HOW TO MAKE MOOSE SOUP
IN A HOLE IN THE GROUND,
OR DINE IN SPACE
In a small bedside bookcase, I often keep bare-bones survival texts like A Pilot’s Survival Manual, from which one learns the correct side of a nomad’s tent to enter after crash-landing in the Gobi Desert, or Bradford Angier’s How To Stay Alive in the Woods, with this recipe for moose soup made in a hole in the ground:
You’ve just killed a moose. Hungry, you’ve a hankering for nothing quite as much as some hot soup, flavored perhaps with wild leeks whose flat leaves you see wavering nearby. Why not take the sharp end of a dead limb and scoop a small hole in the ground? Why not line this concavity with a chunk of fresh hide? Then after adding the water and other ingredients, why not let a few hot clean stones do your cooking while you finish dressing out the animal?
Indeed, why not? I particularly like the recipe’s opening: You’ve just killed a moose. It reminds me of a recipe I once read for stir-fried dog, which began: First clean and eviscerate a healthy puppy. If, like me, you try not to eat mammals unless pressed by an unknowing host or necessity (a knowing host), neither dish will make your mouth water. But I like the idea of quietly brewing moose soup in a mossy pit. This book assumes that though clothed, armed, and equipped with a compass, one may have forgotten matches. Cooking, while not essential to survival, certainly makes it easier, so there are many plans for starting a fire with water (used as a magnifier), watches (hold “the crystals from two watches or pocket compasses of about the same size back to back …”), a drill made out of a bow, sparking a hunting knife against flint and other paraphernalia, including a gun.*
Think what the survival manuals for space travel will include! Much of the pleasure of taste is smell; we can smell something only when it evaporates. So, I imagine there are fewer scents in weightlessness. And that would mean food wouldn’t taste as good. Nonetheless, competition is keen to cater the Soviet and American space shuttles. One likely supplier for the next Soviet shuttle is Belème, a company jointly owned by a French astronaut, a biologist who studies weightlessness, and the chef and owner of L’Espérance, a three-star Michelin restaurant near Paris. The orbital menu would include such haute delicacies as artichoke chips and poulet à la Dijonnaise, presented in tubes and cans. Belème already supplies polar and desert explorers, mountain climbers, racing-car drivers, and other gastronomically aware adventurers with gourmet foods appropriate to the environment they’ll be in. When we think of cuisines, we picture steaming plates of curry, crawfish, peanut soup, chili, fettuccine, or some other savory dialect. But there is also, in its infancy, a space cuisine. I’ve eaten NASA’s freeze-dried space peaches, which taste like sweetly citric wasp’s nest, and read astronauts’ accounts of other foods; space cuisine is nothing to write home about. But wonder flavors things better than any condiment, so for short hauls freeze-dried fare may do just fine, until space travel is no stranger than a stroll along the Rialto in Venice, and we dare to dine al fresco at a cozy little spot whose menu offers moon on the half shell and a side order of stars.
ET FUGU BRUTE?
FOOD AS THRILL-SEEKING
A nation of sensation-addicts might dine as chic urbanites do, on rhubarb and raspberry tortes, smoked lobster, and hibiscus-wrapped monkfish, wiped with raspberry butter, baked in a clay oven, and then elevated briefly in mesquite smoke. When I was in college, I didn’t eat goldfish or cram into Volkswagens, or chug whole bottles of vodka, but others did, in a neo-Roaring Twenties ennui. Shocking the bourgeoisie has always been the unstated encyclical of college students and artists, and sometimes that includes grossing out society in a display of bizarre eating habits. One of the classic Monty Python’s Flying Circus sketches shows a chocolate manufacturer being cross-examined by policemen for selling chocolate-covered baby frogs, bones and all (“without the bones, they wouldn’t be crunchy!” he whines), as well as insects, and other taboo animals sure to appal western taste buds. I’ve met field scientists of many persuasions who have eaten native foods like grasshoppers, leeches, or bats stewed in coconut milk, in part to be mannerly, in part out of curiosity, and I think in part to provide a good anecdote when they returned to the States. However, these are just nutritious foods that fall beyond our usual sphere of habit and custom.
