There is a creature something like whale, for he lives in the cold northern waters as whales often do, and something like an elephant, for he has two ivory tusks, one of which grows long and curved and handsome. He is called a narwahl, and although fewer men tasted him than either whale or elephant, his skin is reported to be delicious, crisp as celery and tasting of nuts and mushrooms…and looking like half-inch-
thick linoleum, which for me, at least, would prove an esthetic handicap.
As for elephant meat, many human beings have enjoyed it, mostly in jungles but also, it is admitted, within walking distance of the local zoo. One man I know, who was the most skilled butcher in his district, had a standing agreement with the zoological gardens near him that he might do a bit of subrosa carving in case of “accident” to any of the more exotic guests, and he assured me over several bottles of Tavel that elephant trunk is one of the most succulent meats ever swallowed (except perhaps crocodile).
Certainly some such menu of the Siege of Paris in 1870 as the one which can now be seen at Voisin, in New York, is ample proof of the gruesome legend that Castor and Pollux, the two elephants of the zoo, ended nobly in the soup kettle, after everyone in the city who could afford to had sampled them.
The Voisin menu, to celebrate Christmas on the ninety-ninth day of the Siege, is an unpleasantly fascinating example of what people will eat if they are hungry enough. Besides the consomme d’elephant, it boasts stuffed donkey head, roasted camel, kangaroo stew, rack of bear, leg of wolf, cat garnished with rats, and antelope pie…a far cry from the first timid use of anything extraordinary chez Voisin, when Bellenger consulted with his chef and grudgingly devised a menu around the meat course of saddle of spaniel!
The degree of exoticism is dictated by both time and place, of course. One winter in Strasbourg I ate wild boar as if it were commonplace beef, but in southern California I would feel strange indeed to find it set before me. And when I was a child I dried kelp leaves over our evening beach fires and ate them happily, quite unconscious of the fact that probably nowhere else but along the shores of northern Japan were children doing likewise, and all because my Aunt Gwen had been a child there herself and was now helping to raise me in the only pattern she knew.
I have always believed, perhaps too optimistically, that I would like to taste everything once, never from such hunger as made friends of mine in France in 1942 eat guinea pig ragout, but from pure gourmandism. The first time I ever felt this compulsion of gastronomical curiosity over instinct was when I was about fourteen and was confronted with my first shrimp. (I do not understand how it took me that long to meet one; perhaps my grandmother’s rigid Midwestern ideas of what was fit and proper to put on the table kept me from that pleasure.)
I was immediately repelled by what now delights me, and the little curled pink things, lying in whorls upon the mayonnaise, with snow packed around the bowl as only Victor Hugo could do it so long ago in hot Los Angeles, seemed horrible to me. Then I looked about the airy, charming room, with the canaries singing in their golden cages and soft lights glowing behind their incredibly fancy chiffon shades, and I recognized the fact that I was facing a test: I must eat at least one shrimp, and then die or be sick.
It was the first of uncountable more, from many a bay and stream, of every color from dank gray to rose, every size from bee to field mouse. Once I saw a corpse fished from a Louisiana bayou, and it was three times its size forthe shrimp sucking at it…and another time I saw a corpse, off Brittany, stripped by lobster claws…and still I think without any qualm at all that shrimp, and all their cousins, make some of the sweetest things in this world to put between my teeth.
The next hardest test I passed, at table, was my first oyster, an overlarge and rather metallic one, in the dining room of the St. Francis in San Francisco, a few years after the shrimp.
I found it dangerously disgusting for several minutes, but since that memorable day I have eaten oysters whenever I could, including one very bad one in Berne which, my husband told me, would prove to have been all right if I did not die within six hours. I did not, although the last hour had me waiting with ill-concealed anxiety, my eyes on the clock and one hand lying expectantly upon the bedside bell.
Pinterest
