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Unmentionable Cuisine
By Daniel Maurer
One of my fondest high school memories involves eating a live
cricket. The idea was to liven up a math presentation about
a formula that used cricket chirps to determine temperature.
The cricket tasted like a straw of hay dipped in carpenter’s
glue, but it wasn’t the taste I recall so much as the
horror of my classmates. I got a similar reaction in art class
after chewing and swallowing a shard of glass. Years later,
when I selected “eats glass” to be the only senior
saying next to my yearbook picture, I immortalized myself
as a “weird foodie”—a person obsessed with
swallowing strange things.
For the restless person, eating unusual food— for instance
a baby pigeon at New York City’s mecca of weird food,
Congee Village— is the only way to experience the exciting
and exotic while listening to his lunchmate complain about
his job for the umpteenth time. Simple mastication becomes
an escape and an adventure; an act of enlightenment and transgression;
the culinary equivalent of foreign travel— a means of
experiencing flavors that are at once comfortingly familiar
yet wonderfully strange. Knowing the secret tastes of foods
such as barbequed ovaries (or “balls on a string,”
as they are called in Japan) makes you feel like someone whose
lover does illicit and delightful things in bed (perhaps also
with balls and a string)— you want to tell everyone about
them, but when you do, you are met with a mixture of awe and
revulsion.
Calvin W. Schwabe knows this. His cultural history-cum-cookbook,
Unmentionable Cuisine, defiantly opens with an epigraph quoting
Frederick Swoone: “It makes no better sense to reject
nutritious dogflesh, horseflesh, grasshoppers and termites
as food than to reject beef or chicken flesh.” (Far be
it from this reader to reject horseflesh— I became a
“kicker eater,” as Yorkshiremen were disdainfully
called, in Osaka, where I also feasted on whale sushi and
sparrow skull.) The hefty tome gathers recipes from all over
the world, including Ancient Roman dormice, Texas armadillo,
squirrel ravioli (substitute kangaroo rats or jerboas if need
be), crisp roasted termites (they’ll keep for a year),
and guinea pig, which we are told provide 50 percent of all
the animal protein eaten in Peru (Peruvians keep them under
their floor boards, feeding them vegetable scraps until the
day comes to “disarticulate their neck vertebrae.”)
As a New Yorker, I have
eaten many of these foods before: ox tail, intestines, eel,
and pig’s feet in countless Chinese or Puerto Rican restaurants;
turtle soup in Harlem; skewered chicken hearts at a Japanese
barbeque joint; strips of cured pig’s ear as bar food;
cock’s combs and wild boar at a tapas bar; skate jerky
in a sake den; ostrich and bison burgers at corner pubs; “kanga
skewers” at an Aussie bar and emu carpaccio at the restaurant
upstairs; peppered lamb testicles at a Russian takeout joint;
blood sausage tacos from vending trucks; squab at a 5-star
restaurant; sea urchin at a sushi joint; bee pollen and sea
moss at a West Indian fast food place. I have purchased shark
at the local fish market, an entire rabbit from a Portuguese
butcher in New Jersey, and veal brains and beef heart at the
supermarket in my Polish neighborhood. And I have seen people
on the streets of Chinatown crowded around Rubbermaid buckets
packed with hundreds of live frogs. But there are recipes
in Unmentionable Cuisine that will raise the eyebrows (and
stomach bile) of even the most hardened New Yorker: Fish sperm
crepes, baked shins, deep-fried calf’s eyes, and “possum
with ’taters” are all mentioned in Unmentionable
Cuisine. One Ancient Roman recipe even calls for stuffing
sea urchin gonads (“the poor man’s caviar”)
into a sow’s nipples.
In addition to the recipes, Schwabe offers helpful preparation
and serving advice. He tells us red ant chutney is often eaten
with “alcoholic drinks,” which goes without saying
given how drunk you’d have to be to eat ants (Ozzy Osbourne
was certainly high when he snorted a line of them.) Likewise,
we are told roasted field mice go great with margaritas. (While
Mexicans like alcohol with their rodents, the French like
it inside of them, cooking the “alcoholic rats”
inhabiting wine cellars over a fire of broken wine barrels.)
Also perfect for margaritas, we are told, are turkey testicles.
“My neighbor and colleague Rosie Rosenwald is probably
the world’s leading authority on turkey testicles,”
Schwabe chirps before instructing us to “express the
organ from its membrane by squeezing it as one would peel
a Concord grape.” Indeed, at times we learn more about
preparation than we want or need to know— how to kill
and skin a rabbit (the instructions take up an entire page),
how to clean a lamb’s head (make sure to brush its teeth),
and how to distinguish good-tasting eggs from bad ones when
plundering birds’ nests. When baking bats Samoan style,
Schwabe says, avoid those behaving abnormally or flying in
daylight, since they may be rabid (unfortunately he fails
to tell us what “abnormal” bat behavior entails.)
