Bizarre foods: European “delicacies,” by country

by Laurel Miller on

What constitutes “food” is relative, depending upon what part of the world you call home. In Asia, pretty much anything on no (snakes), two, four, six, or eight legs is up for grabs. Europe, however, has its own culinary oddities, as detailed below. Got maggots?

Iceland
Hákarl: Fermented, dried Greenland or basking shark. This tasty treat is prepared by burying the beheaded and gutted shark in a shallow hole in the ground for six to 12 weeks. Unsurprisingly, the end result is considered noxious to pretty much everyone on the planet aside from Icelanders.

Norway
Smalahove: Boiled lamb’s head, traditionally served at Christmas. The brain is removed, and the head salted and dried before boiling. Because they’re the fattiest bits, the ear and eye are eaten first. More fun than a wishbone.

Sardinia (yes, it’s in Italy, but this one deserved its own listing)
Casu marzu: This sheep’s milk cheese has maggots added to it during ripening, because their digestive action creates an “advanced level” of fermentation (also known as “decomposition”). Some people prefer to eat the soupy results sans critters, while the stout of heart go for the whole package. Be forewarned: according to Wikipedia, irate maggots can propel themselves for distances up to six inches. Here’s fly in your eye.

Northern Sweden or Finland
Lappkok: This charmingly-named concoction consists of blodpalt–a dumpling made with reindeer blood and wheat or rye flour–served with reindeer bone marrow. Well, Santa’s herd had to retire sometime.

[Photo credit: Flickr user fjords]

Sweden
Lutefisk: This dried whitefish treated with lye is beloved by Scandinavians and their American Midwestern ancestors (let’s just say it’s an acquired taste). It’s traditionally served with potatoes or other root vegetables, gravy or white sauce, and akvavit.

Scotland
Haggis: Who doesn’t love a cooked sheep’s stomach stuffed with its lungs, heart, and liver, combined with oatmeal?

Poland
Nozki: Literally “cold feet,” this dish of jellied pig’s trotters isn’t as repulsive as it sounds. The meat is simmered with herbs and spices until falling off the bone, and set in gelatin. Think of how much fun this would be as a Jello shooter.

Ukraine
Salo: The cured fatback of pork is actually quite delicious, and similar to Italian lardo when seasoned. It’s chopped and used as a condiment, or eaten straight-up on bread. Plan your angioplasty accordingly.

England/Ireland
Black (or blood) pudding: Technically a sausage, this mixture of animal blood (usually pork), spices, fat, and oatmeal or other grains is surprisingly good. It’s served uncooked, fried, grilled, or boiled. Sound bad? At least it’s not called Spotted Dick.

Italy
Stracotto d’asino: A northern Italian donkey stew, often served as a pasta sauce. Donkey and horse are eaten throughout Italy, but this particular dish is a specialty of Veneto, and Mantua, in Lombardy.

France
Tête de veau: You have to love that the venerable French culinary bible, Larousse Gastronomique, describes this dish of boiled calf’s head as, “a gelatinous variety of white offal.” Mmm. While there are many different preparations for the classical dish, it was traditionally served with cocks’ combs and kidneys, calves sweetbreads, and mushrooms.

Eastern Europe
P’tcha: A calves’ foot jelly enjoyed by Ashkenazi Jews throughout this part of Europe. It’s uh, high in protein.

Germany
Zungenwurst: This sausage is made of pork blood and rind; pickled ox tongue, and a grain filler, such as barley. It’s available dried, or can be browned in butter or bacon fat before eating. And bacon makes everything better.

Netherlands
Paardenrookvlees: Culinarily-speaking, the Dutch usually cop grief for their proclivity for pickled herring and eating mayonnaise on their french fries. That’s because most Americans don’t know this smoked horse meat is a popular sandwich filling. Trust me: Seabiscuit tastes pretty good.

Greece
Kokoretsi: Lamb or goat intestines wrapped around seasoned offal (lungs, hearts, sweetbreads, kidneys), threaded onto a skewer, and cooked on a spit. You know what’s good with grilled meat? Meat.

[Photo credits: black pudding, Flickr user quimby;lutefisk, Flickr user adam_d_; kokoretsi, Flickr user Georgio Karamanis]


Top 20 travel destinations – The 2011 Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Report

by Justin Delaney on

Every couple of years, the World Economic Forum crunches a bunch of numbers and releases a list of the top countries in the world to visit. While ranking 139 countries, they measure aspects such as pricing, culture, environmental protection, safety, and infrastructure. For the 2011 report, Switzerland remained at the number one spot – the returning champion from the last report in 2009. Nine out of the bottom ten countries are located in Africa, and seven out of the top ten are located in Europe. Chad ranked in at 139 out of 139. Italy, one of the most visited countries in the world, placed 27th. For the full list, download the PDF at the World Economic Forum website under the ‘reports’ tab.

