The Hungry Cyclist: Pedalling The Americas In Search Of The Perfect Meal

All around me, buildings and farm equipment were left to rot. Schools, banks and libraries were boarded up and there were almost no young people around. With no work and few opportunities, the temptations of life in the cities were too hard to resist. As I moved from town to town along Highway 2, this social evacuation became more and more disturbing. Falling crop and beef prices led by cheaper imports had left farmers under huge pressure to compete. Market forces and expanding free trade had taken over and profit was king. Seemingly forgotten by their government, all it took was one bad year or a breakdown in machinery and a bigger farm would be willing to step in. Amid mega-farms the small ones couldn’t survive. Family-owned farmsteads were being left in ruin or bulldozed down to make the most of the precious land on which they sat, and families were forced to move on. Just as the temptation of vast profit drove the buffalo to the edge of extinction, so it seemed the same was happening to the rural communities of America’s Midwest.

On a warm Thursday evening I pulled into the town of Bainville, Montana, population six, feeling tired and dejected. The last two days had been a painful struggle against a relentless headwind, and without so much as a gas station in which to refuel, my meagre rations of peanut butter and beef jerky had run dry. Approaching the city limits, exhausted and under-nourished, my imagination began to run wild envisaging the possible treats that might await me in this small town.

Half of Bainville was drinking in the small characterless shed they called the bar. It didn’t serve food. The town had no diner and no gas station, but the woman behind the bar, educating herself via the pages of the National Enquirer, pointed me in the direction of two dusty vending machines selling sweets. Appalled at the thought of dining on M&Ms and bubblegum balls, I pulled myself on to a stool at the bar and ordered a beer.

‘You aren’t from round here, are you, honey?’ asked the barwoman, peering over the headline, ‘Britney’s New Drug Shame’.

‘No, I’m from London,’ I replied, with little patience for conversation.

‘So what brings you to lil’ ol’ Bainville?’

‘I’m looking for the perfect meal on my bicycle.’ I popped a couple more M&Ms and washed them down with a second beer.

‘Well, we like our beef out here. Ain’t that right, Vance?’

She sent a glance to a solitary grey-haired figure in a black Stetson, sitting at the end of the bar. He didn’t respond but emptied his glass of beer, and then began on another. I had been hearing about the legendary quality of beef in Montana since the onset of my journey, and in my last week it had been impossible to ignore the countless heads of healthy cattle that happily grazed the lush plains and hillsides of the Big Sky State. So far I hadn’t found anywhere to eat this famous bovine treat.

Grabbing the barwoman’s attention with a raised hand, Vance called her over and they exchanged a few whispered words, looking in my direction. The barwoman filled two more icy mugs of beer and placed one in front of each of us.

‘Mr Anderson says he’s got some steaks and oysters at home if you’re interested. The drinks are on the house.’

I was bundled into the back of a pick-up truck with my bicycle and Mr Anderson’s large panting German shepherd dog, and we turned off the highway a few miles out of town. We rattled and bumped down a dusty track through smooth rolling hills dissected by the unnatural straight lines of fence posts, which stretched unbroken across this vast landscape speckled with grazing cattle. Dwarfed by the steady form of two large buttes, whose steep sides and stubborn craggy summits broke through the grass-carpeted surroundings, Vance Anderson’s ranch looked like a child’s model. An immaculate, white wooden house sat next to a tall red Dutch barn, surrounded by a series of tidy fences. Horses with necks bent to the ground chomped and pulled on the yellow grass, momentarily breaking their feeding to acknowledge our arrival and the swirling cloud of dust that trailed behind us.

I was handed a cold can of Budweiser and took a seat on the porch. Mr Anderson emptied the remains of a sack of charcoal into half an oil drum and got a small fire going. We talked a little but Vance Anderson was a man of few words.

He lived alone but told me of his family, his work running a cattle ranch and the problems facing ranchers in Montana. His large farmhouse needed a family in it, but he told me there was no work in the area for his children so they had moved to the city. They weren’t interested in cattle farming. With his grey handlebar moustache, deep weathered features, denim pop shirt and dusty boots, Vance seemed to represent the last of a diminishing breed. Perhaps the Midwest won’t have any real cowboys in it in a few years. Cattle farming will have become automated, and men won’t sit on porches shooting the breeze. The traditions I had seen at the rodeo and heard in the country music were fading away.

