Don George is the editor of four previous Lonely Planet literary anthologies: A House Somewhere (co-edited with Anthony Sattin), The Kindness of Strangers, By the Seat of My Pants and Tales from Nowhere. He is also the author of the Lonely Planet Guide to Travel Writing. Don is Contributing Editor and Book Review Columnist for National Geographic Traveler, and Special Features Editor and Columnist for the popular travel website Gadling.com. He is also the Editor in Chief of the online literary travel magazine Recce: Literary Journeys for the Discerning Traveler (www.geoex.com/recce) and the creator and host of the adventure travel site Don’s Place (www.adventurecollection.com/dons-blog). In thirty years as a travel writer and editor, Don has been Global Travel Editor for Lonely Planet and Travel Editor at the San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle; he also founded and edited Salon.com’s groundbreaking travel site, Wanderlust. He has received dozens of awards for his writing and editing, including the Pacific Asia Travel Association’s Gold Award for Best Travel Article and the Society of American Travel Writers Lowell Thomas Award. He appears frequently on NPR, CNN and other TV and radio outlets, is a highly sought-after speaker, and hosts a national series of onstage conversations with prominent writers. Don is also co-founder and chairman of the annual Book Passage Travel Writers and Photographers Conference.
A Moveable Feast
LIFE-CHANGING FOOD ADVENTURES
AROUND THE WORLD
EDITED BY
Don George
LONELY PLANET PUBLICATIONS
Melbourne • Oakland • London
A Moveable Feast:
Life-Changing Food Encounters Around the World
Published by Lonely Planet Publications
Head Office:
90 Maribyrnong Street, Footscray, Vic 3011, Australia
Locked Bag 1, Footscray, Vic 3011, Australia
Branches:
150 Linden Street, Oakland CA 94607, USA
2nd floor, 186 City Rd, London, EC1V 2NT, UK
Published 2010
Edited by Janet Austin
Designed by Christopher Ong
Cover Design by Christopher Brand
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
A moveable feast : life-changing food encounters around the world / edited by Don George.
1st ed.
9781742205960
Food--Guidebooks.
Voyages and travels.
Travelers’ writings.
George, Donald W.
641.3
© Lonely Planet and contributors 2010.
LONELY PLANET and the Lonely Planet logo are trade marks of Lonely Planet Publications Pty. Ltd.
All rights reserved.
Contents
Introduction – Don George
Food on the Hoof – Jan Morris
Daily Bread – Pico Iyer
Communion on Crete – Rhona McAdam
Of Boars, Baskets and Brotherhood – David Downie
Seasoning Jerusalem – Elisabeth Eaves
Couscous and Camaraderie – Anita Breland
Cooking with Donna – William Sertl
Salad Days in Burma – Karen J. Coates
Just What the Doctor Ordered – Alexander Lobrano
The Hair of the Cow – Laurence Mitchell
Siberian Chicken – Anthony Sattin
The Scent of Love – Stanley Stewart
The ’Cue Quest – Doug Mack
Propane and Hot Sauce – Liz MacDonald
A Pilgrimage to El Bulli – Matt Preston
Ode to Old Manhattan – Anthony Bourdain
Dorego’s – Matthew Fort
Tijuana Terroir – Jim Benning
Like Father, Like Son – Andrew Zimmern
Dinner with Dionysus – Henry Shukman
A Feast on Fais – Lawrence Millman
Long Live the King – John T. Newman
Mango Madness – Amanda Jones
Adrift in French Guiana – Mark Kurlansky
Speciality of the House – Simon Winchester
Les Tendances Culinaires – David Lebovitz
Peanut Butter Summer – Emily Matchar
The Ways of Tea – Naomi Duguid
Breakfast Epiphanies – Ruth Rabin
The Potion – Johanna Gohmann
Himalayan Potatoes – Larry Habegger
Chai, Chillum and Chapati – Sean McLachlan
The Icing on the Japanese Cake – Stefan Gates
The Abominable Trekker – Jeff Greenwald
Italy in Seventeen Courses – Laura Fraser
Foraging with Pee – Jeffrey Alford
The Best Meal I Ever Had – Andrew McCarthy
The Rooster’s Head in the Soup – Tim Cahill
Introduction
DON GEORGE
I had ventured way off the beaten track, into a weather-beaten fishing village on a foggy spit of land that slides into the Sea of Japan. Because I spoke Japanese and was the first foreigner who had passed that way in decades, I became the town’s guest of honour, and I was taken with great ceremony to what I gathered was the local equivalent of El Bulli or Chez Panisse.
