I used to own a copy of this. I don't think I tried any of the recipes,
but it was fascinating reading.

Another book along the lines of this one is "Northern Cookbook",
published by the Canadian government. It actually has some recipes that
the average person can use, along with a lot of odd stuff. I still have
my copy.

latimes.com/food/la-fo-virbila-20140412,0,207772.story
latimes.com

Revisiting weird foods of 'Unmentionable Cuisine': Earthworm broth, anyone?
'Unmentionable Cuisine' by Calvin W. Schwabe continues to challenge our
culinary myopia.

By S. Irene Virbila

4:55 PM PDT, April 11, 2014

Culling my bookshelves recently, I came across my much-thumbed copy of
"Unmentionable Cuisine" and remembered the dinners, years ago, that
Bonnie Hughes of the late Augusta's Restaurant in Berkeley organized
with author Calvin W. Schwabe. The menus read something like this:
deep-fried turkey testicles with Parmesan, baked lamb eyes with truffles
and shiitake, veal brains in coconut cream, intestine dumplings, and
fried crickets and peanuts — and that's just for appetizers. Main dishes
included red-cooked duck tongues, whole stuffed frog, grilled guinea
pig, and grilled rattlesnake marinated in whiskey, ginger and soy. The
dinners had the thrill of the illicit, and everyone had a merry time.

In the 35 years since the book was published, some of these
then-"unmentionable" ingredients have become eminently mentionable, even
prized. Menus, at least in Los Angeles, now routinely list beef cheeks,
oxtails, pig's ears or feet, sweetbreads, marrow bones and the
occasional blood sausage. Gastronauts boast about eating fish sperm sacs
or chitlins or chapulines (Oaxaca's fried crickets). Whole-animal
butchery has been embraced by a new generation of chefs and/or butchers,
who often use the odd bits for charcuterie or salumi.

But while "Unmentionable Cuisine" is a reminder of how far we've come in
what we are willing to try, it also shows us how far we still have to go.

"Unmentionable Cuisine" was an early manifesto for Americans to abandon
what had become a narrow diet and try some of the foods that millions of
people around the world enjoy. A professor of veterinary epidemiology at
UC Davis and a member of the International Committee for the
Anthropology of Food and Food Habits, Schwabe, who died in 2006, lived
in remote corners of the globe for more than 30 years. An avid cook who
was both curious and sociable, he collected recipes over the years from
restaurant owners, cooks and people he met in markets wherever he lived.

In the book, Schwabe urged Americans to reexamine their food prejudices,
not from some holier-than-thou height but because he seriously believed
people were missing out on some delicious stuff. "It is meant to be a
practical guide to help us and our children prepare for the not too
distant day when the world's growing food-population problem presses
closer upon us and our overly restrictive eating habits become less
tolerable," he wrote. "I do not think this prospect need portend
disaster, for opening our minds about foods and educating our palates to
receive new and varied taste experiences could prove as enjoyable an
experience as it will be a necessary one."

Things looked pretty bleak then, as he noted that Americans not only
"eat many fewer species of animals today than in times past, but rarely
do we eat anything more than the muscle tissues of even those animals"
and that 40% of all the beef we eat is "in the form of the mechanically
ground, homogenous paste we call hamburger."

So, of course, his first chapter is beef with recipes that cycle through
the whole animal (whole roasted ox from England) to recipes for
headcheese, beef tongue, cheeks, osso buco and oxtail Roman-style, all
not that far out for anybody with a semi-adventurous palate. But what
about a recipe for "slivers of ox palate" or, here's a good one, calf's
eyes stuffed with truffles, then dipped in eggs and bread crumbs and
deep-fried. He's included dishes of spleen, pancreas, blood, mountain
oysters (testicles), even a French recipe for calf udder croquettes.

Much of the book features even more unfamiliar fare on the order of
earthworm broth, Samoan baked fruit bats, Turkish sheep's feet with
yogurt, Estremaduran cat stew, French crepes with fish sperm and
béchamel, uterus sausage and stuffed sow's udder. To tantalize with just
a few.

This book is sure to deflate any idea that you or I have tried
everything. I've had porcupine and cane rat stew at a rather fancy
restaurant in West Africa. That's nothing. Schwabe confronts us with our
own culinary myopia backed up with a veritable avalanche of recipes, all
written in the kind of shorthand real cooks favor.

As a practical-minded scientist, he also makes the suggestion that maybe
we should think about eating our pests, starting with pigeons.
Gourmands' highly prized squab, he points out, is merely a 25- to
30-day-old pigeon about to leave the nest. And then there's rattlesnake
and other reptiles.

And finally, dear readers, he gets to insects, with recipes for silkworm
omelet from China, red ant chutney from India and bee grubs in coconut
cream from Thailand. My favorite, though, has to be crisp roasted
termites from Swaziland. Just wait till I get hold of those buggers
gnawing at my house.

"Unmentionable Cuisine" is still in print in paperback (University of
Virginia Press, $24.50.)



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