We don’t always eat foods for their taste, but sometimes for their feel. I once ate a popular duck dish in Amazonian Brazil, pato no tucupí (Portuguese for pato, “duck” + no, “within” + tucupí, “extracted juice of manioc”) whose main attraction is that it’s anesthetic: It makes your mouth as tingly numb as Benzedrine. The numbing ingredient is jambu (in Latin, Spilanthes), a yellow daisy that grows throughout Brazil and is sometimes used as a cold remedy. The effect was startling—it was as if my lips and whole mouth were vibrating. But many cultures have physically startling foods. I adore hot peppers and other spicy foods, ones that sandblast the mouth. We say “taste,” when we describe such a food to someone else, but what we’re really talking about is a combination of touch, taste, and the absence of discomfort when the deadening or sandblasting finally stops. The thinnest line divides Szechwan hot-pepper sauce from being thrilling (causing your lips to tingle even after the meal is over), and being sulfurically hot enough to cause a gag response as you eat it.* A less extreme example is our liking for crunchy or crisp foods, like carrots, which have little taste but lots of noise and mouth action. One of the most successful foods on earth is Coca-Cola, a combination of intense sweetness, caffeine, and a prickly feeling against the nose that we find refreshing. It was first marketed as a mouthwash in 1888, and at that time contained cocaine, a serious refresher—an ingredient that was dropped in 1903. It is still flavored with extract of coca leaves, but minus the cocaine. Coffee, tea, tobacco, and other stimulants all came into use in the western world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and quickly percolated around Europe. Fashionable and addictive, they offered diners a real nervous-system jolt, either of narcotic calm or caffeine rush, and, unlike normal foods, they could be taken in doses, depending on how high one wished to get or how addicted one already was.
In Japan, specially licensed chefs prepare the rarest sashimi delicacy: the white flesh of the puffer fish, served raw and arranged in elaborate floral patterns on a platter. Diners pay large sums of money for the carefully prepared dish, which has a light, faintly sweet taste, like raw pompano. It had better be carefully prepared, because, unlike pompano, puffer fish is ferociously poisonous. You wouldn’t think a puffer fish would need such chemical armor, since its main form of defense is to swallow great gulps of water and become so bloated it is too large for most predators to swallow. And yet its skin, ovaries, liver, and intestines contain tetrodotoxin, one of the most poisonous chemicals in the world, hundreds of times more lethal than strychnine or cyanide. A shred small enough to fit under one’s fingernail could kill an entire family. Unless the poison is completely removed by a deft, experienced chef, the diner will die midmeal. That’s the appeal of the dish: eating the possibility of death, a fright your lips spell out as you dine. Yet preparing it is a traditional art form in Japan, with widespread aficionados. The most highly respected fugu chefs are the ones who manage to leave in the barest touch of the poison, just enough for the diner’s lips to tingle from his brush with mortality but not enough to actually kill him. Of course, a certain number of diners do die every year from eating fugu, but that doesn’t stop intrepid fugu-fanciers. The ultimate fugu connoisseur orders chiri, puffer flesh lightly cooked in a broth made of the poisonous livers and intestines. It’s not that diners don’t understand the bizarre danger of puffer-fish toxin. Ancient Egyptian, Chinese, Japanese, and other cultures all describe fugu poisoning in excruciating detail: It first produces dizziness, numbness of the mouth and lips, breathing trouble, cramps, blue lips, a desperate itchiness as of insects crawling all over one’s body, vomiting, dilated pupils, and then a zombielike sleep, really a kind of neurological paralysis during which the victims
are often aware of what’s going on around them, and from which they die. But sometimes they wake. If a Japanese man or woman dies of fugu poison, the family waits a few days before burying them, just in case they wake up. Every now and then someone poisoned by fugu is nearly buried alive, coming to at the last moment to describe in horrifying detail their own funeral and burial, during which, although they desperately tried to cry out or signal that they were still alive, they simply couldn’t move.
Though it has a certain Russian-roulette quality to it, eating fugu is considered a highly aesthetic experience. That makes one wonder about the condition that we, in chauvinistic shorthand, refer to as “human.” Creatures who will one day vanish from the earth in that ultimate subtraction of sensuality that we call death, we spend our lives courting death, fomenting wars, watching sickening horror movies in which maniacs slash and torture their victims, hurrying our own deaths in fast cars, cigarette smoking, suicide. Death obsesses us, as well it might, but our response to it is so strange. Faced with tornadoes chewing up homes, with dust storms ruining crops, with floods and earthquakes swallowing up whole cities, with ghostly diseases that gnaw at one’s bone marrow, cripple, or craze—rampant miseries that need no special bidding, but come freely, giving their horror like alms—you’d think human beings would hold out against the forces of Nature, combine their efforts and become allies, not create devastations of their own, not add to one another’s miseries. Death does such fine work without us. How strange that people, whole countries sometimes, wish to be its willing accomplices.
Our horror films say so much about us and our food obsessions. I don’t mean the ones in which maniacal men carting chain saws and razors punish single women for living alone or taking jobs—although those are certainly alarming. I don’t mean ghost stories, in which we exhale loudly as order falls from chaos in the closing scenes. And I don’t mean scary whodunits, at the end of which the universe seems temporarily less random, violent, and inexplicable. Our real passion, by far, is for the juiciest of horror films in which vile, loathsome beasts, gifted with ferocious strength and cunning, stalk human beings and eat them. It doesn’t matter much if the beast is a fast-living “Killer Shrew” or a sullen “Cat People” or an abstract “Wolfen” or a nameless, acid-drooling “Alien.” The pattern is always the same. They dominate the genre. We are greedy for their brand of terror.