I was feted with the usual bottomless cups of sake and glasses of beer, and the endless succession of little indescribable delicacies artfully arranged on thimble-sized plates. Then, for a moment, the whole restaurant seemed to pause as a dish was carried regally to the table and set before me. It was a whole fish, arranged with its head and tail twisted to look as if it were still leaping. Its flank had been cut open to reveal thin-cut slices of glisteningly fresh flesh.
All eyes were on me as I picked up my chopsticks and brought them to the fish. I reached in to choose the most savoury-looking slice – and the fish jumped. Thinking this was some bizarre reflex reaction, I reached in again. Again the fish jumped. This was when I looked at the fish’s eye – and realised it was still alive! This was the village’s delicacy: the rawest raw fish in all Japan.
What could I do? Whatever discomfort – piscitarian or gustatory – I was feeling at that point, and however much I identified with that fish, there was no turning back.
On my third try I steeled myself, pincered the desired slice and brought it to my tongue. I closed my eyes, intensely aware that every other eye in the room – including the fish’s – was on me. Suddenly ocean-fresh flavour leapt inside my mouth. My eyes shot open and a rapturous smile lit my face. The entire restaurant burst into cheers and applause.
Travel and food are inseparably intertwined, and sometimes, as in that Japanese restaurant, the lessons their intertwinings confer are complex. But one truth is clear: wherever we go, we need to eat. As a result, when we travel, food inevitably becomes one of our prime fascinations – and pathways into a place. On the road, food nourishes us not only physically, but intellectually, emotionally and spiritually too.
I’ve learned this countless times all around the globe. In fact, many of my finest travel memories revolve around food. The biftek-frites I would always order at the six-table sawdust restaurant around the corner when I lived in Paris the summer after I graduated from college, where the proprietor came to know me so well that he would bring my carafe of vin ordinaire before I could say a word. An endless ouzo-fuelled night of shattered plates and arm-in-arm dancing at a taverna in Athens, and the Easter feast my family was invited to share with a Greek family in the rocky hills of the Peloponnesus, where the host offered me the singular honour of eating the lamb’s eyeballs. The Sachertorte an American couple I met on the train kindly treated me to when we arrived in Vienna. My first fleshy-seedy taste of figs at a market in Istanbul.
I remember a time-stopping afternoon on the sun-dappled terrace at La Colombe d’Or in St-Paul-de-Vence, feasting stomach and soul on dau
rade avec haricots verts and artwork by Matisse, Picasso, Chagall and Miró. I think of a post-wedding sake and sushi celebration on the island of Shikoku, an Ecuadorian version of Thanksgiving with my family on a life-changing expedition in the Galápagos, freeze-dried bœuf bourguignon under the stars on a pine-scented Yosemite night, huachinango grilled with garlic at a seaside restaurant in Zihuatanejo, proffered by the laughing parents at the next table as their children led ours sprinting into the sea and my toes sighed into the sand. So many meals, so many memories.
This book presents a thirty-eight-course feast of such memories, life-changing food adventures, big and small, set around the world. Selected from among hundreds of edifying stories submitted for this anthology, these tales vividly illustrate the many roles food plays in our lives on the road. It can be a gift that enables a traveller to survive, a doorway into the heart of a tribe, or a thread that weaves an indelible tie. It can be a source of frustration or a fount of benediction, the object of a timely quest or the catalyst of a timeless fest. It can be awful or ambrosial – and sometimes both at the same time. Whatever its particular part, in all these cases, and in all these tales, food is an agent of transformation, taking travellers to a deeper and more lasting understanding of and connection with a people, a place and a culture.