20. Norway
19. New Zealand
18. Portugal
17. Finland
16. Denmark
15. Luxembourg
14. Netherlands
13. Australia
12. Hong Kong
11. Iceland
10. Singapore9. Canada
8. Spain
7. United Kingdom
6. United States
5. Sweden
4. Austria
3. France
2. Germany
1. Switzerland

flickr image via jeffwilcox

Love Boat captain cruises to 80th birthday, at sea of course

by Chris Owen on

On one of television’s longest running shows he was Captain Merrill Stubing of The Love Boat, cruising through 10 seasons from 1977 to 1986. Gavin MacLeod celebrated his 80th birthday this week along with friends, family and crew members aboard Princess Cruises Golden Princess in Los Angeles.

While the show stopped production in 1986, MacLeod has been “at sea” as Princess Cruises spokesperson. This year marks his 25th anniversary with the line and fans still gather wherever he may be appearing. Still in syndication in 92 countries worldwide, The Love Boat has generated what one expert estimates at over $3 billion in sales for the cruise industry.But my how far things have come since kindly Captain Stubing and the gang rode the high seas on national television. The 20,636 ton Pacific Princess that sailed for Princess Cruises between 1975 and 2002 carried 646 passengers and was seen as seen as one of the latest and greatest of ships, setting the table for a feast of unprecedented growth in the cruise industry.

Today’s latest and greatest ships are easily ten times larger carrying close to ten times more passengers. You can bet that if Captain Merril Stubing was in command, he would know every one of their names too. Happy Birthday Gavin.

Schengen and the disappearance of European passport stamps

by Alex Robertson Textor on


Creative new use for border crossing posts at German/Austrian border.

In the late 1980s, an American spending a summer traveling across Europe with a Eurailpass would see his or her passport stamped possibly dozens of times. With a few exceptions, every time a border was crossed, an immigration agent would pop his or her head into a train compartment, look at everyone’s passports, in most cases stamp them, and move on. Every Eastern Bloc country required visas, some of which could be obtained at the border and others of which had to be applied for in advance.

Today, an American can enter the Schengen zone in Helsinki, fly to Oslo and then on to Amsterdam, proceed by train through Belgium, France, Italy, Slovenia, Austria, Hungary, Slovakia and Poland, then by bus to Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, and then by ferry back to Helsinki before catching a flight to Athens and landing in Greece without once needing to submit a passport to a border guard’s scrutiny.

The development of the Schengen agreement across Europe has altered the geopolitical map of the continent in many ways. For tourists, the development of the Schengen zone has simplified travel by drastically reducing the number of times a passport can be checked and stamped as national borders are crossed.

The Schengen Agreement is named after the town of Schengen in Luxembourg. It was here in 1985 that five countries-Luxembourg, Belgium, the Netherlands, West Germany, and France-signed an agreement to essentially create borderless travel between them. A model for this agreement had been created years before by the Benelux countries (Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg), which eliminated border controls back in 1948. The Nordic countries also did away with internal border posts, in 1958.

In 1995, the five original Schengen countries plus Portugal and Spain inaugurated the zone. In 1997, Austria and Italy joined. Greece followed in 2000 and the five Nordic countries joined in 2001. In late 2007, nine more countries joined the Schengen zone; most recently, Switzerland signed up in 2008.


Abandoned border crossing between Slovakia and Hungary.

Today, 22 European countries are part of Schengen. Every European Union country (save the UK, Ireland, Bulgaria, Romania, and Cyprus) belongs. Other members include EU holdouts Iceland, Norway, and Switzerland. The European microstates present a few complications. Monaco’s borders are administered by France, which makes the tiny principality a part of Schengen, while Liechtenstein’s accession, approved by the European Parliament in February, is pending. San Marino and the Vatican are de facto versus official members, while mountainous, landlocked Andorra remains outside of the zone altogether.

There are five EU countries not currently part of the Schengen zone. The UK and Ireland (as well as the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands) operate a Schengen-like agreement called the Common Travel Area. Neither country is obligated to join the zone.