The plain truth is that we don’t seem to have gotten used to being at the top of our food chain. It must bother us a great deal, or we wouldn’t keep making movies, generation after generation, with exactly the same scare tactics: The tables are turned and we become fodder. All right, so we may be comfortable at the top of the chain as we walk around Manhattan, but suppose—oh, ultimate horror!—that on other planets we’re at the bottom of their food chain? Then you have the diabolically scary “Aliens,” who capture human beings, use them as hosts for their maggotlike young, and actually hang them up on slime gallows in a pantry.
We rush obsessively to movie theaters, sit in the cavelike dark, and confront the horror. We make contact with the beasts and live through it. The next week, or the next summer, we’ll do it all over again. And, on the way home, we keep listening for the sound of claws on the pavement, a supernatural panting, a vampiric flutter. We spent our formative years as a technologyless species scared with good reason about lions and bears and snakes and sharks and wolves that could, and frequently did, pursue us. You’d think we’d have gotten over that by now. One look at the cozy slabs of cow in a supermarket case, neatly cut, inked, and wrapped, should tell us to relax. But civilization is a more recent phenomenon than we like to think. Are horror films our version of the magic drawings on cave walls that our ancestors confronted? Are we still confronting them?
Fugu might not seem to have much to do with nuclear disarmament or world peace, but it’s a small indicator of our psyches. We find the threat of death arousing. Not all of us, and not all the time. But enough do often enough to keep the rest of us peace-loving sorts on our toes when we’d rather be sitting down calmly to a sumptuous meal with friends.
BEAUTY AND THE BEASTS
In Jean Cocteau’s extraordinary film version of the classic fairy tale “Beauty and the Beast,” a sensitive beast lives in a magical castle, the walls and furnishings of which are all psychosensitive. On the back of the Beast’s chair, in Latin, runs the motto: All men are beasts when they don’t have love. Every evening, the literate, humane beast must go out hunting for his dinner, chase down a deer and feed on its steaming flesh, or die of starvation. Afterward, he suffers the most bitter anguish, and his whole body involuntarily begins to smoke. The unstated horror of our species reveals itself in that moment. Like the sensitive Beast, we must kill other forms of life in order to live. We must steal their lives, sometimes causing them great pain. Every one of us performs or tacitly approves of small transactions with torture, death, and butchery each day. The cave paintings reflected the reverence and the love the hunter felt for his prey. In our hearts, we know that life loves life. Yet we feast on some of the other life-forms with which we share our planet; we kill to live. Taste is what carries us across that rocky moral terrain, what makes the horror palatable, and the paradox we could not defend by reason melts into a jungle of sweet temptations.
*This special milk, called colostrum, is rich in antibodies, the record of the mother’s epidemiologic experience.
*It was the food-obsessed Chinese who started the first serious restaurants during the time of the T’ang dynasty (A D. 618–907). By the time the Sung dynasty replaced the T’ang, they were all-purpose buildings, with many private dining rooms, where one went for food, sex, and barroom gab.
*In German, humans eat (essen), but animals devour or feed (fressen) Cannibals are called Menschenfresser—humans who become animals when they eat.
*For an excellent discussion of cannibalism, and the nutritional fiats that have prompted it in a variety of cultures (Aztecs, Fijians, New Guineans, American Indians, and many others), including truly horrible and graphic accounts by eyewitnesses, see Harris’s chapter on “People Eating.”
*From the Middle English jade, a broken-down horse that is spiritless and crippled by fatigue.
*With one exception: Animals that are greatly underfed have longer life spans Scientists aren’t sure why—it may be the effect on the immune system, it may be the effect on metabolism, it may be something else entirely. And it’s important that the animals not be undernourished, just fed a lot less than normal and given vitamin supplements Studies are now beginning with primates, our closest relatives, but every other animal studied has shown longer life spans as a result of being skinnier.
*In a one-and-a-half-ounce milk-chocolate bar, there are about nine milligrams of caffeine (which the plant may use as an insecticide); a five-ounce cup of brewed coffee has about 115 milligrams; a twelve-ounce cola drink between thirty-two and sixty-five.
*Randy workmen and explorers are responsible for a lot of interesting etymology Consider the word “gasket,” which comes from the Old French garcette, a little girl with her hymen still intact.
*To make real vanilla extract. Split a vanilla bean lengthwise, set in a glass jar, cover with ¾ cup vodka. Cover and let steep for at least six weeks. As you use the extract, add more vodka; the bean will stay redolent and continue oozing flavor for some time. Add a teaspoon of vanilla extract to French toast batter to transmogrify it into the New Orleans version called “lost bread.” Vanilla sugar tastes wonderful in coffee. Split one vanilla bean from top to bottom and cut into pieces, mix with two cups of sugar, cover, let stand for six weeks. The longer the vanilla stands, the more intense the flavor.