As the host of this literary feast, I am delighted that chefs, food critics, poets and travel writers – some of them bestselling, some never published before – are sitting together at this table, spicing the air with their idiosyncratic perspectives, adventures and voices. And I am astonished and humbled by the spectrum of settings, themes and emotions embodied in these tales, robust proof that food offers a plethora of life-enriching gifts on the road, if only our minds and hearts – and stomachs – are open to them.
I am also delighted that, quite unexpectedly, this literary feast has been an agent of transformation in another way for me. As I have been working on this book over the past few months, I have found myself singing in the kitchen as I was preparing a simple salad, exulting without even realising it in the texture, scent and taste of tomato, lettuce, carrot and feta cheese. I have discovered a new-found fascination with the produce section of the local market, hefting cantaloupes and smelling them, relishing the smooth solidity of mushrooms, savouring the nutty tang of kale. I have made a one-hour pilgrimage to pick strawberries straight from the field, and when I eat out, I have been taking the time to taste, really taste, the grilled king salmon, garlic potatoes, and roasted asparagus with truffle oil on my plate. Even at home, I chew more intently and more intensely, and wherever I am, I cherish more mindfully the camaraderie that food convenes.
I hope this humble meal will have the same effect on you.
Food delights us, food unites us, food embodies the soil, the sea and the weather, the farmer’s sweat and the fisherman’s toil. But as these tales and my own edible adventures reveal, food is only part of a feast. Every meal, whether a single mango or a multicourse molecular masterpiece, is really a communing of spirit: just as important are the setting and the situation, the effort, attentiveness and intention that infuse and inform what we share. We feast on the love behind and within the offering, love for a moment, a lesson, a gift, for companions and connections, that will never be repeated and can never be replaced. For me, this revelation has been the last course in this literary bacchanal of risk, embrace and care: the exquisite beauty of the moveable feast is its savoury serendipity – as on that long-ago day in rural Japan, it can leap into your life when you least expect it, anywhere.
Now, let the feast begin. Bon appétit!
Food on the Hoof
JAN MORRIS
Jan Morris, who was born in 1926, is Anglo-Welsh and lives in Wales with her partner, Elizabeth Morris. She has published some forty books of history, travel, biography, memoir and fiction, most notably the ‘Pax Britannica’ trilogy about the British Empire; major studies of Wales, Europe, Venice, Hong Kong, Sydney and Trieste; the historical fantasy Hav and the autobiographical Conundrum.
I am a shamefacedly self-centred and often blinkered writer. Although, in the course of a long travelling life, I must have eaten several hundred thousand meals on the hoof, I have never taken food very seriously or bothered to consider the seminal contributions it has made to every aspect of history down the ages. From mammoth meat to foie gras, from the composition of Elizabethan banquet madrigals to the strategies of blockading navies, from rocket rations to genetically modified cereals – I have ignored them all.
Too late to change! Food’s contribution to my historical or aesthetic thinking remains minimal to this day. But, of course, there are some foods that I decidedly prefer to others. Life without bitter Seville orange marmalade would not be worth living, but torturers could not make me eat another forkful of the Lithuanian delicacy called a capelinas, which is made of potato dough soaked in bacon fat, with a sausage in the middle. By and large, however, it is not the edible ingredients of travelling food that I remember, for better or for worse, but the circumstances in which I ate them.
Like most of us, I enjoy eating while actually in motion. An Indian curry is best of all when it has been thrust urgently through your compartment window at Hooghly Station the very moment before your great train leaves for Mumbai, and I remember with intense pleasure gobbling a pot of self-heating noodles on a lurching sampan on a wet and dismal dawn en voyage from Hong Kong Island to Tai Po in the New Territories. When I boarded the last frail remnant of the original Orient Express, in the absence of a restaurant car I was delighted to be handed a paper bag containing an apple, a hunk of cheese and a half-bottle of excellent white wine – what could be a better munch while we laboured across Europe?