Romania, Bulgaria, and Cyprus, however, are all bound by treaty to eventually join. Romania has fulfilled all the criteria for joining Schengen and Bulgaria is close to fulfillment as well. These two countries will accede together, likely later this year. Cyprus presents a more complicated situation given the division of the island between the Republic of Cyprus in the south and the largely unrecognized Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus in the north.

With the coming accession of the Western Balkans to the European Union, the Schengen zone will almost definitely continue to grow. Might it one day cover the entire landmass of Europe? Check back in two decades.

[Images: top image Flickr | Mike Knell; middle image Flickr | jczart]

Where They Ate in 2010, Part II: The Ensnackening

by David Farley on

A couple weeks ago, Gadling published a large-portioned round-up of where authors, eaters, travel and food writers had their most memorable eating experiences in 2010. It was such a popular feature, I couldn’t help but ask for seconds. After all, consuming a list of memorable eats with the eyes is about the next best thing to devouring it with our mouths.

I put out the call to some more of my favorite food-loving writers and got just as tremendous and exciting a response as the original round-up.

So, without further adieu, in no particular order, here is the sequel: where they ate in 2010, part II: the ensnackening.


• J. Maarten Troost
Author of The Sex Lives of Cannibals, Getting Stoned with Savages, and Lost on Planet China

–Roast chicken in Amritsar, India. I had just spent a week balancing my chakras in an ashram in northern India (think lentils three times a day), and so to suddenly have before me a succulent chicken prepared in the Punjabi manner… well, I dont think I’ve ever enjoyed eating a sentient creature as much as I did that day in Amritsar.

–Far Western Tavern, Guadelupe, California. Continuing with the meathead theme, I tend to appreciate meals that reflect a sense of place. Now imagine a place where early-20th-century Wyoming seamlessly transitions into modern Mexico, toss in a dash of the surreal (the movie set of Cecil DeMille’s epic Ten Commandments is buried in the nearby sand dunes), and what you have is the Far Western Tavern, complete with cow hides, pinquito beans, and epic steaks.

–Emergency Cioppino. Last Christmas, my 84-year-old grandmother graced us with a visit. She is an excellent chef. She is also Czech. For the Christmas Eve meal, I’d decided to showcase my own culinary chops by preparing a goose. My grandmother thought this would make for an

excellent meal. Pleased, I set up doing the prep work as my grandmother offered helpful tips. “I think you’re going to like this, “I’d said with a hopeful smile. “Oh, I won’t be eating this,” she
replied as she measured the carraway seeds. “You know that Czechs only eat fish on Christmas Eve.” Long silence, followed by a mad dash to the commercial wharf in Monterey where I vacuumed the contents out of the industrial fridges and fish tanks, rushed back home and made, if I do say so myself, a mighty fine Christmas Eve cioppino. Indeed, it was so yummy that we’ve decided to make it again this Christmas.

• Michael Bauer


I have three new places worth talking about.
–Prospect that offers high style food in high style surroundings at reasonable prices. It’s the first Nancy Oakes of Boulevard spinoff. The chef is Ravi Kapur who has been cooking with her for eight years and adds his own unique style to the American-inspired menu that includes black cod with shrimp fritters wrapped in shish oleaves and deepfired, arranged next to a pile of greens flecked with paper thin slices of snap peans and button size shiitakes.
–Commonwealth: Jason Fox cooks exceptional food like you’d find at a white tablecloth restaurant in a much more modest storefront in the Mission. He dehydrates cauliflower floret slices to crown his lamb cheeks which seasoned with Douglas fir and combines squid and pork belly and rests them on egg salad with tiny, crisp potato croutons and an herb vinaigrette.
–Bar Agricole: This represents a new genre of restaurants in San Francisco. While the focus is on the bar–they even have five kinds of ice depending on the type of cocktail you want–the food produced by Brandon Jew is just as good and pristinely selected. He drapes tissue-like strips of lardo around thin coins of radiches and black coco nero beans, and for main courses he may roast sand dabs, filleted tableside and served with brown butter and purslane.

• Lisa Abend

Food and travel writer, author of The Sorcerer’s Apprentices: A Season in the Kitchen at Ferran Adrià’s ElBulli; twitterista.

