Hell's Backbone Grill
Something right in this world.
I have never read a cookbook before I read This Immeasurable Place.
You might need to visit Hell’s Backbone Grill in Boulder, Utah, before you can appreciate the book’s contents. You really shouldn’t however—because it’s message is universal.
It’s message is that dedication, determination and backbreaking work pays off.
It’s message is that in order to build a community, you need to open yourself to the community already surrounding you.
It’s message is that it IS possible to live more simply, so that others may live.
It’s message is that love finds a way. Along the way there are incredibly delicious recipes. The two founders have no qualms about letting you in on all of their culinary secrets.
My significant other, Dana, owned Hell’s Backbone Grill’s first cookbook—written 4 years into their conception—and had always wanted to visit the James Beard-recommended restaurant—literally—located in the Middle of Nowhere. In this case, nowhere is Boulder, Utah, which is engulfed by the 2 million acres set aside for Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
If you click on the Hell’s Backbone Grill link above, you will land on their splash page and immediately be notified that the Biden Administration has rescinded the previous administration’s callous, but completely predictable, act of opening this majestic wilderness to extractive mining industries. I have a much better appreciation for these southern Utah national monuments (which includes the much-remarked upon Bears Ears National Monument) after learning that their existence is due to some old-fashioned political compromise. Back in the last days of political compromise when political compromise was accepted as the price of believing in the sanctity of democracy. President Clinton’s Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt convinced hardscrabble southern Utahns to accept the ‘national monument’ designation by assuring them that their bucolic way of life would not be altered.
If the Clinton Administration had pushed for wilderness designation, conservative-minded southern Utahns (read: ranchers) would never have agreed to board the conservation bandwagon. By being designated as a national monument, it preserves the vast ‘wilderness’ from the most destructive instincts of our society—mines, factories, industries, rampant development, foreign entities buying land for investment purposes.
Meanwhile, ranchers can go about their business.
On the 35 mile trek or so off one deep blue highway—deep in southern Utah—to reach Boulder on another even more blue highway, Dana and I drove past dozens and dozens of healthy free range cows hewing close to the road but never making themselves a complete nuisance. (Having said that, however, I wouldn’t want to drive those 35 miles in the dark because every cow was as black as the proverbial raven in the coal mine during a once-in-a-lifetime eclipse). Even though the cud-munchers were munching their way through the landscape—it was a mountain pass with alpine junipers and piñons—it remained beautiful to the eye.
But that might reflect my inveterate love of red rock country.
So, en route to Santa Fe for a lengthy visit with my dear sister, Pam (whom I wrote about in my column Peggy Ann Moore), Dana and I drove like shoppers stampeding into Best Buy on Black Friday pre-pandemic from Baker City, Oregon, to Hell’s Backbone Grill in teeny-tiny, eensy-weensy Boulder, Utah (population 225). It was a Tuesday night. Only large parties could make reservations and the Grill only had their patio open for dining due to the fact we are still in the midst of a worldwide pandemic.
Middle of nowhere, midweek, late September. How busy could it be?
We arrived at about 7pm. Kitchen set to close at 9:30pm. The place was hopping. At every table sat patrons. They invited us to poke around on their grounds until there was an opening. I had already decided to spend the night and return the next evening if we were unable to be seated.
It’s not every day you can make dreams come true, and I was dead set to bring this one to fruition. Having possessed their first cookbook for a decade and having heard her mother’s firsthand accounts of the farm-to-table’s delectable fare, Dana had been dreaming of visiting this place for a very long time. No timetable was going to interfere with that.
Without going into intimate detail, I can report the multi-course meal was easily one of the top three restaurant experiences of my lifetime. (Little known fact: I was a restaurant critic for Puget Sound Consumer Co-op’s monthly newsletter during the early ‘90s. Never mind that their sole criteria for hiring me was that I was willing to eat red meat and all other forms of meat). The show stopper was the Dark Magic Gingerbread with Butterscotch Sauce dessert. If I’d been struck by lightning at the conclusion of eating the DMGBS, I would’ve died a man contented.
