arianej's Full Review: Jerry Hopkins - Extreme Cuisine: The Weird & Wonde...
Having enjoyed Anthony Bourdain's no-holds-barred views on food, cooking and travel in his books Kitchen Confidential and A Cook's Tour, I perked up to see a complimentary blurb from him on Jerry Hopkins' Extreme Cuisine: The Weird and Wonderful Foods That People Eat. Don't get me wrong, Hopkins' book is one I'd grab off the shelf anyway due to subject matter alone, but knowing Bourdain's snout-to-tail, everything-but-the-squeal philosophy about eating and impatience with the mediocre, I knew this would be good. I was definitely not disappointed!
You Gonna Eat That?
Jerry Hopkins was a correspondent and editor for Rolling Stone (among other varied jobs) and has written two biographies on Elvis. What qualifies him to write a book about exotic foods? Well, he's done a lot of traveling and he's voluntarily eaten a lot of truly bizarre stuff-- that's good enough for me.
The book is just what it says it is. It's an extensive discussion of just about everything and anything people consider food, with a focus mainly upon Asia. The book is divided up into six main sections that read more like the chapter headings of a Biology textbook:
Mammals
Reptiles and Water Creatures
Birds
Insects, Spiders and Scorpions
Plants
Leftovers
Yeah, that's right. It's all food for somebody, somewhere. Imbedded in the text are little side blurbs that might go into more detail about a particular cultural aspect of the cuisine or the ingredients, as well as recipes for nearly every sub-section.
Contributing to the overall feel is Michael Freeman's excellent food photography (in color, no less!) so that those curious as to what a platter of whale blubber or a scorpion/asparagus canape looks like will be satisfied at long last.
The Good Stuff
This book is thorough, the Mammals section being the longest. Each section is broken further down into smaller sub-sections, so Mammals contains surprisingly detailed sections on many animals Americans don't generally consider food, including horse, dogs and cats, rats, bats, whale, camel and even a part on cannibalism.
Some space is also dedicated to plants: exotic fruits and vegetables, and even ordinary things that people have eaten out of desperation, like grass, or out of a desire to obtain a high, like certain mushrooms or uh... herbs. Hopkins has obviously done a lot of research and given this book a great deal of thought, and even includes a few of his own recipes collected over the years, such as this one:
Stir Fried Bat
6-8 bats
2 medium onions, sliced
2 turnips or similar vegetable, cut into small pieces
salt and pepper to taste
1 red chili, seeded and finely chopped
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
cooking oil
Remove wings and heads and cut meat into bite-sized chunks. Fry meat in a
wok with minimum amount of oil over a medium heat until tender.
Vegetables and other ingredients are added only for the final 2 or 3
minutes.
And if you think that sounds unappetizing, you should check out his recipe for "Chocolate Chirpie Chip Cookies" under the "Crickets and Cicadas" section. Want to guess what the secret ingredient is?
What I appreciated was that despite the often controversial subject matter, Hopkins handles it very well and is fairly matter-of-fact about it. He knows that the book will likely be read by an audience whose viewpoints on food will differ greatly from his own, and he manages to cover the topics in considerable depth without going into gratuitous gore or being obnoxious about it.
In his introduction, he assures the reader that his intention is not to offend, but that those animals "all have a long history as food that continues to the present time, so they cannot be denied from any survey that has any pretensions to historical comprehension". Hopkins has written his book with the aim of keeping an open mind, though he's not above pointing out the occasional (often humorous, sometimes hypocritical) logic contradiction in western mindset re: what counts as food.
And you know, I think he's absolutely right. Though the idea of eating a cat or a bowl full of grubs might disgust some of us, there are cultures who consider them perfectly legitimate food sources-- and they might regard some of what we choose to eat with equal repugnance!
But keeping that in mind, the biggest drawback of the book for many will probably be the fact that it is graphic and contains descriptions that may be upsetting to animal lovers. The pictures in all their vibrant color will likely not help, either.
Warning: Animal lovers may want to skip the next section.
Not For the Delicate of Stomach
For the love of little green apples, if you're squeamish, do not pick up this book. And if you're a member of PETA, then definitely don't read this, because Hopkins goes into what is certainly graphic detail that might be a little Too Much Information.
For example, he starts off with the eating of cats and dogs, which is likely to cause the strongest reaction out of any topic in the book. The little mini-history of cat/dog consumption touches upon people who do so mainly because they have little choice, but quickly moves onto cultures who consume cats/dogs (or portions of them) in the belief that they're aphrodisiacs as well as food.
One section talked about a practice involving swallowing four raw cat galls marinated in rice wine in order to improve a man's sexual prowess, while another talks of "Three-Six Meat" (a play on the Chinese word for "nine", which sounds like the word for "dog") as a code word for dog meat.
Hopkins himself has eaten dog in both China and Vietnam, and reports that it has "a taste like cooked beef, slightly greasy". In Thailand, the northeast province of Sakon Nakhon has a local specialty of dog tartare, where raw chopped meat is mixed with spices, vegetables and even the dog's own blood/bile, a dish particularly suited to counteract the meat's toughness.
I could go on and on, particularly since the book has so many other sections. The author has sampled many of the foods he writes about, from an extremely fresh shotglass of bat blood to balut (16-18 day old duck or chicken embryos, eaten unformed bones, beak and all in the Phillipines), to baby bees straight from the hive to durian, the large, spiky, undeniably fragrant king of fruits.
He's not afraid to tell you what he's eaten, what he balked at eating (which is admittedly not much) and what it tasted like to him in terms that less adventurous eaters might still be able to relate to. While I don't think I'm as brave as he is about trying everything (ix-nay on the bush meat, or pate made out of human placenta for example), I admire his determination to try as many things as possible.
Recommendations
If you tend to be squeamish and the weirdest thing you've eaten was that dodgy gas station hot dog, you might find descriptions of roasted monkey, deer penis soup, pig brain custard, grilled iguana and powdered waterbugs too much. On the other hand, if you're at all interested in the history of weird food and the cultures who eat them, I don't know of any other book that covers so wide a range, in such detail.
There's really so much I haven't mentioned in the review, partly because there's too much to list, and partly because it's so surprising and interesting that people should find out for themselves. It's little wonder Bourdain enjoyed the book, because even though the author has Been There, Eaten That, it still retains a lot of the amazement and wonder Hopkins must have felt in encountering these foods for the first time, along with plenty of intelligent discussion.
So if you enjoyed Bourdain's books or you're glued to the TV when Iron Chef comes on, maybe you'll want to "kick it up a notch" and see some of the really wild things people eat in other parts of the world.
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