I asked Abe if he was in the livestock business. He told me that the flock had gone astray, then he looked up at me questioningly, as if to read my eyes, my inner conviction. And then silence, he didn't want to talk about it anymore. He just stared into his plate, trying to push the stormbrew in different directions with his spoon, as if he was trying to sort it into little piles. A futile exercise. The stuff justs sticks together, as anyone who has ever tried to chew it apart will know.

The name "stormbrew"comes from the way that it is prepared, and not from its interesting digestive side effects, as one would evidently suspect.

It is cooked at night, when the combination of fire smoke off the lake and high humidity bring down dry lightening, resonating flashes in the folds of the low fuming clouds. The raw ingredients (that no one knows what they are) are piled into large metal pots that are taken out into the marsh flats on large, shallow barges. There they are rapidly hoisted up into the sky on long wooden poles, rammed into the mud. A flash of lightening or two, a heartening sizzle, and "bon appetit!", everyone!

Though it takes a whole day to cool down to an edible temperature.