My protein-hungry muscles began twitching with excitement when Vance reappeared from the kitchen with a plate piled with two Flintstones-sized steaks, marbled with lines of yellow fat and smudged with the dark patches of aging, but I was mystified by the plastic bowl beneath the plate which was full of what appeared to be fleshy water balloons.

Splitting open a testicle brings tears to your eyes, even if it’s not one of your own. Vance gave me a sharp knife and instructed me on the finer arts of peeling and preparing a calf’s testicle, while he put a couple of potatoes in the oven. Otherwise known as Rocky mountain oysters, or prairie oysters, these tidy little bags were quite a bit bigger than my own pair but the whole process was still uncomfortably close to home. I had to make a delicate incision through the tough skin-like membrane that surrounded each ball before removing what lay inside from its pouch. Slicing the sac’s pink contents through the middle, I dipped them in a little egg yolk, coated them in flour and dropped my balls into a hot skillet of vegetable oil that was spitting on the grill.

Three and a half months before putting a testicle in my mouth, I had left home on a bicycle in search of the perfect meal. I had not wanted to take the easy option of eating on my own in smart restaurants. I began the trip because I wanted to eat what ordinary Americans were eating, and so far that was exactly what I had done, from sharing Puerto Rican rice with gangsters in New York to gorging on turkey cooked a hundred ways in Frazee. And now that I was sitting here on Mr Anderson’s porch eating Rocky mountain oysters, watching Montana’s big sky smoulder in a fiery kaleidoscope of red and orange while the coyotes called into the night, I believed I might have found what I was looking for.

May your horse never stumble, and may your cinch never break,

May your belly never grumble, and your heart never ache.

Cowboy poem

Snapping Turtle Stew

Serves 6

1kg snapping turtle meat 150g salted butter 1 tablespoon cooking oil 1 medium onion, chopped 3 celery sticks, chopped 120ml dry sherry 2 cloves of garlic 1 pinch of dried thyme leaves 1 pinch dried rosemary 1 400g can lima beans 3 medium potatoes, diced 3 carrots, chopped 1 400g can tomatoes 1 tablespoon lemon juice salt and freshly ground black pepper to serve: 1 bunch of fresh parsley and your favourite hot sauce

1 Cut the turtle meat into bite-size pieces and brown on all sides in the butter in a frying pan. Remove from the heat and set aside.

2 Heat the oil in a large pot and add the onion, celery, sherry, garlic, thyme, rosemary, lima beans and a pinch of salt and pepper. Once the contents begin to sizzle and your kitchen is full of aroma, cover with water, bring to the boil and leave to simmer for 1 hour.

3 Now add the browned snapper meat and melted butter to the pot, along with the potatoes, carrots and tomatoes and lemon juice, a little more salt and pepper to taste if necessary, and simmer for a further 45 minutes.

4 Serve in deep bowls with a little chopped parsley and a shake of your favourite hot sauce.

Rocky Mountain Oysters

(Although the oysters I ate in Montana weren’t soaked in beer I’ve learnt since that the process of soaking them tenderises the meat.)

Serves 6

1kg fresh calf’s testicles * 2 cans beer 150g flour salt, garlic salt and freshly ground black pepper 3 egg yolks 240ml vegetable oil chilli sauce or a little chopped chilli

1 Using a sharp knife, split the tough skin-like muscle that surrounds each ‘oyster’ and remove the testicle from within.

2 Place the testicles in a deep bowl and cover them with beer. Leave to sit for at least 2 hours.

3 Now combine the flour with a pinch of salt and garlic salt and some black pepper and mix through. Remove each testicle from the beer and while still damp, dip in a little egg yolk and roll in the flour until well covered.

4 Heat the oil in a deep skillet or frying pan, seasoned with a little hot sauce or some chopped chilli. Drop in the oysters and fry them for a couple of minutes on each side until golden brown.

5 Leave them to cool on a bed of paper napkins and then enjoy them with a cold beer and a little chilli sauce for dipping.

* Be sure to ask your butcher for calf testicles, not bull testicles. Calf testicles are the size of a walnut and are much more tender than the larger bull testicles, which can be a bit of a mouthful.

