Bear Grease. . . -- cont. | Outside Online

Outside Magazine July 2001

Page:

Bear Grease. . . -- cont.


	Pssum with Basil: Frank Basil Clark making friends in Clanton, Alabama

What happened? Why can Americans stomach catfish and crawfish—not to mention scrapple and Twinkies and electric-blue Gatorade—but not possum? Thirty years ago, the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss divided all food into a "culinary triangle"—the raw, the cooked, and the rotten—and then examined how cultures deal with each category. The French have little tolerance for raw food, he wrote, while Italians love it. Americans can't stand rot—after D day, GIs sometimes destroyed Normandy dairies because their cheeses smelled like decaying corpses—whereas some American Indians preferred a rotted buffalo carcass to a freshly killed one. "The cooking of a society," Levi-Strauss concluded, "is a language in which it unconsciously translates its structure." The most famous case of dietary prejudice, if only because so many cultures have had to grapple with it, is in the Bible. "These shall ye not eat," Leviticus declares, and proceeds to list half the animals of ancient Israel: camels, coneys, hares, and swine; fish without fins or scales; eagles, ospreys, ravens, and owls; hawks, swans, pelicans, and storks; herons and bats and "all fowls that creep"; weasels, mice, tortoises, and ferrets; chameleons, lizards, snails, and moles. (Grasshoppers, for some reason, are just fine—but only in Yemen.) Jews who keep kosher still follow Leviticus to the letter, and anthropologists have made the book a favorite case study. Yet despite many elaborate explanations ranging from food safety to cultural xenophobia, no one has quite puzzled it out.

Except, perhaps, Calvin Schwabe. In 1979 Schwabe took a look at all this irrational smirking and gagging and decided it had gone far enough. As a veterinarian at the University of California, Davis, with years of experience in the Third World, he'd seen too many people starving in places where food was everywhere to be found. Schwabe's answer was admirably practical: He wrote a cookbook. The most disgusting cookbook ever written. Unmentionable Cuisine gathered nearly 400 recipes from all over the world—from baked bat and stuffed dormouse to stewed cat and Cajun muskrat. The only criteria was that the recipes offend someone. (Turkey testicles are apparently a fail-safe dish, as long as diners don't know what they're eating.)

Schwabe's aim was less sensationalist than revolutionary. "Some 3,500 puppies and kittens are born every hour in the United States," he wrote, "and the surplus among them represents at least 120 million pounds per year of potentially edible meat now being totally wasted." When thousands of Americans go hungry every year, and when the Romans considered suckling puppy a dish "fit for the gods," Schwabe's conclusion was obvious: Our prejudices don't just define us; they can kill us.

Back in March, before I'd fully hatched my Strange Southern Foods tour, I put a call in to the Big Canoe, Georgia, satellite office of the Southern Foodways Alliance. Where could I find a chef, I asked, who specializes in "low-country cooking," the sophisticated cuisine woven together from African, American Indian, and European sources that plantation owners like Jefferson Davis once enjoyed? "Oh, dear," the woman at the other end said. "There aren't many places like that left." After a pause she directed me to The Horseradish Grill, in the heart of Buckhead, one of Atlanta's gilt-edged eastern neighborhoods. I called David Berry, the Grill's 32-year-old chef, and asked him if he would make me a meal.

There's one catch, I added. I'll be bringing the meat.

And so, on a cool, sunny Friday afternoon, completing the circle from Georgia to Alabama and back, I find myself waiting on the loading platform in back of the Grill, holding a bloody Ziploc bag full of bullfrog, wild hog, turtle, and possum. Berry emerges in chef's whites, his red beard closely trimmed, his manner crisp and professional. He grabs the bag, flips it over, squeezes it pensively, and examines the turtle claws, jutting under the plastic, with a herpetologist's eye. "All right," he says. "We'll do it up nice for you. Maybe add some southern vegetables." Then he smiles: "I hope you've got an open mind."

Five hours later, after a shave and a shower and a quick change into my least rumpled traveling clothes, I take my seat in Chef Berry's dining room. The decor could be called Nouvelle Hunting Lodge: The ceiling is vaulted, a fire blazes in the corner, mullioned windows are set off by bright oils on the wall, and jazz wafts down from hidden speakers. "Let me suggest a Sancerre," the sommelier says. "It's a great summer wine from the Loire Valley, with a bit of tang to stand up to what you'll be eating." Then he laughs, despite himself, and leans in closer. "The truth is I have no idea what to suggest. About the only thing I've done with frogs is flatten'em with a post as a kid."

That thought is lodged in my mind when the first course arrives, but it's hard to connect it with the thing on the plate. On the one hand, no meat is quite so luridly anatomical as a pair of frog legs. Stripped of their slinky tights, every ligament and tendon, muscle and articulated joint looks ready to leap across the room. But the taste is worlds away from the swamp. Tender and buttery, with a subtle, amphibian chew, it's so mild the Sancerre almost overwhelms it. "I sauted it for three or four minutes and then drizzled it with a lemon-caper, brown-butter sauce," Berry explains, settling in next to me. "Frog doesn't need a lot more than that."

