Strange Foods. Jerry Hopkins

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ not pets.

      There is no mystery why so many Euro-Americans oppose the eating of dog. There have been too many dog heroes in literature, TV and film—in stories by Jack London and dozens more, in movies like Rin Tin Tin, Lassie, Benji, and Disney’s enduring 101 Dalmatians, in virtually everything writ large in popular culture, from the heroic K-9 Corps in the U.S. military to the Saint Bernard who carries a flask of life-saving grog to humans lost in the Alps. In addition, the dog-believed to be a domestication of a Neolithic Asiatic wolf-through the years has proven useful to man because of its speed, hearing, sense of smell, hunting instinct, herding abilities, and companionship. So even for those who enjoy snails and octopus and may even be so brave as to try rattlesnake chili and shark’s fin soup, the line is drawn when it comes to man’s canine friend.

      All that said, dog has been a welcome dish across much of the world’s history and geography. The recorded eating of dog goes back to Confucius’s time in China, circa 500 B.C., when the Li chi, a handbook of ancient ritual translated in 1885, offered recipes for delicacies prepared on ceremonial occasions. One of the dishes was canine, fried rice with crispy chunks cut from a wolfs breast, served with dog liver basted in its own fat, roasted and seared over charcoal. During the same period, an emperor who wanted more warriors encouraged childbirth by awarding what was described in the literature of the time as a succulent puppy to any woman bearing a boy.

      The Chinese (and other Asians) regarded dog meat as more than a culinary treat. It was considered to be very good for the yang, the male, hot, extroverted part of human nature, as opposed to the female, cool, introverted yin. It was believed to “warm” the blood and thus was consumed in greatest frequency during the winter months. As early as the fourth century B.C., a Chinese philosopher named Mencius praised dog meat for its pharmaceutical properties, recommending it for liver ailments, malaria, and jaundice. Along with many other foods, it also was believed to enhance virility. The Chinese also served a sort of dog wine, believed to be a remedy for weariness.

      Later, the Manchu Dynasty that ruled China from the seventeenth century A.D. banned dog meat, declaring its consumption barbarian. However, southern Chinese continued to eat it and Sun Yat-sen’s opposition Kuomintang followers began their meetings by cooking dog, believing the act symbolized their anti-Manchu revolution. The code name was “Three-Six Meat,” a play on the Chinese word for the number nine, which rhymed with the word for dog. Even today in Hong Kong, where since 1950 it has been illegal to catch or kill dogs or to possess their meat, butchers and customers use the expression “Three-Six Meat” when selling and buying it. Because Hong Kong Chinese are from southern China, where dog is still regarded as a staple, enforcement of the law has been negligible: punishment (up to six months in prison and a fine of US$125) has been lax, and the law is widely ignored, especially during the winter months when demand is greatest.

      It is well-known that the American Indian originated in what is now Mongolia, and it’s believed that they brought the dog with them when they crossed the Bering Sea and eventually settled the wilderness that became North America. When European explorers and settlers arrived in the New World, they counted seventeen dog varieties, many of them raised specifically as food, although it was noted that not all tribes indulged. Those that did included the Iroquois and several Algonquin tribes of the central and eastern woodlands and the Utes of Utah, who cooked and ate dog meat before performing sacred ceremonial dances. While the very name of the Arapahoe means “dog-eater.” David Comfort writes in The First Pet History of the World (1994) that puppies were generally preferred because of their tenderness: “They were fattened with a special mixture of pemmican and dried fruit. After harvest with a tomahawk, the puppy was suspended upside down from a lodge pole, and the carcass hand-marinated with buffalo fat. Then it was skewered.”

      Many of the early European arrivals contentedly, or at least circumstantially, joined in. According to Mr. Comfort’s text, Cabeza de Vaca, the Spanish explorer, was shipwrecked in the Gulf of Mexico and wandered for eight years on foot throughout the American Southwest, eating canine regularly. In Christopher Columbus’s time, Mexico’s only domesticated livestock were the turkey and the dog and according to a history written in the sixteenth century, the two meats were served in a single dish. Meriwether Lewis, leader of the Lewis and Clark Expedition that opened the American Northwest, wrote in his journal in 1804, “Having been so long accustomed to live on the flesh of dogs, the greater part of us have acquired a fondness for it, and our original aversion for it overcome by reflecting that while we subsisted on that food we were fatter, stronger, and in general enjoyed better health than at any period since leaving buffalo country.” As recently as 1928, the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen ate his sled dogs in the Arctic in his attempt to reach the North Pole, although that was, admittedly, for reasons of survival and not by choice.

      Dog Capital of the World

      Guangzhou, about two hours from Hong Kong, is regarded as the “dog capital” of the gastronomical world. I stayed on Shamian Island, a onetime sandspit in the Pearl River that was ceded to the British and French following the Opium Wars of the 18th century, now a European-styled neighborhood with gardens and colonial buildings, as well as several tourist-class hotels. Across the canal separating Shamian Island from what is otherwise an undistinguished Chinese city is the Qingping Market, one of the late Premier Deng Xiaoping’s most radical innovations, a street market operated by entrepreneurs, a concept that subsequently spread throughout much of China. The market in Guangzhou is different from the others, however.

      Once past two city blocks of stalls selling traditional medicine—beetles, lizards, starfish, seahorses, deer antlers, flowers and the like, all dried—I came to a cross street where the goods were all alive. Hundreds of frogs hopped in wire cages and eels and large water bugs swarmed in plastic tanks of aerated water. More tubs offered crawling crabs, crayfish, worms, and scorpions. There were turtles from one inch across to the size of a small beer keg. In metal cages stacked head-high were dogs, cats, small deer, pigeons, peacocks, guinea pigs, rabbits, and a number of dog-sized rodents called coypu. Everything was butchered on the spot on request or shoved into a sack for home preparation if the buyer wished to keep the dinner fresh.

      In a phrase: a take-away zoo. Best to arrive before 10:00 am for the widest choice.

      Nor was canine cuisine limited to Asia and North America. For at least a thousand years, Polynesians cherished the poi dog, so called because the animal’s diet was vegetarian, consisting largely of poi, or cooked taro root. This was one of the food animals taken to what is now Hawaii on primitive sailing ships from Tahiti and the Marquesas (along with the pig). At large feasts in Hawaii in the early 1800s, hosted by local royalty and attended by sailors from England and the United States, as many as two hundred to four hundred dogs were served at a single sitting.

      In 1870, a cookbook was published in France with recipes for dozens of dishes based on the meat of dogs. Across the English Channel, however, the British typically rejected anything enjoyed by the French and in the 1890s Punch, the humor magazine, published several cartoons demonstrating their disapproval. The same magazine also satirically described an anonymous Englishman’s encounter with a canine meal:

      ...he brightened up

      And thought himself in luck

      When close before him what he saw

      Looked something like a duck!

      Still cautious grown, but, to be sure,

      His brain he set to rack;

      At length he turned to one behind,

      And, pointing, cried, ‘Quack, quack?’

      The Chinese gravely shook his head,

      Next made a reverent bow;

      And then expressed what dish СКАЧАТЬ