Chapter 3

A Rocky Road MOOSE BURGERS, BEARS AND AN UPHILL STRUGGLE

Behind mountains, more mountains.

Haitian proverb

Along with having to wear Lycra, and the inevitable chafing, there are three major downsides to cycle touring. The rain, headwinds and going uphill. Crossing the American Midwest I had been exposed to my fair share of lip-chapping, energy-sapping headwinds. The ending of the summer meant I had already been well watered, but until now the topography of my route had been sympathetic. A few unfriendly grades in Upstate New York had tested my early resolve but since then my legs had remained almost completely unproven at riding a 50-kilo bicycle uphill. This was about to change. Leaving the United States I had made it to Calgary, in Canada’s oil-boom state of Alberta. Home to the annual cattle stampede, it stands where the Great Plains meet the Rockies. Examining my location on my soggy, worn-out map, the impending change in terrain was evident. To my east, the map’s clean expanse of even green ink represented the flat ground I had just covered. To my west, a confusion of grey shaded crags seemed to rise out of the page, promising a very different type of landscape.

Beyond Calgary’s silver skyscrapers the snow-covered peaks of the Rocky mountains shimmered against a cloudless blue sky. From the safe distance of the city’s coffee shops and busy streets they seemed calm, almost unreal, like the blue-screened scenery in an old movie. By all accounts I would need at least a month to get to Vancouver, and with the year moving on, if I was to make it ‘over the top’ before winter set in, I had to get going. Bike repaired, Lycra washed and bags packed, the weathermen gave me the green light, and on the first of September I rode off, excited and apprehensive, towards the Rockies.

Cycling through Calgary’s oil-rich manicured suburbs in the early morning I passed bleary-eyed commuters clutching briefcases and giant, insulated coffee beakers. They called their goodbyes to wives and children standing in the doorways of their prim cloned houses and climbed into shiny all-terrain vehicles parked in the tidy driveways. Row after row of identical houses sporting velvet lawns luxuriating under automatic sprinklers stretched in every direction, but as the houses stopped I began to ride uphill and the endless terrain of the Midwest closed in around me.

The wide-open spaces I had been used to became tight valleys with heavy, shadowed cliff-faces. Never-ending vistas shrank to dark dense forests. The water no longer meandered and gurgled in lazy riverbeds, it rushed and crashed in foaming streams. Within a day’s cycling of Calgary, I was enclosed by mountains.

But far from being intimidated in these new surroundings, I felt strong and healthy, the air was crisp and clean and the climate cool and refreshing.

Gone were the slow-moving, nonchalant cowboys of the Midwest. Up here everyone I encountered at gas stations and small mountain cafés looked like a model from a camping catalogue. Ruddy-cheeked, clad in lumberjack shirts, heavy boots and efficient clothing with dozens of pockets, they had an infectious energy gained from their healthy mountain living. The Rocky mountains were an outward-bound paradise and after almost four months on the road I couldn’t help but feel like the mountain alpha male, living rough and surviving on my wits. Under clear blue skies, surrounded by this dramatic new scenery, I rode confidently towards the mountain town of Banff.

Adding an uncomfortable coolness to my sweat-damp T-shirt, a chill wind whistled in my ears. As deep rumblings echoed in the distance, I looked ahead to the tops of the mountains that were enveloped in swirling white clouds. The sun was quickly obscured and without the picture-perfect backdrop of blue sky and bright sunshine the mountains took on a whole new character. The first few drops of rain fell on my arms and an explosion of lightning flashed behind the high ridges above me as I laboured up the last hill into Banff. I was losing a race against nature. From what I could hear, a storm was systematically moving from valley to valley, and as a blanket of black clouds unrolled above I knew I was next. I rode into one of Banff’s large campsites with the cold rain now pouring down my face and battled with the unpredictable gusts of wind to put my tent up quickly. Deafening claps of thunder clattered round the mountains and each time the lightning snapped every detail of the valley was illuminated in brilliant phosphorescent light. Frantic to unpack my bike, I threw my panniers inside my tent, hurled myself in behind them and pulled the zip.

