Pig penis is right out. If that’s diversity, I’m happy to be monoculture. Sorry, just not into it. And I eat a lot of pork.

Traveling in foriegn countries does test one’s intestinal fortitude. In China, chickens are fried whole, the heads and feet are still on them. The restaurant we frequented most while there offered fried pig penis and duck beaks. It was an interesting place, about a half block long with little glassed in kitchens lining the back wall. Each kitchen specialized in different dishes and there were color pictures of all the offerings attached to the glass. A hostess would walk with us along the windows and we’d point out what we wanted from the pictures. After the first visit, we learned not to not look too closely at some of those pictures. That aside, I had some of the best food I’ve ever eaten there.

“hey should be tied on a small bird spit, and put to roast as a clear fire; a slice of bread is put under each bird, to catch the trail, that is the excrements of the intestines; they are considered delightful eating… ”

I’m thinking this is juices from the innards rather than bird poop. Although, who knows. If they eat nothing but berries and nuts, might be flavored very nicely.

I suspect there will be a movement among gourmands to bring back recipes from the earlier years. I had a professor at B-school who had a collection of 1000 antique cookbooks, and every semester except the one I had her, she would prep something from her archive for the class every session (taught at night, one per week, nice tenure gig if you can get it). Saw in a random magazine at my doctor’s a page about old virginia cooking (where I got the MSU link). And even Joy of Cooking talks about old recipes vs current ones. Lemme play futurist: In the next 2-3 years, there will be an old timey cooking show on somewhere (older than Paula Deen). Possibly in the next 3-7, there will be a set of cookbooks distilling old recipes (like the link) into modern format without altering content. This will coincide with current movement towards traditionally raised foods (buying clubs, sustainability, polyface, organics & beyond organics, etc). Butter, cream, etc will make a huge comeback. McDonald’s will co-opt the movement somewhat. I could see an offering of “Original Fries” cooked in the 90/10 tallow/cottonseed oil. They might even be puzzled when it doesn’t work (the original fries were better, I’ve had them abroad, and might get them in Italy if they do em the old way there).

Anyrate, thanks Mike. This is the kind of top notch interesting stuff that keeps me reading.

Hi Max–

Thanks for the kind words about the blog. 

Maybe MD and I should do the TV show on pioneer cooking.  We could call it Low Carb CookwoRx, the Early Years.

Cheers–

MRE

I didn’t even notice it in your comment.

On a trip through Sicily a few years back I was presented with a halved lambs head as part of a tasting menu I had ordered.  I sucked up and ate it, but I didn’t like it.  It tasted okay, but the thought of what I was eating – actually, it wasn’t the thought, it was the sight; the thing was right there in front of me – made me a little squeamish.  I understand how you’re daughter felt.

Cheers–

MRE 

I promise you that you have neighbors that are doing the same.

Mike, what do you make of the following post on Seth Roberts’ blog? (sethroberts.net)

http://www.blog.sethroberts.net/2007/04/14/omega-3-and-arithmetic-continued/

Further, I’d love to hear your thoughts on Roberts’ beliefs about drinking oil to suppress hunger. He calls it a diet (“the Shangri-La diet”), but it seems to me it’s more of a tool to be added to a real eating plan. (Ideally very low carb, so the fat isn’t immediately stored by the body.)

(BTW, if you haven’t tried it, it works shockingly well.)

Hi John–

As to the Seth Roberts’ post to which you linked…

I don’t think it’s a particularly good experiment, and here’s why.  A few years back I ran across a fairly simple calculus problem that I tried to solve.  I had taken 5 calculus courses in engineering school and had always considered myself a pretty good basic mathematician, but I had a hell of a time trying to solve this problem.  I decided to go back and relearn calculus and work my way through a workbook of problems, which I did.  It took me a couple of months of fiddling with it a half hour or so every day, but at the end of that time I was cranking through the problems like I did back in school.  Confident that I could pick calculus back up if I really needed to, I quit and went on to other pursuits with my spare time.  Now, if I had started taking DHA at the start of these exercises and had timed myself on the problems I would have produced a graph much like Roberts’.  But I would also have produced the same graph without taking the DHA in increasing doses simply because my skill and speed at doing the problems increased with repeated practice.

I went through the same process with sudoku a year ago.  A friend got me hooked on sudoku puzzles, which, when I first started working them, took me forever.  Over a couple of months I got to where I could bang them out in a heart beat.  Same thing.  If I had started taking increasing doses of DHA at the start, I could have attributed my increase in speed to the oil, but the reality is that the increase came about because my daily practice made me more adept.

To make his study valid you would have to get two groups who had never done sudoku (or whatever), start one group on increasing doses of DHA, the other on placebo, and let them have at it for a month.  A comparison of the speed at which the subjects in the two groups worked the puzzles would eliminate the practice variable and could show a difference caused by the DHA, if any.

Drinking oil suppresses hunger, of that there is no doubt.  When the oil hits the first part of the small intestine, it stimulates the release of cholescystokinin, which causes the gall bladder to contract, the pancreas to release its secretions, and feeds back on the satiety center in the hypothalamus telling us we’re full.   Such a strategy  works,  but I would rather simply eat my fatty foods a little more slowly while sipping some good wine and accomplish the same thing.

Cheers–

MRE 

I also liked the prediction about corn. One interetsing factoid in The Omnivore’s Dilemma is just how much food in the US today is made with corn, when you add up corn meal, corn flour, corn starch, maltodextrin, corn syrup, and corn-fed meats.

Hi Paul–

The 1927 futurists hit the nail on the head when they wrote that

Our children and grandchildren will be eating food not particularly different from much that is found in the world today [corn]; but in the preparation of that food there will be a great difference.

Cheers–

MRE 

Black Game is Black Grouse. No recipes from Black game or black grouse in the library, but this idea for Blackcock, Grouse et al. Little carby for my taste (currants and fried bread crumbs), but probably nice. Currants probably help cut the “gameyness” of it. Nice.

Hi Max–

Thanks for looking this up.  I particularly like the following instruction in the section about Woodcocks and Snipes:

…they should be tied on a small bird spit, and put to roast as a clear fire; a slice of bread is put under each bird, to catch the trail, that is the excrements of the intestines; they are considered delightful eating… 

I wonder if we’ll ever see this on Martha Stewart?

Cheers–

MRE