–I got to participate in Cook It Raw’s grand adventure to Lapland. The event’s organizers, Alessandro Porcelli and Andrea Petrini, put a bunch of us professional eaters and thirteen of the most exciting chefs in the world-including René Redzepi, Albert Adrià, Petter Nilsson, and Yoshihiro Narasawa-on a night train to northern Finland. Once we arrived in Lapland, the chefs foraged and fished, then created two multi-course meals with what they found. There was a lot of reindeer on the menu (tongues sous-vided on the bathroom floor of Massimo Bottura’s room; blood splattered over ices and stirred into sauces), and enough lichen to open a terrarium store. But it was one of those magical experiences that reminds you of what food can do.

–In May, Dan Barber and I had dinner at Aponiente, Angel León’s restaurant in Puerto de Santa Maria, on Spain’s southern coast. In addition to being an excellent chef who is doing really interesting things with seafood, Angel is a creative and passionate activist for sustainable fishing. So he and Dan had a lot to talk about. Between courses-rice tinted green with plankton and tasting profoundly of the sea, a fantastic filet of horse mackeral (a fish often considered by-catch in Spain) that got its pop (literally) from roe and preserved lemons)-they swapped stories and traded ideas for future projects. Eating this delicious meal while listening to these two great advocates for the sea and the land talk about how to change the world was incredibly inspiring. By the end we were all just beaming at each other.
–I had the great good fortune to eat at elBulli twice this year. Don’t hate me.

• Derk Richardson

Senior editor, Afar magazine; freelance music and food writer; music radio host; twitterer.

–One of my favorite meals of any year has always been the February Whole Hog Dinner at Oliveto in Oakland. Once I spent three hours in the kitchen, with chef Paul Canales feeding me tastes of everything from blood pudding to fresh sausage made that moment. This year I was sent to heaven by the Tofeja del Canavese, a mixed grill of Piedmontese peasant braise of pork shoulder, little cotechino sausages, wild boar spare ribs, and pork skin rollatini with Borlotti beans. The dinner was made that much sweeter by my wife surreptitiously inviting four neighbor couples and my sister and brother-in-law for a one-week-early birthday surprise; and by the fact that it turned out to be Canales’ last Whole Hog-he left Oliveto in early December.
–Within six weeks of Daniel (Coi) Patterson opening Plum in Oakland, we ate their twice and tried almost everything on the 21-item menu, and I’ll be damned if I can decide what blew my mind the most: The mousse-like artichoke terrine, with fresh cheese, chervil and black olive vinaigrette? The dreamy turnip-apple-miso soup with pepper cream and shiso? The delicate mushroom dashi with yuba, tofu and greens? Oh, wait, give me more of those crunchy potato “chicharrones”!
–In early December we spent our last day in Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City doing an unforgettable, probably unreplicable street-food tour under the wing of expat chef Geoffrey Deetz. It culminated on an alley deep in District 5 with tamarind crab. I can still conjure the taste. Fresh live crabs get delivered every few hours from the market. An assistant cleans and chops and tosses them into the wok for the cook who has heated up a fresh batch of pork-fat oil (with crispy bits of meat). He tosses with garlic, steams the crabs a few minutes, adds tamarind, sugar, salt, and pepper. Stirs. Tastes and tweaks. Cooks a couple more minutes. Piles it on a platter. Serves it with loaves of Vietnamese baguette (the bánh mì bread). Dig into the crab, sop up the sauce with bread, wash it down with a cold beer.
• David Grann
New Yorker staff writer; author of The Lost City of Z and The Devil and Sherlock Holmes

With two young kids in tow I find myself eating at their favorite spots. And one of them is Walters Hot Dog Stand, in Mamaroneck, New York, which justly attracts customers from all over. When I was with my wife in London, we made our ritual trek to Amaya Bar and Grill. It’s not cheap, but the Indian food is sensational. And, finally, I’ve spent a lot of time travelling this year in Central America, which means I get to eat plenty of my favorite food: homemade corn tortillas from the local markets.

• Camille Ford
Star of the Travel Channel’s Food Wars and Best Places Ever

Hi… My name is Camille. I’m a food addict.

Pungent cheese, raw fish, exotic fruits, and plates of spiced alchemy are just a sampling of what occupies most of my daily motivation. 2010 has fed my obsession (pun intended).

2010 has been a year of deliciousness and the list topper, the one item that has sent me on four-hour drives to the Italian market in Philidelphia, and sketchy Yonkers fridge raids is Tartufata ” ucamorganti”: dark chocolate spread infused with white truffle oils. Handmade in Florence, Italy, it has put my day to day eating in a tailspin. Nothing compared this year to the texture, taste, and lingering effects of such a sensual ingredient.

