Pizzle, Pluck and Bung - and the inside of Bourdain's fridge.

Plus, some of the weirdest sh*t I've sourced. Trigger warning for vegans

“I DON’T NEED A FUCKING FOOD STYLIST.”

Almost a decade since his death and you can still hear that voice.

I knew Anthony Bourdain toward the end of his stint here on earth; we’d met while working on his last book, Appetites. Unlike the others, this one would have recipes that he’d wanted photographed as weirdly and abstractly as possible, to go with the Ralph Steadman painting that had been commissioned for the cover. Nobody but Tony had any illusions of him being the one to cook them. I mean, just because you can cook doesn’t mean you’re a stylist or have the temperament to do it for the camera - for two weeks straight.

Bobby Fisher - not the chess player, would be the photographer and he knew he’d need a stylist who’d 1) be able to deal with The Client’s mercurial personality and 2) excel at Weird and Abstract. Problem was, Bourdain’s idea of a food stylist was a fuddy-duddy home economist in a half apron shellacking a chicken that looked like every other chicken. So when Bobby said he was bringing in a - horrors! - food stylist, the response was “I DON’T NEED A F*CKING…..blah blah blah”. It was only when Bobby said I’d worked with Irving Penn and showed him the picture of a pulpy- necked disembodied turkey I’d styled that he agreed to let me come for one day to see if he liked me. (If he liked me?)

Mr. Bourdain, you have no idea who you’re dealing with.

Ever since my friend Michael had moved from L.A. to rural Texas, he’d been on a recreational shooting spree to supply his wild boar prosciutto-curing experiments. This was Thursday and we’d begin shooting (the book) Monday morning at Tony’s home, so I put in a call: Hey Mikey, any chance you’re going out shooting this week because I am in desperate need of a boar’s head and maybe one hoof. All he wanted to know was where to send it. I gave him Bourdain’s home address, my FedEx number and instructions to send it for a Saturday delivery. Then I alerted Tony’s assistant Laurie to make sure he unpacked it and refrigerated it IMMEDIATELY.

Monday morning a gruff, bleary-eyed Bourdain answered my knock.

“You Victoria?” he asked, giving me the hairy eyeball.

Yes I am.

ALLRIGHT. YOU CAN STAY.

By the third day I had him inflating a pig’s bladder with a bicycle pump and blowdrying a chicken.

Tony turned out to be game for just about anything, and quite fond of animal parts that didn’t otherwise get a lot of play, especially the boar’s head, to which he became weirdly attached; It appeared in the banquet scene along with a roasted duck head and a veal tongue en geleé, in the centerfold, on the back cover, and then one last time for Tony’s publicity portrait on Day Five when it had begun to….ripen. He was very protective of the thing.

.

Just in case Texas Mike didn’t come through, I’d also sourced a pork hock; that is, the foot and leg, in one piece. Compared to some of the wackier body parts I’ve had to source, this was child’s play.

A pig’s bung, however, was more challenging. To illustrate an urban myth that’s been debunked but won’t die, I sourced a pig bung (rectum) that when sliced crosswise, dredged and fried, allegedly passes for calamari. So they say.

I still won’t get near calamari unless there’s a tentacle for every few rings and believe me I count them.

One of the downsides of culinary school in the U.K. even if it was the Cordon Bleu was haggis. Alan Cumming, don’t hate me but eew. As part of my training I had to inflate a pig’s bladder and stuff it with oatmeal and pluck and a lot of onions for what amounted to a stinky entrail piñata, while the girl with the pearls and twinset got to poach a nice fillet of cod.

For a story Alan Richman wrote for GQ, I was charged with sourcing duck tongues (easy - Chinatown, from whence cometh many treasures), fresh frozen guinea pigs (Ecuadorian market in far Queens that threw in a grilled one for free that had met a fiery end impaled up his bum and out his mouth. Never again.), veal testicles (more child’s play, Ottomanelli has them in regular rotation), testina, which is the face and ears of a pig that in order to make myself understood, I had to scream in Sicilian dialect and then pantomime to the stone deaf father of the Bensonhurst butcher: U GOO-Dee-Nay! He came back holding it in front of his face, making freakish animal noises to scare me which it did - and finally, off to a Mexican market in Sunset Park to source pizzle (what could be worse than a pig’s face? A BULL’S PENIS). I’d forgotten to look up the Spanish word for pizzle (pre-Google Translate) so had to mime that too. The butcher let me go through the whole charade before he deadpanned “fresh or frozen?” Bull pizzle is not what you’d expect - my condolences to the cows - each one is about 14” long with a circumference of a breakfast sausage.

Here’s Hans Gissinger, who photographed the pizzle, pluck and bung, wearing the testina. (Because he could, that’s why).

Then there’s the cow’s head Richard Burbridge couldn’t bear to shoot because it looked too much like a cow’s head; instead, he made me wrap it in a black trash bag and shlep it a good three blocks in the heat of a July afternoon to dump in a Union Square trash can on a greenmarket day, the very day after Giuliani debuted the new trash cans with the contraption on top to limit the size of cow’s head you could cram in. One day earlier and this would have been an easy assignment. (This is the curse of the word EASY).

A cow’s head in a trash bag looks like a cow’s head in a trash bag, and although it probably wasn’t the first head in a trash bag to find itself in Union Square, I still got plenty of side-eye until I found a dumpster full of corn husks behind a farmer’s booth to dump it in. I just hope nobody opened that bag.

As promised, here’s a peek inside Tony’s fridge. This picture’s made its way into many an Instagram feed, posted as though the posters had discovered it while at Tony’s for a friendly coffee klatsch. (you didn’t.)

While yes, this is his refrigerator, only the acidophilus, protein shake (belonging to his Sardinian martial arts master almost ex-wife with the knife collection) and Brother Perignon’s fizzy were original. Everything else had been labeled and shoved in there as we cooked over the course of a week, augmented by a durian and that pork hock from my former assistant Jay over at Hudson & Charles. I styled his fridge the way you’d expect Anthony Bourdain’s character on No Reservations would have done.

And here’s my favorite recipe from the book. It’s unembellished, snarky and good.

Nearly a decade after his death, you can still hear that voice.

P.S. I’m often grateful Tony didn’t stick around long enough to witness the full flowering of food influencers and TikTok cooks who can’t cook. He would have haaaaated it.