Category: Odd Bits

The local recycling station as well as the local food coop both have shelves dedicated for books people can drop off or pick up if they want. It’s a good way to acquire a book free of charge to add to your collection or return to the discard shelf if it doesn’t pass muster. I have gotten a pretty good number of free books to add to my collection in this way. The latest one I picked up is titled The Curiosities Of Food or The Dainties and Delicacies of Different Nations Obtained from the Animal Kingdom by Peter Lund Simmonds. As can probably be surmised from the long title, this was a reprint of a book originally published in 1850.

The book makes for surprisingly droll reading. The author compiles an exhaustive list of all the different types of food; birds, reptiles, mammals, fish, mollusks and even insects from all over the world (as it was in his time) along with how they are cooked (or not). With a certain amount of dry humor he describes the preparation of certain dishes by locals and leaves it to you to decide if it’s actually something you want to try or not.

One anecdote he collected from someone who had gone to China described the unusual presentation of a covered dish, unusual because dishes were usually served uncovered at Chinese meals. The dish, when the lid was quickly removed, proved to contain dozens and dozens of live baby crabs which proceeded to make their escape while guests snatched them up and devoured them. The visiting gentleman was game enough to grab a few, pronouncing them ‘soft and gelatinous’ (but didn’t indicate if they tasted any good) but stopped when he got a painful claw pinch on his lip from the third. I’ll pass.

After coming across such disconcerting entries as how delicious Passenger Pigeons are and that South Africans occasionally dined on quagga steaks, I moved onto the section covering fish and came across a reference to isinglass. While I had heard the word before, I had just assumed it was some sort of glassware. Turns out, it’s actually a product made from fish.

Isinglass is a substance created from the dried swim bladders of fish. A form of collagen, it can be used as glue, but also as a clarifying agent in wine and beer. Once processed, it has no fishy flavor (which is why your beer doesn’t taste fishy) and has been used for thousands of years. In Roman times, it was used as an ingredient in patching up head wounds and street magicians would coat their feet with it before doing their fire-walking tricks. In the Middle Ages, it was used to help gold dust adhere to manuscripts being illuminated.

Vegans may wail about dried swim bladders from fish in their beer but there are alternatives, of course. Whether they are a tasty substitute or not, I’m not able to judge as I don’t drink. But that’s just a personal choice which has nothing to do with obsessing about possible animal bits in any of my food. In fact, if you read some of the information online, there’s actually not much of anything that’s totally free of insect contamination, especially with the vast amount of food processing done by agribusinesses. Read too much of this stuff and you’re likely to wind up not eating much of anything. Ignorance really is bliss in this case.

Still after reading Mr. Simmonds book, it’s apparent humans will eat pretty much anything that doesn’t eat them first. No matter what we pop into our mouths, adding extra flavor to our cuisine is important. Salt, herbs, spices, sauces, gravies get added in varying amounts to perk up a meal. In ancient Rome and around the Mediterranean, the flavoring of choice was something called garum. This is a fermented sauce made from fish parts. The production of the sauce was a reeky process, causing its makers to be banished to the edges of cities but once the sauce finished its fermentation process, its flavor became subtle and mild (and presumably not as reeky). Enthusiatically embraced by most Romans, it occupied much the same place in cookery that garlic does today.

Frankly I think I’ll pass on both but I’m probably just being fussy.

A condiment that my mother’s father was fond of was horseradish. He grew it himself and ground it up to serve as a little side dish for himself at dinnertime (no one else was willing to touch the stuff apparently). This turned out to be a recipe for disaster (of a minor sort). My grandmother was in the habit of serving mashed potatoes in a side dish as well instead of directly on the plate. One fine day my grandfather was lecturing the kids about something and eating mashed potato while he did so. My mother says at one point he mistakenly took a heaping spoonful of horseradish instead of potato. The kids all watched in fascination while he did this, no one shouting a warning to poor old Granddad. Of course, there was the inevitable explosion (*@#&, Why didn’t somebody say something?). I smell payback here somewhere, I think.

That’s all for this month. Bon Appetit!