Like the snug comfort of being beside a roaring fire in a small cottage on a winter’s day, rain beating against the windows, there is something strangely comforting about being in a tent during a storm. But this comfort soon turns to panic when your ‘cottage’ decides to blow away. My pathetic tent pegs put up no resistance to the gale-force winds that were now howling outside. My flysheet had torn away from the main body of the tent and, after transforming itself into an efficient mainsail, began dragging me around the campsite. Wrapped in a confusion of torn nylon, tent poles, sleeping bags, pots and pans and puncture repair kits, I tried desperately to locate the zip so that I could escape, but no sooner had I resigned myself to the storm’s power than I felt a strong hand grab at me through the wreckage.

‘You OK in there?’ came a cry from outside.

‘Not really,’ I bleated in distress.

I was pulled from the wreckage and, after salvaging what I could, was rushed by my rescuer into the nearby safety of a motor home, where the confused faces of a young family seated around a small table at a game of Pictionary looked me over.

‘We watched you come in. Didn’t think you’d make it through the storm with your tent pitched where it was. Done much camping, have you?’

‘Bits,’ I muttered, embarrassed that my camping show had provided some light entertainment. ‘I’ve cycled from New York,’ I added, in an attempt to improve my credentials.

‘Well, you’re welcome to dry up in here while this storm passes through. Some fudge?’

The mother offered me a plate of home-made peanut butter fudge from the middle of the table where the family were grouped around their game. The Wendlebows were a family from Vancouver Island on vacation in the Rockies. In the snug comfort of the motor home, Paul, Emily and Erik, the couple’s young children, eyed me up and down shyly.

Wrapped in a blanket, clutching a steaming cup of coffee and nibbling on a slab of fudge, I stared out of the steamed-up windows of the motor home and watched as the storm moved into the next valley. Suddenly downhearted in the midst of this comfortable family, I pondered my situation.

I had spent four months sleeping rough and cycling, and now the summer was coming to an end. I had almost crossed the continent but one last, seemingly insurmountable, hurdle remained, and after only a few days into the Rockies the weather had already got the better of me. My tent was in tatters and so was my morale. I imagined limping back into Heathrow and being met by a posse of friends and family offering polite congratulations.

‘You did so well to get so far.’

‘You should be really proud of yourself.’

‘What a shame about the weather.’

At this point it was very clear how totally under-prepared I was for my mountain crossing, and I had at least another month ahead of me until Vancouver. For the first time the thought of failure was very real. I felt a long way from the heroic continent-crossing cyclist I was claiming to be.

The sky cleared and before darkness fell I was able to recover what was left of my equipment, which had been liberally scattered around the campsite. My tent would need to be patched up, I had lost four tent pegs and my inflatable mattress no longer inflated. The Wendlebows kindly invited me to join them for supper and after a comforting evening of Pictionary, hot dogs and corn on the cob, I crawled back into my weather-beaten tent, curled up on my deflated mattress and slept.

In 1885 the completion of the Canadian-Pacific Railway finally linked the east and west coasts of Canada, allowing passengers to travel the 2,500 miles across the North American continent in relative comfort. Passing north of Lake Superior, the tracks traversed the Great Plains of Manitoba and Saskatchewan before snaking into and over the Rocky mountains. A remarkable feat of Victorian engineering, which cost the lives of countless Chinese labourers, the project was spearheaded by the charismatic William Cornelius Van Horne. A rising star of the new industrial age, Van Horne not only saw the railroad as fundamental to trade and commerce, he also saw the potential of the Rockies’ breathtaking scenery as a tourist attraction. ‘Since we can’t export the scenery—we shall have to import the tourists,’ was his entrepreneurial boast before starting work on a series of luxurious mountain resorts where the super-rich of this new industrial epoch could come and take in the clean air and enjoy the views. Van Horne’s vast chateau-style hotel, built on the convergence of the Spray and Bow rivers, was to be the jewel in the CPR’s crown. A towering testament to industrialism, the Banff Springs Hotel quickly became one of the world’s most prestigious getaways.

In bad weather, with its Gothic turrets and gables, it would have appeared like an impregnable cocktail of Psycho-meets-Colditz, but bathed in warm late-summer sunshine it was as reassuring as a Scottish baronial castle on the lid of a tin of Highland shortbread.

