Preface — The Curious Palate

Preface — The Curious Palate

"Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es." "Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are." — Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, Physiologie du Goût (1825), Aphorism IV

T he first four volumes of this compendium kept the naturalist, for the most part, at the table of the settled and the possible. They asked what flavour is, what food does inside the body, how the raw is coaxed into the sublime, and how the world's great cuisines came to differ. Each was, in its way, a book about cooking one already knew how to want. This fifth volume turns to a stranger appetite: the impulse that carries curiosity past the edge of the familiar plate, to the creatures and preparations that most eaters would refuse, and asks the harder question of why anyone would want to taste them at all — and whether they should.

It is the most double-edged volume in the series, and it is best to say so at once. A book about the daring palate can very easily become a book that points and laughs, a cabinet of curiosities in which other people's dinners are exhibited for a comfortable reader's disgust. That book has been written many times, and this is not an attempt to write it again. The tradition this volume follows is older and better than the freak-show: it is the tradition of the naturalist-gourmand, the person for whom to know a creature fully might include, among many other things, knowing how it tastes — and for whom the unfamiliar dish is not a joke but a fact about the world, as worthy of careful attention as a beak or a leaf.

That tradition is not a modern conceit, and it is worth tracing its lineage, because the lineage is the volume's defence. Natural history and the table have kept company since natural history began. When Aristotle set down the first systematic zoology in his Historia Animalium, he thought it perfectly proper to record how a fish or a fowl tasted alongside how it bred and moved; the two facts were, to him, one kind of knowledge. The long line of parson-naturalists who catalogued the English countryside — Gilbert White of Selborne foremost among them — saw no wall between observing a creature and knowing its use, and the great Enlightenment describers, Linnaeus and Buffon, wrote of edibility as a natural property to be filed beside plumage and dentition. It was Linnaeus, after all, who classified our own species as Homo sapiens while cheerfully noting what the rest of the kingdom was good for, and the early proceedings of the learned societies are thick with reports that pass, without embarrassment, from an animal's anatomy to its merits at table. Brillat-Savarin, whose aphorism opens these pages, was himself a species of naturalist: a magistrate who studied the human animal at its feeding with the patient eye of a field observer, and who insisted that taste was a subject fit for science. The nineteenth century simply carried the old habit to its logical and slightly alarming conclusion. If to describe an animal was to know it, and to know it might mean to taste it, then a sufficiently thorough naturalist would end up eating his way through the specimen drawer — which is very nearly what the men in the first two chapters of this volume set out to do. The Victorians even gave the impulse its own scientific-sounding name — zoophagy, the eating of the animal kingdom entire — as though a systematic appetite were simply another branch of systematic zoology. Their appetite was eccentric, but it was not new. It was the oldest partnership in the study of life, followed one course too far.

The Curiosity Mandate

Because the risk is real, this volume binds itself to a rule, the way its predecessor bound itself to an Authenticity Mandate. Call this one the Curiosity Mandate, and let it stand at the front where the reader can hold the author to it. It has four commitments.

The first is that there is no freak-show here. Every food this book calls strange is, somewhere, the treasured and ordinary cuisine of a real culture, prepared with skill and eaten with pleasure by people who would find a good deal of the reader's own diet just as improbable. Hákarl, durian, century egg, a dish of insects — these are written from the inside, as delicacies with their own chemistry and their own logic, never as a dare.

The second is that curiosity is celebrated but harm is not. This distinction is the whole moral spine of the volume, and its sixth chapter is given over entirely to drawing the line in daylight. An open palate is a fine thing; it is not a licence to eat an endangered animal for the novelty of having done so. Where this book admires a historical appetite that today would be indefensible — the sailor's tortoise, the gourmet's songbird — it says so plainly, and pairs the old pleasure with the honest modern reckoning.

The third is that wonder must not be counterfeited. A great deal of what is told about eating at the edge is legend dressed as fact: the exact bill of fare of a student dining club, the precise contents of an explorer's Christmas pot. Where the record is firm this book reports it; where it thins into colourful tradition, it says which is which, on the conviction that a true story honestly hedged is worth more than a tall one told straight.

The fourth is that no danger is described without its safety. Some of these foods are genuinely hazardous in the wrong hands — a shark that is poisonous until cured, a fish that is fermented under pressure, a fungus with a lethal double. Curiosity that omits the warning is not curiosity but negligence, and the warning is given every time.

The Road Ahead

The itinerary is arranged as a single argument carried across seven chapters. It opens with the most famous curious eater of all — a young Charles Darwin and the Cambridge dining society that set out to taste birds and beasts unknown to the English table — and widens into the whole Victorian culture of "zoophagy" that made a near-doctrine of eating the animal kingdom. From those explorer-gourmands it turns to the living cuisines they would have called extreme and this book calls prized, and then to the smallest and most rational of bold foods, the insects that feed some two billion people without apology. Halfway through, the volume stops eating and starts thinking, asking why disgust feels like instinct when it is so plainly taught, and what the word "edible" has ever really meant. Only then, with the reader properly equipped, does it draw the ethical line the whole book depends on — and, having drawn it, sit down at last to the menus themselves, the real and reconstructed dinners from the ends of the earth.

A closing admission belongs here, as one belonged at the front of the last volume. The naturalist writing these pages is a guest at most of the tables described, dependent on the scholars, cooks and communities who have made these foods their own; where the book succeeds the credit is largely theirs, and where it slips from its own Mandate the fault is the author's alone. Curiosity, this volume will argue, is among the finest things an eater can bring to the world. It is also, uncontrolled, among the most dangerous. The art is in knowing the difference — and that art, not the shudder or the boast, is what these chapters are actually about.

The road opens where the modern appetite for the untasted first announced itself with a knife and fork: at Cambridge, in a small society of hungry young naturalists, and at the dinner that ended when the pot produced an owl.