I looked at my newly purchased packet of creamy Gorgonzola this afternoon and it had a number ‘5’ on it. Presumably this is to tell you it is a strong cheese, just in case you mistakenly thought it was coconut ice with some blue ripples in it. Is the ‘5’ labeling another EU regulation?
So on that note and in the spirit of Christmas, I thought I would write about weird foods rather than lots of heavy “let’s all commit suicide now” political stuff.
Who would actually buy Gorgonzola if they had not grown up eating it? It’s actually quite a bizarre taste if one thinks about it and lots of non Europeans find the whole idea of strong, wiffy cheeses quite awful. If a Tibetan goat herder was given it and told it was sweet, they would probably retch or vomit with shock after tasting it, rather like the average Americans’ reaction to marmite.
Their reaction would probably not be much different from mine when, five months pregnant and finding myself halfway up a freezing Himalayan mountain at 10,000 feet in the middle of winter, I was given a cup of hot tea. It was worse than ‘quelle horreur’ – it was literally ‘where is the nearest bucket’. It was hot. It was strong. It was greasy from the little globules of Nak’s butter floating around on the top. (For clarifications sake, there is no such thing as Yak’s cheese or Yak’s butter. A Yak is a male, a Nak is a female Yak.)
No, it was not the grease that made me decidedly queasy although that was bad enough. It was the shock of the salt . Not a pinch of salt but a whole desert spoon in a cup. One could not think of a better emetic.
Salt and butter tea is a staple of Tibetans and Sherpa’s and like most awful tasting things is supposed to have lots of wonderful health qualities.
Staying in that part of the world, one of the most remarkable things I have ever tasted is ‘timbu’.
It is one of the few things you cannot find when googling and I have no idea what the biological name is. It is a berry from a Himalayan bush used to flavour meats and stews. Even in a stew it is rather piquant and creates a highly unique flavour but this is nothing compared to what happens when you put a piece in your mouth uncooked. First you get a sharp, extremely unpleasant tingling. Shortly afterwards you lose all feeling in your tongue and eventually your entire mouth disappears and stays like it for a good half an hour.
Of course, no doubt it is another of those things like ‘Horny Goat weed’, otherwise known as Macca, that has ‘loads’ of unique properties for herbal heath officianadoes.
The real viagra of the Himalayas is yarsagumba (a fungus) which sells for around $120,000 a kilo and creates a supposed $11 billion dollar industry from people scuttling around freezing forests looking for the stuff. It literally means ‘summer grass, winter worm.’ I am not sure this would be classified as food, technically, but it is certainly eaten for pleasure (see here).
Changing continents, one of the oddest textured foods I have ever encountered is injera, made from the staple grain of Ethiopia, the teff. It is a type of bread, eaten universally with almost every meal. There are two things that make it so odd. The first is the sheer size – they are often a couple of feet wide, enormous flat, wavy, thin things, the colour of a bit of old cow hide. The real oddity is the texture. Injera are full of holes so the whole thing becomes a bit rubbery, so you end up eating something quite unlike anything you have ever had before, think of one of those old shammy leathers for window cleaning. It tastes similar to your shammy leather too.
A lot of people will have eaten the odd bit of snake, an eel or two (another of those foods with a rather odd texture), a bit of pigs trotter, some chicken feet, the odd fried cockroach and various animals eyes or male genitalia – and what fun it is boasting at dinner parties over such feats!
But the really awful thing about a lot of worldwide food is not about these adventurous or weird tastes but just how boring and bland most people’s diets are. White pappy bread and potatoes in Britain are replaced by equally boring things elsewhere. White rice with a thin gruel of watery red lentil dal is the staple of Nepal named Dal Bhat – and dull it is after the fiftieth meal in a row of it.
I took a Sherpa from a mountain village to an expensive restaurant and guess what he chose, Dal Bhat – the same meal that he had eaten for lunch and dinner all week and probably everyday for his entire life. In Lidl today, the cashier said whilst scanning Lidl’s rather cheap version of caviar, ‘I haven’t tried it but I wouldn’t like it.’
It seems a particular feature of the working class of all countries to have highly parochial and conservative tastes when it comes to food.
Does this inability to try new things, even when the opportunity presents itself, contribute to their inability to move upwards in their respective societies? Opportunity always rewards the inquisitive and the brave.
On that thought, I wish everyone a happy Christmas and enjoy your pigs in blankets, toad in the hole, faggots or whatever other British delicacy you are partaking off!
People say eating insects is the future. Are prawns not bugs that live in the sea? We happily eat them.
How can you brew tea at 10,000 feet? We couldn’t make a decent cup in our 12th floor flat in Johannesburg and that was only 6,000 feet.
People live in permanent villages at that height and above.
Here is a link to the capital of the Sherpa’s at 11,300. There are villages well above that in some of the higher valley’s,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namche_Bazaar
Are you all trying to explain why immigrants want to leave, and come here or
Are you saying we should adopt these foods to make them feel at home,. Or what , cause I’ve spent valuable time reading it all
Or is this some wierd introduction to economics.
Oh and by the way,
Good to see you back.
Or is it a Eats shoots and leaves joke
My takeaway is that the chances of refining your raw material into a chateau d’Yquem or a Spem in Allium are quite low, and you’ll probably find you made the world much worse by inventing Irn Bru or gangsta rap instead. Or the ECJ. Therefore stay well away from all creative activities and people, shut the art schools and kill the restaurant critics.
Happy Christmas everyone.
Thank you Catherine, and a happy Christmas to you too. Let’s hope 2019 brings us the freedom from the EU that we all hope for.
And a very Happy Christmas to you Catherine.
As a New Year gift, what would persuade you to join UKIP and become a Parliamentary Candidate?
Can I nominate Kevin Baverstock as most humourous writer of the year?, I still haven’t stopped laughing since I spilled soup all over my trousers whilst reading it!!!!. Keith Stevens.
I don’t know why this article about food in exotic places made me think of the worst job I ever had, which I did on this very day at Christmas many years ago when I was working on a Kibbutz just 5 miles from Gaza, but it did….
All the Christians had Christmas day as a free day off but that was it, however the Israelis were offering an unheard of bonus of two extra days off on top of normal for 10 volunteers to do a night shift in the poultry houses. Good idea, I thought…count me in….The first job was to catch 10,000 birds, cage them and put them on giant trucks to be taken off for slaughter…. That was fowl enough but the next job was what they were really bribing us for. … All the new chickens had to be vaccinated and then protected against some other dreadful insect thing that attacked chickens in the houses.
One had to catch the young chicken, turn it gently upside down, and your fellow chickeneer would dip a needle in vaccine and prod it into a specific place on the wing one was extending… Not so bad you are thinking, but then one had to lift the tail feathers , dip a thick paintbrush in some thin liquid and paint a large red X on the chicken’s arsehole.
Painting X’s on chickens arseholes invariably makes the animals park their breakfast all over the painters hands and feet. After doing this about 2000 times I looked like I had been having a pillow-fight in the sand tray of a neglected budgie’s cage….
But I got the next 3 days off….
The three foods I have been offered abroad which I just had to decline, two on sight and one after tasting were Balut, which are duck foetuses eaten boiled from the shell (Indonesia), Fried chicken foetuses in batter (Saudi Arabia) and Andouillette , which is a type of French sausage made out of the rectum of a pig. I actually took a bite of the latter and ran immediately to a toilet retching violently.
Nope… None of that for me, I much prefer Lebanese sheeps’ testicles….but never raw….