You will really like this one if you qualify as a hunter/gatherer, possess a sense of adventure, don't have a fear of gherkins, and aren't inclined to form some sort of reverse Stockholm Syndrome attachment to captive pigeons prior to their conversion to pigeonneaux crapaudine.

Steven Rinella's The Scavenger's Guide to Haute Cuisine locked me in a grin for 317 pages. Except for the fact that it sports the most delusive title for a book since Canning Moose, it is wonderfully entertaining.

The book is about Rinella's yearlong quest to assemble and create a three-day, 45-course, Thanksgiving feast for his struggling vegetarian girl friend and a group of mostly open-minded friends and relatives. It isn't your usual three-day, 45-course, Thanksgiving feast. For recipes and inspiration, Rinella turned to Le Guide Culinaire?the 1903, 5,012-recipe "pretty weird cookbook" by French master chef Auguste Escoffier.

Not too surprisingly, Escoffier, an epicurean genius and snob, featured foodstuffs that were decidedly French or at least European. Rinella, though widely traveled in his quest for the feast menu, hunted and gathered exclusively from New World waters, forests, bridge ledges, roadsides and eccentrics. His pre-feast larder included stingray from Florida, eel from New York, Michigan snapping turtle, Alaskan halibut, elk from Montana, clams and mussels from Washington, northern California wild pig, English sparrows from Iowa, deer from the fender of his sous chef's truck and, count 'em, 38 or so other "delicacies." Not bad for a guy who grew up eating the breaded products of a garage-dwelling, industrial-size deep fryer that his father believed "was suitable for any item that died by way of a hook or a bullet."

It seems that Escoffier?"King of Chefs and Chef of Kings"?readily substituted within many of his own recipes, but one gains the impression that he didn't want his readers drifting too far from his ingredients and directions. One can imagine, for example, Escoffier's unabashed Francocentric clucking at Rinella's unrepentant use of adult rather than young rabbits for forcemeat. Quelle id?e....

On the other hand, Escoffier surely would have been delighted to know that a century, culture, language and ocean away, someone was recreating and experimenting from his magnum opus, which Rinella likened to the "Kama Sutra of food." Likewise, he undoubtedly would have been pleased that, in this day and age, someone, a devotee, selected foods taken joyfully from nature.>

You might think that the Thanksgiving feast was anticlimactic. You might be wrong. Among the gathered ingredients were 18 kinds of fish, 8 species of shellfish, 10 different kinds of fowl, 11 different red meats, and a medley of innards, such as bladders, caul fat, head, hearts, intestines, kidneys, sweetbreads, tongues and livers. You might think that a feast energetically gathered and meticulously prepared would have been an unqualified success. You might be wrong. But it certainly is worth finding out.

Steve Rinella is a young guy. He is a correspondent for Outside magazine, which accounts for the free-spirited, uninhibited approach to the epic and for the occasional, smart-ass commentary, all of which I found delightful. I was so tickled at something on page 266 that I inadvertently and permanently marked the passage by the smudge of a careless forkful of Swanson's Salisbury steak.

The Scavenger's Guide to Haute Cuisine was published in 2005 by Miramax Books. It retails for $23.95, and can be found in most bookstores.