The chapter most will turn to (or away from) first is “Dog
and Cat Meat.” After trying to guilt trip the reader
into cooking Garfield or Snoopy (“Some 3,500 puppies
and kittens are born every hour in the United States, and
the surplus among them represents at least 120 million pounds
per year of potentially edible meat now being totally wasted”)
and offering a world history of dogmeat eating, Schwabe charms
us with an anecdote about a couple traveling in Hong Kong
whose language difficulties caused their pet poodle to be
cooked and served to them in a restaurant. Then come recipes
for broiled puppy (Hawaii), puppies stuffed with rice (Burma),
smoked dog (“a tremendous hit at cocktail parties”
in the Philippines), and stir-fried dog (“eviscerate
and clean a puppy,” the Chinese recipe deadpans). The
Swiss recipe for dried dogmeat calls for hanging a dog carcass
for 8 to 10 days, then packing the pieces in oak barrels for
14 days, then pressing it between two boards for 5 to 6 weeks,
and finally hanging the pieces of meat for as much as four
and a half months.
Schwabe has a few recipes for cat people too. Although he
admits that he failed to find a way to use the cat’s
eyes that were sold in Cantonese food shops in the last century,
he does come through with stewed cat recipes from Ghana and
Spain. Disappointingly, Dragon, Phoenix and Tiger Soup doesn’t
contain dragon meat, but provides your daily nutritional allowances
of cat, cloud ear fungus, fish stomach, and snake meat. (Carb
counters beware: Because the book was originally published
in 1973, there is no mention of them in the nutritional information
Schwabe provides for each animal.)
By the end of the cat and dog chapter, even the most hardened
weird foodie begins to suspect that the author of Unmentionable
Cuisine is unspeakably insane. It is not just because he says
things like “hearts are conveniently made for stuffing”
and “spinach goes unusually well with brains.” It
is not just because he commands us to “split a pig’s
head in two” and “bake the face.” There is
also the matter of his painful puns: “The heart and lungs
of an animal are called the pluck— but it really takes
none at all to eat and enjoy them!” One pictures Schwabe
winking and nudging this to his kids over dinner as they fantasize
about plucking out his heart and lungs. Indeed he admits to
including an Ancient Roman pig uterus recipe “for the
cook who has successfully subjugated most of the family’s
food prejudices and is interested in having his or her culinary
reputation recognized.” (Whatever happened to impressing
your kids by teaching them how to throw a curveball?) Schwabe’s
party guests are similarly victimized: “at our family’s
pre-Christmas caroling suppers each year, it amuses me to
see how a whole cold poached tongue… may remain all evening
virtually untouched, while the pot of tongue spread next to
it will have to be refilled.”
Evidence of the author’s insanity mounts when we consider
his recipes’ more remarkable first lines. An Argentine
recipe begins with a Dali-esque vision: “An eviscerated
lamb or kid (with the kidneys left in) is spread-eagled on
a wrought-iron cross.” (Maybe Schwabe should lay off
of the bourbon-soaked snake meat.) Indeed when we combine
several of his recipes’ more curious opening lines we
get what sounds either like a recipe for witch stew or like
Jeffrey Dahmer’s to-do list: “Kill a chicken and
collect its blood… Take a sheep’s head and a couple
of sheep’s feet… Drive a stake into the nostrils
of a lamb’s head and, holding it by this handle, burn
off the wool over an open fire… Collect the blood of
a sheep or goat in a bowl and stir it vigorously with some
added salt to prevent clotting. Cut some of the liver, lungs,
kidneys, heart, brains, tripe, intestines, pancreas, and any
other organs you wish into small pieces, wash them well, and
put them into a large kettle… Pack the washed paw of
a bear in clay and bake it in an oven…. Cut the meat
of a mature cat and a chicken into cubes and steam them until
tender… Grind termites, sugar and banana flour together
to form a kind of honey-nougat paste.”
To be fair, the book avoids being a Fear Factor episode (or
the episode of Beverly Hills 90210 where Brenda and Donna
go to France and accidentally eat cow brains) by providing
curious facts about the history and customs of strange food.
We learn that before Geritol, “even proper ladies in
Victorian England would drop by the slaughterhouse for a monthly
tot of fresh blood.” We learn that pickled pig’s
feet once graced most bar counters in America. We learn that
South American cowboys have a “fiesta de huevos”
(feast of balls) after castrating their charges (and perhaps
more interestingly, that whenever a horse or bull was castrated
during Schwabe’s stint in vet school, the doctors threw
dice to see who got to take home the “goodies”).
Schwabe even breaks the recipes down by countries in a sort
of perverse culinary Olympics ceremony. (Our own fast food
nation clocks in with forty recipes, about a fifth as many
as Schwabe’s favorite France.)