I pushed my bicycle up the long sweeping driveway, gazing at the towering façade with its backdrop of mountains. Then I walked into the imposing hotel lobby and, in my dirty shorts and worn-out shoes, I felt immediately and agonizingly under-dressed. Stone chimneypieces framed roaring fires, vast oil paintings of misty mountain scenery hung from the walls and the proud heads of deer and moose stared down at me with disdain. Colourful stained-glass windows lit up solid wood staircases and rich carpets, while busy staff scurried to attend to the well-to-do guests lucky enough to be staying here. I pulled off my bobble hat, revealing a shaggy head of unkempt hair, and approached the reception desk to enquire about brunch.

‘Certainly, sir. Do you have a reservation?’ drawled the concierge in a smooth Canadian accent.

‘No, I’m afraid not.’

‘Well, I’m afraid you need a reservation, sir, and we do have a dress code in the dining room. Resort casual.’

‘Resort casual?’

‘Yes, sir. Will that be all?’

A short ride back into town I found the nearest phone box and popped in a couple of quarters.

‘I’d like to make a reservation for brunch please.’…‘Today.’…‘Just one, I’m afraid.’…‘Eleven thirty? Perfect.’…‘Tom.’…‘Thank you.’

Back at the hotel’s front door a polite porter offered to keep an eye on my wheels, and after I explained that I planned to be inside for quite some time he offered me the valet service.

‘For a bicycle?’

‘Don’t see why not, sir.’ Handing me a smart brass token, he wheeled away my overloaded bike.

I hurtled through the lobby, past well-dressed guests enjoying their Sunday, and made a beeline for the Gents.

It was an opulent room with yellow marble basins, golden taps, tall mirrors and, amid a baffling range of towels and scented toiletries, I went to work. I trimmed my wayward beard, added a few well-needed blasts of deodorant, put on a collared shirt and slipped into an almost clean pair of jeans.

The reflection that looked back at me may not have been wearing a pink Ralph Lauren shirt, chinos and a preppy blazer, but as I brushed my hair and eyed myself up in the large mirror I decided I was as close as I was ever going to get to ‘resort casual’. Stuffing my dirty clothes in the small cupboard under the sink, I made my way to the dining room, leaving a trail of stubble and my own distinctive fragrance in my wake.

Like another of life’s simple pleasures, eating is much more fun with other people. I gave my name to the maître d’ and felt a momentary pang of sadness as I was shown to a single table, laid for one, in the middle of the large dining room, which was filled with families, groups of friends and the lively sounds of animated conversation. Eating alone is one of the downsides to solo travel, but determined not to dwell on my solitude I began to plan my brunch and activate my gastric juices.

‘Do help yourself to the buffet, sir.’

Just hearing the word ‘buffet’ conjured up apparitions of metal trays filled with multicoloured gloop in cheap Chinese restaurants. It reminded me of cheapskate corporate functions with tables littered with cold cocktail sausages, plastic ham sandwiches, damp quiche, greying Scotch eggs and soggy sausage rolls. But as I stared at the galaxy of food laid out before me here, it was clear that they treat buffet very differently Stateside. This was buffet, but not as we know it.

Heaps of crushed ice were covered with pink lobsters, meaty crabs, fat shrimps and coral-coloured langoustines; there were sides of smoked salmon, trout and gravadlax; pepper-crusted pastrami, haunches of prosciutto, shiny maple-cured hams studded with cloves, salted hunks of beef, rolled pancetta, looped Spanish chorizo, slender salamis, chunky saucissons…

Busy men in tall chef’s hats and white jackets whisked eggs and made omelettes to order. Balls of pizza dough were thrown around like juggler’s balls, stretched like chest expanders before being sprinkled with savoury ingredients. Headband-wearing sushi chefs patiently constructed flawless nigiri and sashimi while others tossed ingredients into hissing woks. Sous chefs with knives that could remove a man’s arm at a single stroke dissected tender ribs with all the skill of a surgeon and racks of lamb and huge hams glazed with sticky honey were deftly sliced. Golden chickens rotated slowly on spits. There were salads of every colour and description. Baskets spilling over with fresh fruit and wild berries were next to towers of decadent pastries and puddings cemented with whipped cream and bejewelled with fresh fruit. It looked like the delirious fantasy feast of a starving man. After four months of living on the road, it was almost too much to take in. I wanted it all and yet seemed to be overcome with a strange sensual panic.