballs served at room temperature. It didn’t work; he was executed as scheduled — but with a very full belly.
A public spectacle
The custom of providing “last meals” for condemned prisoners appears to date far back to Medieval times or earlier when executions by hanging, be-heading or other unappetizing methods were staged as public spectacles that drew large crowds.
Nowadays executions in the United States are no longer done in public and are administered more humanely with a lethal injection. Almost all states provide for a protocol to serve a last meal. Some states like Florida ($40) and Oklahoma ($25) set a price limit on a prisoner’s menu choices and several states require food selections be limited to the prison’s regular menu or cafeteria offerings.
Almost all the states prohibit alcohol or tobacco, but Utah allowed mass killer Gary Gilmore to have three shots of Jack Daniels whiskey during his final minutes.
Domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh, who killed 168 people with his bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, ordered two pints of mint chocolate ice cream on the day of his lethal injection in 2001.
Believe it or not, there are more than just a few websites that compile lists of last meals requested by death row inmates. Steak, fried chicken and other less exotic fare appear to be the most popular choices.
Serial killer John Wayne Gacy, who killed at least 33 young men and boys and who once worked as a Kentucky Fried Chicken manager, ordered a dozen fried shrimp, a bucket of KFC fried chicken and a pound of strawberries prior to his 1994 execution.
Perhaps trying to make some other kind of statement with his final meal request, convicted killer Victor Feguer in the late 1960s asked for, and was served, a single unpitted olive.
Former Texas inmate and chef trainee Brian Price wrote a book about his many years of learning to cook while serving a lifetime sentence in the penitentiary. The collection of his recipes is called, “Meals to Die For.” It actually became a bestseller for awhile.
Haute Cuisine
Getting as far away as we can from Death Row, if price were no object, and there was no looming guilty verdict nearby, what would be some of the best dining options for an Olympus-scale dining experience?
It’s too late, we’ve discovered, to fret about the appearances of seeking opulence or gluttony in a world with daily starving deaths. So, go for it, guilty or not.
Very near where I live in northern California’s Russian River wine country there are several Michelin-starred eateries. Any one of them would be a perfect venue for a “last meal on Earth.”
Take for instance, the reincarnated Cyrus Restaurant of partners Doug Keane and Nick Peyton. The restaurant sits amidst premium grapevines outside of Geyserville, Sonoma County in a reimagined former fruit-packing warehouse.
If money is no object, you can have your last meal there that would begin with a champagne and caviar cart on wheels. A 15-course dinner would be spread around through four different dining rooms, including a visit to the kitchen. The evening would suspensefully end in a room featuring a molten wall of dripping chocolate. (We kid you not.)
Eat your heart out Thomas Bundy who had to settle for an off-the-shelf sirloin steak.
At Cyrus you can have spicy, woodsy grilled matsutake with a sprig of chrysanthemum; Kusshi oysters basted with soy sauce-infused butter and cooked over charcoal on a Japanese charcoal grill; panna cotta-like silken tofu topped with juicy pieces of tangerine.
For mid-evening courses, you could add a seared sea scallop with braised lettuce trailing behind like the tail of a comet; a crisp, seared morsel of foie gras, buttery with a whisper of tallow flavor; a caramelly tonka bean dessert topped with a slab of poached Pink Lady apple flesh that dramatically unwinds like a spool of satiny ribbon, and the bracing, perfume-like sorbet of Buddha’s hand citrus and chamomile. (All descriptions above about Cyrus are from a review in the SF Chronicle.)
Recently the world’s top-rated restaurant, NOMA of Copenhagen, Denmark closed after a long run of trailblazing the landscape of Nouvelle Cuisine and the outer horizon of food experiences that might defy death. NOMA chef Rene Redzepi surrendered to the labor costs of presenting a few dozen “last meals” on too many nights a week. Who would have thought that world famous top chefs would ever share the menu snares of a penitentiary warden?
Could I please have a tuna salad sandwich on lightly toasted white bread, mayonnaise, lettuce and tomatoes, with French Fries on the side? And a glass of Coca-Cola with lots of ice.
R.I.P.
— Rollie Atkinson
7-28-2024
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Having lost much of my sense of taste as a result of oral cancer surgery, I can tell you I’m so glad I had a chance to eat at Cyrus prior to my illness, back when it was in Healdsburg. It was truly an amazing taste, flavor and presentation experience; not something I would do every day even if I could afford it, but super glad to have experienced it.
I can tell you that facing my impending surgery, I did savor my food more contemplating the possible loss of my sense of taste. It’s just another loss that comes with time. But having said that I also have to acknowledge the wisdom and life experiences gained with that same passage of time. It is the trade of a life lived long enough to realize it is a trade.
I am trying not to think of the seared morsel of foie gras... Sounds so wonderful. When I taught English at the JC, one of the assignments I gave to students who were reluctant to write was a series of questions from the book My Last Supper 50 Great Chefs and Their Final Meals. The questions, besides what would be your last meal, were: What would be the setting for your last meal? What would you drink? Would there be music? Who would be your dining companions(dead or alive)? Who would prepare the meal? It's a fun exercise, and surprising to me were that a lot of chefs chose simple home made favorites, prepared by themselves. You are so right that the last meal contains emotion. It also was a great way to get students to begin writing.