Here’s the recipe:
Dark Magic Gingerbread
From A Measure of Grace: The Story and Recipes of a Small Town Restaurant by Blake Spalding, Jennifer Castle, and Lavinia Spalding
**The only change I made to these recipes was to increase both the pear and the Scotch by a good measure. I would guess I added 3/4 c. pear to the cake and 1/4 c. Scotch to the sauce. The recipes below are as originally printed. I used very ripe Bosc pears and substituted Irish whisky with happy results.
Yield: 1- 9×13 cakeIngredients:
3 c. white flour
2 t. baking soda
1 t. salt
3 t. ground ginger
1 ½ t. ground cinnamon
½ t. ground cloves
½ t. Chimayo chile
1 ½ sticks unsalted butter
2 eggs
1 ½ c. sugar
1 ½ c. dark molasses
1 ¼ c. boiling water
½ c. diced pear
1 T. chopped crystallized ginger
It looks like this:
I think the example we ate—because we shared it—was twice that size. I think it was also baked in a bundt cake form. I remember it being even darker and richer than the picture above. Perhaps I was merely enchanted by the whole magical evening and a little pixilated from 12-13 hours of long distance highway driving.
At 10pm—it might have been later—we consumed the last morsel on our plate, closed the place down, bought some souvenirs (the cookbook for instance) and waddled our way back to the pick up. Our very congenial and solicitous server, Max, advised us of a free campsite half a mile up the road in the National Forest. We found it with no problem and spent a peaceful night surrounded by the sounds of two million acres of solitude.
The story of Hell’s Backbone Grill, the place itself and everything it embodies is reason enough to journey to Boulder, Utah. It’s success bodes well for farm-to-table acolytes and everyone who wants to see homemade goodness triumph over convenience. It’s success also bodes well for those who love the idea of community.
When Dana read the lines—she actually read me the cookbook while we were driving between southern Utah and northern New Mexico, so, technically, I have still not read a cookbook—where one of the women founders was quoted saying (and I am liberally paraphrasing), “We worry less about whether someone is good at what they do than that they are good people and want to be part of the community. We can always teach them to cook, clean, chop and grow vegetables,” I was sold.
That’s my kind of place and my kind of attitude.
So, if you ever find yourself in the last bit of territory to be mapped in the contiguous United States, check out Hell’s Backbone Grill & Farm.
I need to rant a bit.
Nearly threw a haymaker at some random nerdy dude at Lunar Laundry in Ballard. As it was, he and I exchanged your common NSFW sobriquets at a volume loud enough to be heard throughout the laundromat despite the numerous rumblings of washers and dryers. It was spontaneous and completely unpremeditated. Lucky for us both, we were middle-aged, graying white guys obediently wearing masks in a Seattle laundry concern.
The odds of either of us carrying a weapon was infinitesimal.
I can tell you one thing for sure, I won’t be doing that sort of thing in Chelan County on the east side of the mountains.
That exchange however indicates to me how much pent up anger I am walking around with largely due to the incessant barrage of batshit craziness in the world.
For instance, I woke this morning to read that Texas schools need to teach the opposing side to the Holocaust because of one of the latest laws passed by a Legislature hellbent to drag the Lone Star state, as well as the rest of the country, back to the Dark Ages. Every morning there are fresh hells like this. Many of them coming from Texas.
Just saw this Twitter post:
Days we have gone without Texas embarrassing the nation? 0
Someone needs to turn the tables on those mofos, but it will take someone less angry and more clever than me.
I heard Samantha Bee tell Kara Swisher of the Sway podcast the same thing I have been preaching and that is the only solution is to be an active, engaged, informed citizen. Rattle the cages of the people we hire to be public servants. There’s no easy path out. Like Samantha Bee said, it’s boring. It’s dull. It’s repetitive.
And it’s 100% essential in order for us to keep the authoritarians from winning.
Also, EVERYONE and I mean EVERYONE is singing the praises of the movie, Coda. I have yet to see it but it comes with numerous endorsements from numerous AARs.