Next up is the turtle soup, and with it a more jolting image: Ken Holyoak, the frog and turtle farmer, slouching against his truck at dusk a few days earlier, watching as I try to butcher a six-pound softshell. "You ever cleaned one of them before?" he asks me. "That's one nasty job." Half an hour and two broken knives later, I'm carving out the meaty thighs, prying open the joints, and reaching in to tear out the viscera. By the time I'm done, I'm actually humming to myself. The tune is "Passionate Kisses."

If the frog legs were a still life, this soup is pure abstraction. The broth is moss-green and perfectly limpid, scattered with flakes of scallion and cubes of white and brown protein. There's no trace of ornery musculature, just a rich, tranquil flavor—a mixture of brine and fern and slumbering beast, as ancestral as chicken soup. "It's an old delicacy," Berry says, "so I didn't try to get too fancy. I just soaked the meat for a while, to pull out some of the blood, then simmered it in onions, garlic, celery, and a little carrot."

It's tasty, but Berry still wouldn't serve it in the restaurant. The problem is partly cultural and partly political. Like every other state, Georgia forbids restauranteurs to serve game or freshwater fish unless it's raised on a farm. "I can serve Chilean sea bass any day," Berry says. "But if I serve largemouth bass from a local lake, the health department could shut me down."

If Berry can't serve an acknowledged classic like turtle soup, what hope is there for my last dish?

The plate arrives looking like a hillbilly coat of arms: a proud possum shank emblazoned on a shield of grits, flanked by asparagus fleurs-de-lis and chevrons of wild hog tenderloin. "Gusta Plus Possium," the motto above it might read. Up until now I've tried to stick to things that a modern diner might reasonably adopt, under the right circumstances. But this possum has me worried. On the day that he killed it, Clark assured me that its fat was 100 percent polyunsaturated. "It'll clean your arteries like a Roto-Rooter," he said. But mostly I remember the possum's inscrutable, prehistoric face, its way of hissing and spitting when cornered, and its long, naked tail. "That's a natural air-conditioner!" Clark explained. "The possum licks its tail, the blood circulates through it, and then the cool air cools it off." Somehow that image made it no more appetizing.

I start out slowly, with Berry watching my every facial tick. First the grilled hog—tender, smoky, and more flavorful than any pork loin I've ever tasted. Then the vegetables and grits (the latter a creamy revelation). And then, finally, the shank: big as my foot and dripping with thick possum gravy. I hold my breath at first but then slowly break into a smile. The gravy is strong and gamy, but with an uncomplicated charm, like something a cowboy might get served from a chuck wagon, and the meat is meltingly tender. "It's all in the preparation," Berry says. "I braised it very, very slowly in a little veal and chicken stock. I put in some onion, carrots, celery, mushrooms, and red wine, too. But that taste is all possum."

All possum. The words trigger an odd reaction in my mouth. It starts with the texture: Fluttering pockets of fat are interleaved throughout the muscle fibers. Rubbery and slick, they bring to mind countless childhood dinners when my parents made me eat the fat from my pork chops. Then there's the aftertaste: that feral, faintly glandular presence rising through the sauce. This is an ancient animal, it tells me, one that was scurrying through primeval underbrush long before my ancestors, or their taste buds, had even evolved.

A solipsist might conclude that taste is all in the mind, but that's too easy. Our taste buds are just chemical receptors, designed to detect sweet and sour, salty and bitter, and no amount of prejudice can make them call a lemon sweet. Every taste is a story, a mystery for our minds to solve. Depending on the taster, the result may be tragedy or farce, hors d'oeuvre or abomination. Or, if we're lucky, something beyond categorization altogether.

A few years ago my father-in-law was driving to Nebraska to visit his 90-year-old mother. He was fiddling with the radio dials, he says, looking down for just a second, when something hit the windshield with a terrific crash. Being a man of steady nerves and stoic Swedish character, he calmly maneuvered the car to the side of the highway and climbed out. There, lying in the road, was a wild turkey. He stared at the bird. The bird stared back. Then he picked it up and threw it in the trunk. No sense letting a thing like that go to waste.

When he arrived, he handed the bird over to his mother. She took it without comment—like him, she'd seen stranger things on the farm growing up. But that night, when he was dressing the bird, he found a surprise. Reaching inside like a magician, he pulled out an egg the size of his fist, still intact.

"What about that?" she asked him.

"Fry that up for breakfast," he said.

Long before I went to Georgia, that story served as a blunt reminder of my own culinary prejudices. I might think of myself as an adventurous eater, but my tastes had their limits too: The bird I would eat; the egg, never. Now I'm not so sure. Had I joined my father-in-law for breakfast that day and not known where the egg came from, I would have eaten it over-easy or sunny-side up. But he would have had the better meal. For an egg, eaten without prejudice, is like any other under the sun. But an egg with a story behind it, whether of a people, their history, or of a turkey crossing the road—that egg tastes like nothing you've ever imagined.

Page: