Adventures in Eating: How to Cook a Placenta

by David Farley on

I’m not kidding. Welcome to placentophagy. There’s a theory that eating the afterbirth is good for various things, including post-partum depression. Just ask Tom Cruise. He reportedly did it after the birth of his daughter in 2006 and he’s perfectly sane, right? The word “placenta” comes from Latin, which translates to “flat cake.” And if you can’t handle eating a real one-wimp!-you can travel to Romania where they serve placinta, a flattened pastry stuffed with things like pumpkin.

But then there’s posthephagy. With the exception of certain fetish communities, I couldn’t find many places around the world that practice this. But there’s a precedent in the western world. Well, sort of.

Meet Agnes Blannbekin. This early-fourteenth-century Austrian lived as a beguine-a single woman who resided in an all-women’s home-and would spend her day going from church service to church service, having memorized the schedule of masses in every church in Vienna. We know this because a monk friend of hers wrote down a series of visions that Agnes claimed to have had. The writings were eventually published under the title Life and Revelations, and when it first hit the streets in 1731, it was an immediate scandal. Agnes’s criticism of the pope wasn’t too well received. Also, some of her daily devotional practices were strangely erotic. At the end of each mass, for example, she would partake in a practice that was apparently quite dear to her, making a beeline for the altar and showering it with an amount of amorous emotion and enthusiasm that would make modern Roman teenagers blush.But that wasn’t exactly what all the commotion was about when Life and Revelations hit the street. It was all about Chapter 37, titled “Regarding the Foreskin of Christ.” The chapter describes how the young Agnes would always cry on the feast day of the Circumcision, saddened by the first spillage of Christ’s blood. One particular year on January 1, Agnes, tearful and in mourning, began to wonder where the Holy Foreskin might have ended up. Suddenly, the inside of her mouth was overcome with a sweet sensation. She stuck out her tongue and there in the middle of it was “a little piece of skin alike the skin of an egg,” which she promptly swallowed. And then the sweetness came again and there was another piece of skin. She swallowed. And again, it came back and she swallowed again. This happened about a hundred times, until she was tempted to touch the piece of skin with her finger. When she tried, the piece of flesh began going down her throat on its own. So amplified was the sweetness her in mouth, all of Agnes’s limbs quivered and shook as they, too, were engulfed with the saccharine spirit of the Holy Foreskin.

Her confessor, the anonymous monk who scribbled down Agnes’s visions, wrote that Agnes was reluctant to talk about this particular revelation. But she did anyway, which excited him to no end: “I . . . was really very comforted that the Lord deigned to show Himself to a human being in such a way, and greatly desired to hear [about it].”

There’s no pastry-like item named for the foreskin. And you’re unlikely to find many recipes involving the prepuce. Well, there’s this. And we’ll drink to that.

[Photo credit: Sean in Japan]

Adventures in Eating: the Luther Burger

by David Farley on

There are few reasons to go to Queens. That is, unless you enjoy things like food. One of the five New York City boroughs, Queens is actually the most ethnically diverse county in North America. Which means you can pretty much travel around the world with your taste buds in the matter of a couple subway rides. New York fooderati, for example, know that the best Thai can be found in Queens. Bohemian Hall not only serves up quality Czech pub grub, but the huge beer garden (holding up to 1000 drinkers) is the last remaining relic of Queens’ 300 or so pre-Prohibition beer gardens. Why go all the way to Uzbekistan or Kyrgyzstan when you can eat your way through Rego Park, otherwise known as “Regostan” because of its large Central Asian population.

But what lured me to Queens recently was something more decidedly American: a Luther Burger. Dig, if you will, the picture: one beef patty, two strips of bacon, and one slice of sharp cheddar cheese sandwiched between-wait for it-a glazed doughnut. Online reports claim this heavyweight tops out at 1,500 calories. And while the burger has popped up on menus here and there, my research indicated there’s only one place in New York City that has the Luther as part of its permanent menu: the four-month-old Crave Shack in Astoria, Queens.

The origin of the Luther Burger and the provenance of its name are murky. As the story goes, the burger is named after soul singer Luther Vandross, a diabetic and legendarily voracious eater. Some say Vandross even invented the burger when he didn’t have a traditional bun in his pantry.

The Crave Shack burger flipper was so excited, he gave me a high five at the register and then with more enthusiasm than I’ve ever seen for grilled meat, proceeded to create a Luther burger, which here is called a Donut Burger. As the burger, bacon, and two doughnut halves each cooked on the grill, he told me they sell about a baker’s dozen worth of Luthers on a daily basis. “A real Luther,” he said, “uses two doughnuts as a bun. We only use one and because we use turkey bacon”-this part of Astoria is heavily Muslim so they obey halal dietary restrictions-“our version has much fewer calories.” And by that, he means the burger here is about 650 calories. So why not, I thought, call it Luther Lite?

I have to confess I was a tad frightened to bite into the Luther, fearing within seven seconds my left arm would begin growing numb. But one small bite later I was not only still alive, but impressed. The sacharine of the doughnut overwhelmed the burger, but the combination of flavors-the savory greasy beef, the sharp cheddar, the smokiness of the bacon, and the maple syrup-like sweetness of the doughnut-went well together. I’m not going to eat a Luther Burger every day, but I’d eat it again. Maybe after I’ve recovered from my first heart attack.

No one at Crave Shack could tell me the true origins of the Luther Burger. We could just go ask Vandross himself, but unfortunately he died in 2005. The cause: a heart attack.

Treme and the “Magic” Food of New Orleans

by David Farley on

The new HBO show Treme is getting a lot of attention. Not just because it is produced by David Simon, who brought us The Wire, which some TV critics (both professional and aspirants) have deemed the best TV show, ever; not just because America has a fascination with New Orleans, the closest city in the country that feels like the amusement parks we have come to confuse with reality; and not just because Americans like funny fat guys (John Goodman is one of the stars). But to a lesser extent because of the food references and food controversies that have snuck into the show.

In the first episode, which takes place in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, a chef runs out of dessert to serve and pulls out from her purse a pre-packaged Hubig’s pie. She hands it to her colleague and says to “dress it up.”

Of course, locals were quick to point out that Hubig’s pies weren’t available at that point in the city’s deluged post-apocalyptic environment. David Simon wrote an open letter to the city’s “fact-grounded literalists” that the pie was, in fact, a “Magic Pie,” a metaphor, likening it to the hocus pocus of materializing bread and fish in the New Testament.

It all got me thinking about the last time I was in New Orleans. It was Spring 2005, just a few months before the hurricane would hit, and my first (and only) time in the Big Easy. I didn’t want to stumble through the French Quarter holding a toxic, barely-drinkable concoction inside a plastic toy-like cup; I didn’t want any colorful beads; I didn’t even want anyone to show me their breasts. That is, unless they were chicken breasts. I came to eat. And in Biblical proportions. New Orleans, of course, is as famous for its debauchery, both in drink, merriment and in food. In fact, the cuisine here is so rich and artery hardening, restaurants should start replacing the after-dinner mint with a Lipitor.

Since it was our first time, my wife and I hit all the famous places: we split a catcher’s-mitt-sized meat-crammed muffuletta (olive salad, capicola, salami, mortadella, emmenntaler, and provolone all stuffed between two pieces of bread) at Central Grocery; we dined on staggeringly heart-stalling fare like Huitres a la Foch (fried oysters on toast buttered with foie gras and smothered in a rich Colbert sauce) at Antoine’s; we even trekked way out to Uptown to a place called Cooter Brown’s Tavern where we consumed dozens of raw oysters and tried to use the word “shuck” as frequently as possible.

And while I generally liked what I was eating, I hadn’t had a mouth-watering religious experience I’d hoped for. Maybe we hadn’t been going to the right places, I wondered. So on the morning of our final day, I read an article in the newspaper that the legendary restaurant Uglesich’s was finally going to turn off its burners for good. And despite balking a couple times at shuttering in the past, this time was for real.

Opened in 1924 by Croatian émigré Sam Uglesich, the Garden District restaurant soon built up a reputation for holier-than-though local fare like fried soft shell crab, fresh shrimp, plump oysters, and po’ boy sandwiches. Locals favored it for the fresh ingredients, not frozen seafood like some of the more famous guidebook-friendly restaurants had started using. Lines snaking around the corner were customary.

So, I wasn’t surprised when we walked up and saw the line going out the door. But when I walked around the corner, I was disheartened to see it went around another corner, deep into the parking lot. Jessie and I had four hours to get a bus to the airport so we figured we’d just spend our last remaining time waiting to eat. We got in line and after a few minutes, drinks began arriving. Strong, boozy cocktails. I met Steve, in line behind us, a computer programmer from San Jose. And Jerry, a local who had been coming here for years. Soon enough we were toasting. It didn’t even matter that the minute hand on my watch was moving much faster than the line.

A few hours later, we’d moved up in line, but barely enough to even see the door. It was a decisive moment. It was the time we would have to leave to catch the bus to the airport. But as I watched pot-bellied diners stumble out of the restaurant, deeply satisfying post-prandial looks on their faces, I decided we should take the chance. When we finally got inside, it was pure havoc: kitchen workers scrambling around, orders being screamed out, and diners furiously consuming saucy dishes at the formica-topped tables. And then suddenly ancient Anthony Uglesich, the patriarch of the family restaurant, who’s grey and balding and built like a beer can, was staring at me, pen and paper in hand, awaiting our order.

By the time our food came, we had minutes to jump in a cab and plead with the driver to break speeding laws. Sitting with our new friends, Bob and Jerry, the tabletop was crammed with something that looked like a shrimp version of Monty Python’s famous Spam skit: There was the Asian-inspired Volcano Shrimp, Shrimp Uggie, the Asian-Creole voodoo shrimp, spicy Angry Shrimp, crab meat-stuffed shrimp, something called Paul’s Fantasy (trout topped with, you guessed it, shrimp) and, finally, crawfish-laced etouffee. Jessie and I, with an eye on the clock, piled the food in our mouth.

We did make our flight. Barely. The last passengers to board. On the plane I had a few hours of idle time to think about what I’d just eaten-each dish had a bold, rich flavor and was clearly the best meal of the long weekend-I wondered why the food was so satisfying. Was it really that good? Or was it the “magic” of travel-to borrow the food phrase form David Simon-that made the food taste better? Was it enhanced by the experience of travel, which tends to allows us to exoticise and fetishize even the most mundane things, activities, and experiences in the place we’re visiting?

I’ll never know. Uglesich’s really did close for good after that weekend. And, four months later, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, which would have certainly inspired the Uglesich family it was time to hang up the apron and move on to more idle, less magical things.

David Farley is author of An Irreverent Curiosity: In Search of the Church’s Strangest Relic in Italy’s Oddest Town.

Berkeley diary: The way of the tortoise

by Don George on

I’m sitting at Berkeley’s Caffe Strada on a sun-washed April morning, surrounded by the clamor of students and espresso machines. In front of me, a trio of young men is conferring earnestly in Korean and English over biology textbooks; to my right two women — one clearly American, the other fervently French — are planning their weekend en francais; and behind me what must be a hot-button seminar is unfolding in a flurry of flying hands and impassioned outbursts in Spanish and Ingles.

A week ago I sat at this same table, cloudy and clouded, recalling an afternoon almost a decade before when I stood on a hilltop in Umm Qais, Jordan, looking out over Syria, Israel, the Golan Heights, Lebanon, the Jordan Valley and the Sea of Galilee. I remembered thinking how indistinguishably the landscape of one country flowed into the other, and how confounding it was that people raised in such similar environments, confronting so many of the same challenges of soil and climate, could be so intractably divided.

“Intractable divisions,” I wrote in my journal, “delineate our world still.”

I recalled a scheme I’d dreamed up a few years ago: I’d called it The 1000 Dinners Project. The idea was that we would bring 500 families from Iran to the United States and 500 families from the U.S. to Iran. Each family would spend the day with a host family, going to the market to select the food for the evening’s dinner, then preparing that dinner in the host family’s home and finally sitting down together to enjoy it.During the course of the day they would learn about the ingredients and routines of each other’s everyday lives; they’d share concerns and dreams and hopefully little jokes as well. And slowly, slivering cracks would appear in the stereotyped images each had brought to their encounter, and by the end of the day they would have formed a bond, however frail and fledgling, with someone who had once been branded the “enemy.” And some of them, at least, would return to their villages and towns and tell their friends, relatives and neighbors that those foreign people were not so foreign after all, and seeds of tolerance and peace would be planted.

Of course, it was impractically hard to organize and fund this dream, and it fell by the way.

But on a deeper level, that dream has inspired and defined my life as a traveler and as a travel writer. For the past quarter-century I have been dedicated to the proposition that travel seeds understanding, and that understanding nurtures open-mindedness and compassion — and that these pave the pathway to peace and progress. As a wandering pilgrim, I have come to worship in the church of insatiable inquiry and unconditioned kindness.

Still, last week I looked at the world’s headlines and wondered: Are we really learning anything? Are we any closer to the catechism of kindness than before?

Then in the ensuing days my wife and I attended the screening in Berkeley of a wondrously moving documentary called The Miracle of the Colored Light, by Japanese filmmaker Fumiko Irie; Irie-san had flown from Japan to attend the screening and graciously opened her heart to the audience afterwards, answering questions in Japanese and English. David Farley flew to Oakland from New York and we dined a block from my house in culinary Italy, savoring authentic salumi, porchetta and arancini at a corner eatery called Adesso. I toured Canada in San Francisco at a conference with more than 100 enthusiastic travel folks who had convened to convey the riches of their country, from Newfoundland to the Yukon. I edited dispatches that took me to France and Nepal, and read tales of food adventures sent from Syria, Mexico, the Netherlands, Morocco, the Philippines, Sweden, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Japan, Wales, and the Micronesian island of Fais. And I taught a writing workshop where students were shaping life-changing journeys in Brazil, India, Germany, and other far-flung places.

Now I sit at the Strada reflecting on this gloriously global week and realize, once again, that the world is interwoven all around and through me in a way that would have been unimaginable even a half-century ago. I look around this sunny cafe and see tangible evidence that the world is growing closer. It’s just that when change is tectonic, molecular, you have to be attuned to the slightest movements.

I open my journal and write: “Hard as it sometimes may be to discern from the headlines, I have to believe that humanity is evolving, plodding tortoise-like across the Galapagos of time, toward some enlightened end. Step by step, we lumber, a moving film here, a bridging encounter there, seeds of goodwill and understanding borne around the globe. The end is not in sight, but on this April day, I’ve found renewal of spirit to keep plodding on the way.”

From street kids to culinary stars in Vietnam

by David Farley on

As I strode into the restaurant, relieved to take a brief respite from the chaos that is Saigon’s streets, a warm smile greeted me. A young man, probably in his late teens, led me to a table and handed me a menu. There were fried pork ribs with lemongrass, ginger-braised chicken, steamed prawns in coconut juice. Not terribly surprising southeast Asian fare. But this was a surprisingly different restaurant.

People don’t come to Vietnam to eat. At least not historically. They came for other reasons. The Khmer, the Chinese, the French, the Americans came to occupy, to settle, to pillage, to exploit, to push back, or various other things that didn’t always sit well with the locals. And while they didn’t come for the food, their influence on Vietnamese cuisine is now indelible. The Khmer influence can be seen-or, rather, tasted-in the south, the Chinese in the north, the French all over the place (banh mi, anyone?).

But, like a lot of people these days, I came to Vietnam to eat. And I ate everything I could that didn’t previously bark. Including the wince-inducing stuff: rat, snake, pigs blood and various “other” parts of mammals. The Vietnamese are fiercely omnivorous and, like other southeast Asians, they don’t waste much of a plant or animal.

And while I left thinking that I could spend a decade or so eating my way through the country-the steaming bowls of pho in the morning, street cart sticky rice flavored with exotic fruits, the sweet, caramelized clay pot dishes have left me dreaming for more long after I departed-there was something else that was tugging at me: namely the estimated 19,000 street kids in Vietnam.

And the restaurant I was eating at in Saigon was trying to do something about it. Welcome to Huong Lai, a pioneer of sorts, not because of the acclaimed food it serves, but because of the employees. They’re all street kids, orphans whose first years of life were one of begging for money and sustenance.

Haong Lai isn’t the only restaurant and training center in Vietnam to turn streets kids into culinary stars. Koto, in Hanoi, has been doing the same. There’s also a similar school/restaurant in Cambodia. And they’re not just learning how to prepare spring rolls. They’re trained in cooking western dishes as well as other aspects of restaurant hospitality and they’re taught English.

The latest to throw its toque into the kitchen is Streets International. Located in Hoi An, on the central coast of Vietnam, Streets was founded by Neal F. Bermas, a resident of Hoi An and New York City who teaches at New York University. The school and restaurant, located smack in the center of UNESCO-protected Hoi An, received donations from various international organizations as well as an annual charity event in New York City. Which was where I caught up with Bermas last week. While the attendees were munching on food from restaurants such as Blue Smoke, Cabrito, Tabla, and Colicchio & Sons, Bermas told me about that light bulb moment for Streets: “It was my first night in Saigon over a decade ago and I came across these streets kids. They had these dark yet beautifully compelling eyes. And as time went on, I just kept coming back to that image.” Bermas hopes to expand the model to other parts of Vietnam and even southeast Asia.

Which got me wondering: what is it about southeast Asia, in general, and Vietnam, in particular, that has bred this great idea to deal with poverty? Bermas had an intriguing answer: “This model works particularly well in so-called developing countries when the tourism industry is just starting to take off.” And in Vietnam it’s doing just that. Tourism is up fifteen percent in the last few years. The economy grew last year by four percent, which is a lot considering most of the world’s economic activity has slowed to a crawl.

Because Streets International is about a year old, no one has graduated from the 18-month training program yet. But the endeavor can already be called a success. Not just for taking a handful of kids off the streets. As Bermas told me last week, Nam Hai, the upscale resort on the coast near Hoi An, has said they would hire the entire first batch of trainees.

Now that’s well worth tucking in to a bowl of steamed prawns in coconut juice during your next visit to Vietnam for.

David Farley is the author of An Irreverent Curiosity: In Search of the Church’s Strangest Relic in Italy’s Oddest Town.