Once you get over your shock and wonder over everything that
appears in Unmentionable Cuisine, you’ll wonder about
the things that don’t. There is, for instance, no mention
of Louisiana’s loveable swamp rat the nutria (readers
will have to scour nutria.com
for a “stuffed nutria hindquarters” recipe that
calls for “pounding out the legs”) or South America’s
equivalent the capybara (according to a 1991 survey, over
400 tons of the giant rodent’s meat is eaten yearly).
Schwabe might also have given the Glaciar Brewhouse of Alaska’s
recipe for reindeer sausage, 28 of which record-holder Dale
Boone downed in 10 minutes (other competitive eating records:
3 pounds of pickled beef tongue in 12 minutes and 57 cow brains
in 15 minutes). While these omissions may have been innocent,
one can’t help but cry “food prejudice,” as
Schwabe so often does, over the glaring absence of primate
recipes. After all, entire smoked monkeys can be purchased
on the side of the road in rural Africa, their tales tied
to their heads so they can be carried like briefcases (this
according to CongoCookbook.com,
which also offers an elephant soup recipe). And legend has
it that in China, monkey brains were and possibly still are
eaten before the creature is even dead— the monkey’s
head is locked in a vise (or in a special table with a hole
in the middle), its scalp is skinned and punctured, and the
brains are extracted and eaten while still pulsating.
And what about that ultimate unmentionable cuisine? The book’s
epigraph, after all, may remind some of Diego Rivera’s
words about cannibalism: "When man evolves a civilization
higher than the mechanized but still primitive one he has
now, the eating of human flesh will be sanctioned," said
the artist of the refreshing two-month cannibal diet he claimed
to have gone on during his stint as an anatomy student (his
favorite dish: "women’s brains in vinaigrette.")
And yet Schawbe offers none of the human placenta recipes
(placenta pizza, placenta lasagne, etc.) that are commonly
prepared by new mothers.
To round off Schwabe’s book, readers will have to refer
to the fascinating "Eat Me" chapter of Mary Roach’s
Stiff: The Curious Lives of the Human Cadaver, which kicks
off with a recipe for Arabian "mellified man," one
of the many "mummy elixirs" Roach says were ubiquitously
prescribed in Egypt (and, according to one source, even in
Paris) up until the early 1900s: the corpse of a man who has
eaten only honey for the last month of his life is macerated
in a stone coffin full of honey for one hundred years after
which small bits of the "human mummy confection"
can be swallowed to ail broken and wounded limbs. Roach quotes
from a 1571 book Chinese Materia Medica that offers restorative
recipes for feces soup, human knee dirt, earwax, and powdered
penis (to be "taken with alcohol"). C.J.S. Thompson’s
book The Mystery and Art of the Apothecary includes recipes
for Spirit of the Brain of Man (combine human brains with
black cherries, lavender, and lily) and King Charles’
Drops (combine brains with a half pound of opium and some
wine). And Cannibalism in China by Key Ray Chong offers a
list of dishes prepared by children who demonstrated filial
piety by hacking off pieces of themselves (limbs, ears, kidneys,
even an eyeball) and cooking them in soups and porridges (this
occurred as recently as 1987 when a daughter served her mother
a piece of her own thigh). Roach’s sources say that indeed
as many as three million Chinese still drink urine, aborted
fetuses are consumed to improve bad skin, and "the use
of human fingers, toes, nails, dried urine, feces and breast
milk are strongly recommended by the Chinese government to
cure certain diseases." Although Roach doesn’t know
of any cultures that regularly participated in "taste
cannibalism," we can’t help but think of Schwabe
the testicle-eating medical school student when she tells
us that Chinese executioners enjoyed the job perk of taking
human brains and hearts home for dinner. Given that Schwabe’s
book makes no mention of these unmentionable cuisines (nor
of "fecal phosphorus," the glowing excrement dish
that was concocted in 1710 by a German doctor), it appears
that our fearless author (or at least his publisher) still
has a few sacred cows of his own.
If its premise falls short, Unmentionable Cuisine is still
to be admired. After all, Schwabe’s non-chalance about
organ eating predates Hannibal Lechter’s by almost two
decades. I admit I have yet to sample the recipes—reading
the book is so delightful that actually using it seems beside
the point. But I plan to. I can’t help but wonder what
the tome will look (and smell) like a few years from now,
when the pages have been smeared in veal brains, beef tunics
(the outer membrane of the testicle), and who knows, maybe
someday the mucus of the fabled Giant African Snail. Some
of these recipes I’ll never get to try— especially
the ones in which an entire pig or lamb carcass is slung over
an elaborate ground stove such as the Peruvian pachamanca
or Hawaiian imu (I doubt my Brooklyn nabe will yield the requisite
lava stones). But there are simple recipes, too. Maybe I’ll
start with this one from Laos:
“Boil dragonfly nymphs. Eat them.”
--
Daniel Maurer writes and edits things in New York City.
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