• Ryan Sutton
Restaurant critic for Bloomberg News; twitterer

When I started planning my visit to Las Vegas’ CityCenter, Adrienne, one of my closest friends, an avid foodie from Sin City, promised to be my date. That was in the summer of 2009. I arrived in January of 2010, approximately 3 months after Adrienne, in a hospital not too far from the Strip, died from cancer. She was 22. Her mother joined me in her stead for my first meal. (Adrienne was a Mina fan). It was a tough meal. But the food helped. Mina got some flack for flying in Hawaiian ocean water to poach his fish, but hey, is it any different from drinking Fiji in a bottle? The cocktails helped too. They always do. Mina put a legit guy in charge of the beverage program; they even make their own lime cordial (which makes for a solid gimlet). I spent much of my 7-day Vegas trip alone. Vegas wasn’t a party that week. It was quieter, stranger, yet very human and very beautiful city. I would often end my night at American Fish, often with a single drink. It certainly wasn’t the best Vegas restaurant I visited (that was Guy Savoy), but maybe because of that first meal with Adrienne’s mom, it’s where I felt most at home.

• Alain Gayot

Editor in Chief of Gayot.com

Blended in the fancy gastronomic experiences it’s always interesting to discover a pleasing hole in the wall. Above all, a surprise always wins points. This year, in my journeys I had a fresh and flavorful ceviche at a modern restaurant called Red Crab, located in a posh neighborhood in Guayaquil, Ecuador. Served with large roasted corn kernels and chips of plantain of various kinds.

• John Mariani

Food and travel correspondent for Esquire; wine columnist for Bloomberg News.

–The chances of my ever becoming a vegan are about as good as Dick Cheney running a triathalon. So when I heard that Chef Sean Baker of Gather in Berkeley had a vegan section on his menu, along with banquettes made out of cast-off leather belts, I clenched my teeth in anticipation of an evening of groaning rhetoric and floppy headed waitresses wearing “Hug a Chicken” t-shirts and Vedic mantra tattoos. It turns out, fifty percent of the menu also had tantalizing dishes like grilled petrale sole, a burger with Sierra Nevada cheese and fries, and one of the best pizzas I’ve had in ages, with guanciale ham, roasted corn, jalapeño, ricotta, and mozzarella-dishes to put vegans into a rage. I couldn’t have eaten better.
–It is assumed that you can get anything you want in NYC’s Italian restaurants, but in fact, few actually commit to a menu of food from a specific region, instead offering a pan-Italian menu with a few special dishes from Campania or Liguria or Tuscany. So the emergence of Testaccio, named after the eighth hill of Rome, which is really a mound of ancient broken wine amphoras (testae), as the only true Roman trattoria in NYC is absolutely wonderful news. Located in Long Island City, Queens, the restaurant’s menu includes one of the best, crispiest renditions of carciofi alla giudea–fried baby artichokes–you’ll ever taste. All the pastas I tasted were outstanding, from the simplest, tagliolini cacio e pepe, graced with nothing more than cheese and black pepper, to bucatini all’amatriciana, sweet with tomato, onions, and guanciale.

• David Farley


–In January I spent two weeks in Vietnam, first eating my way through Saigon, and then flying up to Hoi An to travel back down the coast until flying back to New York. My first revelatory meal in Saigon was at Pho Quynh, a corner restaurant adhering to the steel table and tile floor variety of decorating. The main dish was pho bo kho, a stewy, opaque version of pho that felt almost like goulash and pho had collided. I first had it for breakfast and I savored every bite. The broth was thick and rich and bobbing with fork-tender chunks of beef and carrots and the occasional tendon. I went back the next morning. Later, in Hoi An, I sat down at an alleyway eater for the city’s famed dish, cao lau, a porklicous bowl of rice noodles, chunks of pig, mint, and basil. This time I didn’t even wait until the next day to have it again. I ordered seconds right there on the spot.
–In February I was in La Paz, Bolivia. Maybe it was altitude sickness but I was rather underwhelmed by the food prospects there. That is, until I discovered llama meat. Dark and a bit gamey with that slight organ meat taste, llama meat was served two ways in La Paz: grilled and breaded, of which I preferred the former. I liked llama meat so much, I tried (unsuccessfully) finding it in New York.
–In April I went to Oakland to write an article about new and noteworthy restaurants that have opened up in the East Bay city recently. I was totally blown away by Commis. Chef James Syhabout, who has worked at ElBulli and the Fat Duck, is masterful pairing flavors and textures.