On the other hand, eating en avion has generally been a disappointment to me, especially when, in more spacious times, I used to travel first class. This was chiefly because of the ridiculous hyperbole of airline menus, the preposterous sham Frenchness of them, the absurd lists of celebrated chefs who were alleged to have selected the ingredients, and the gigantic menu cards, like nightmare wedding invitations, which you were obliged, with extreme difficulty, to extract from among your magazines and Duty Free catalogues when a supercilious stewardess suddenly turned up and demanded your choice.
I do make an exception, though, for meals on the short-lived Concorde, during the brief heyday of its service between London and New York. Who could honestly complain about poached apple chatelaine (a whole apple filled with redcurrant jelly and coated with kirsch and cream) or a wine list that numbered five champagnes, six burgundies and half a dozen clarets, to be enjoyed as the cabin speedometer gently told you that you were now travelling faster than the speed of sound?
Often it is the place that bewitches me, far more than the food. For example, the food is marvellous at the Grand Hotel in Stockholm, but it doesn’t compare with the welcome of the setting when I check in on a summer evening and toddle down for a jet-lagged early supper on the hotel terrace. All around me, the spires and jagged rooftops of the old city are silhouetted against the twilight – the little steamers puff by, the royal palace looks stately over the water, scores of flags are still bravely flying, and as I hear the slapping of their ropes against their flagstaffs, and breathe in the cool clear air of the North, I hardly bother to notice when my victuals arrive.
In any case, simplicity is my criterion of good food on the hoof. I love to stop off for a snack at one of the tumultuous outdoor marketplaces of Asia, anywhere east of Suez. In Hong Kong there used to be such a place bang in the centre of the city waterfront, not a hundred yards from one of the grand hotels. It would amuse me, as I sat on a bench amidst the market hubbub, eating some delightfully organic sustenance, to think that just over the way I might be having a crab soup not half as good as mine, and ten times as expensive.
O, simplicity’s the thing, plus serendipity! ‘Here, try one,’ cried a cheerful girl to me, passing by in the back of an open truck among the orchards of Andalucía, and the kumquat
she threw me, I swear, was the food of Paradise – along with baked potatoes from an open fire among the Sherpas, or the raw fresh herrings sold as snacks in the coastal streets of Holland, or Dungeness crabs among the tourists at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, or the fried whitebait they have been serving for a couple of centuries at the Trafalgar Tavern beside the Thames at Greenwich, or blinis somewhere off Nevsky Prospekt, or big juicy asparagus fresh from a Lüneburg garden, or oysters on a trestle table down the road from Galway, or Guinness and prawns beside the sea in the Isle of Man, or classic fish and chips, the real thing, at Harry Ramsden’s at Guiseley in Yorkshire, where they will give you a free pudding if you manage to get through the mammoth platter called Harry’s Challenge …
Simple foods every one, the food of the countries I’m passing through. The very best meal I ever eat – and I have eaten it a hundred times – is simple food served with extreme sophistication. They serve it at Harry’s Bar in Venice, which I have frequented since the end of the Second World War, when it used to be cooked by the proprietor’s wife, Signora Cipriani. Now in her honour they call it Scampi Thermidor alla Cipriani, and it consists of prawn tails cooked in oil under a parmesan-flavoured sauce, with a little green salad and a rice pilaf on the side. I have a glass or two of the local pinot grigio, and if I ask nicely they might do me a warm zabaglione to polish it off.
Travel the world over, from the Ritz to McDonald’s to a street-stall in Chiang Mai, and you won’t do better than that.
Daily Bread
PICO IYER
Pico Iyer is the author of many books of travel, among them Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk and The Global Soul. A gourmand of experience, he prefers to consume the entire world, and not just its meals and its restaurants.
The quiche is as soft as hope itself, and the long spears of asparagus are so elegant on the plate that to pick one up feels like messing with the symmetry of a Klee. There are bowls of lettuce in our midst, and the chunky vegetable soup alone would make for a hearty meal. Bottles of salad dressing crowd the blond-wood table, large enough for six of us, while early-spring sunlight streams into the window-filled refectory, so that it feels as if we’re tasting radiance and taking a long draught of the sun.
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