A Moveable Feast (15 page)

I wish I could recall the desserts or cheeses, but I do remember the anger in my dad’s face when he got the bill. That subsided when the great one himself, Bocuse, the man who inspired the creation of no less a personage than the great (and fictional) Auguste Gusteau in the movie
Ratatouille,
the chef who has been awarded three Michelin stars every year since 1965, strode through the room to see the fourteen-year-old who was eating his way across the menu. I got a handshake and a menu, signed of course, and an invitation to return. I was sold. I slept all the way back to Val d’Isère and to this day consider it the finest meal I have ever had, not for the quality of food, which was superb, but for the sum total of the parts. My dad was my hero.

At eighty-three, my father is still as tenacious a traveller as anyone I know. About eight years ago, he moved to Portland, Maine – which is the last stop on the subway all on its own. If you hold the state of Maine under a magnifying glass, you’ll see that its coastline looks like a thousand little fingers pointing into the Atlantic Ocean. In some areas, these peninsulas are protected from the brunt of the Atlantic storms by islands, creating quiet waters perfect for fishing and lobstering. I don’t care how many times you’ve dined at fancy seafood restaurants in Chicago or New York: until you’ve had lobster fresh from the cold waters of Maine, you really haven’t had
Homarus americanus,
the true lobster.

The very first time I visited Dad in Portland, he insisted we drive up to the Five Islands Lobster Company, a third-generation, family-owned lobster fishery, for what he felt was the best lobster roll in the state. The Five Island’s food shack is like Red’s in Wiscasset, or Day’s in Portland, one of those under-the-radar joints whose address is passed amongst foodies like heroin junkies trade reliable connections or old school New Yorkers use to trade in rent-controlled apartments. I am probably performing an act of culinary self-mutilation by revealing my most precious source, but here it goes.

Five Islands is one of those rare food finds, if you can find it at all
.
You drive about forty-five minutes north of Portland on the I-295, make a right and head east on the US-1. You begin to head east down the county road 127, onto the paved road, turn left onto a dirt road and drive right up to the eighty-year-old, barn-like wooden structures where you can park and get some fresh air. Just look for the sign saying ‘Five Islands Lobster Company’; you can’t miss it. The family still goes out every day and lobsters. That’s their main business. You can sit and watch their boats coming in with crates and crates of lobsters, some headed off to the world’s finest restaurants and fish shops. However, the family keeps the best stuff for themselves. Steamer
clams, haddock, hake, clams on the half shell, local shrimp, oysters or their famous lobster: It’s fresh, delicious, and they’re cooking it on the spot.

Enter the wooden swinging door and you’ll notice the requisite mugs, T-shirts and bumper stickers for sale at the counter. Crayon and magic-marker-drawn cardboard menus line the walls of this crazy little room that houses the standing cooler where you fetch your root beer and the counter where you order. Somehow, they’ve managed to squeeze a kitchen into the back of this teeny space. Everyone orders the same things: Maine lobster rolls or deep-fried belly clams, or in my case, both. These items pair perfectly with their made-from-scratch dill and lemon tartar sauce, homemade coleslaw and hand-cut French fries.

The thing that sets Five Islands apart from the rest of the clam shacks I love is not just that the lobster marches straight from the traps to the kitchen. This family takes their product so seriously that they don’t want a giant food service truck unloading on their dock. They could doctor up a decent tartar sauce from a jar, but they don’t: they make their own from scratch, and the quality of their lobster rolls and hand-dusted fried clams exceeds well beyond that of their competitors. The Five Islands lobster roll is a singular experience. You don’t even notice the mayonnaise coating the meat, even as you put the overstuffed toasted hot dog bun into your gaping maw. I am usually good for two, plus that little side order of clams.

Sure, I am an eater, but mostly I am a traveller. I am definitely not a tourist. Occasionally, I do touristy things (we took our son to Disney World four times last year), but I’ve spent roughly ten weeks in the People’s Republic of China and never seen the Great Wall. That’s not to say hitting tourist attractions isn’t worthwhile, but at the end of the day, what do you want from your travels? Do you want to see how people lived thousands of years ago with busloads of other foreigners, or do you want to know what it’s
like to live there today? Do you want to experience the best a culture has to offer? I can assure you authenticity isn’t found in a museum, notable church or crumbling old castle. Honesty and authenticity are found at the end of your fork – if you are eating in the right places. Thanks to my dad, I learned to find them.

Oh, and Bocuse has a son too. Jerome Bocuse is a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America (class of 1992), a chef (how could he not be!) and a director of the Bocuse d’Or USA Foundation; since 1996, he has also overseen Les Chefs de France, the French restaurant at the Epcot Center in Orlando, Florida. He listened to his dad, and the rest – as they say in France – ‘eez heeestory’.

Henry Shukman won the 2003 Jerwood Aldeburgh Prize for his first poetry collection,
In Dr No’s Garden,
which was also a Book of the Year in the
Times
and
Guardian,
and was shortlisted for the UK’s Forward Prize. He has been Poet in Residence at the Wordsworth Trust, a Royal Literary Fund Poetry Fellow at Oxford Brookes University, and now lives in New Mexico, where he writes for the
New York Times
and teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts. His poems have appeared in the
New Republic, Iowa Review, Hudson Review, Harvard Review, Times Literary Supplement
and
London Review of Books
. His novel
The Lost City
was
Guardian
Book of the Year in the UK. Most summers he teaches fiction and poetry in Loutro, Crete, at the World Spirit Institute (
www.worldspirit.org
).

The red copper wine carafe endemic to Cretan tables is a highly unpredictable source. Out of it comes local wine that’s sometimes crimson, sometimes pink (not rosé, but truly
pink
) or sometimes yellowish-brown, and that more often than not tastes
of blackberry juice mixed with a little vinegar. But just occasionally, you get a real surprise.

The Old Phoenix Hotel stands on its own little bay on the barren, vertiginous shore of southern Crete, a half-hour walk from the village of Loutro – which is itself a sweaty, death-defying two-hour cliff walk from the nearest town, Sfakia. This part of the coastline is so steep and lofty, at a spot where the White Mountains stomp right down to the shore in grey cliffs 2000 feet tall, that no road has yet been built. If you want to visit Loutro (not for the faint-hearted), unless you take the ferry, a hike or a pitching open boat are the only ways to get there. If you do take the ferry, the little steep bay will keep you prisoner until you get back on it.

The Old Phoenix stands all alone on its rocky shore. Some intrepid German hiking families come to stay for a few days, some backpackers pass through, and some of the Loutro visitors will hike or kayak around a headland for the afternoon. But it’s just too inaccessible ever to be thronged, even in the middle of summer. Yet it’s well worth the journey. The restaurant, which is just a terrace under a trellis of vines overlooking the pebble beach, has some unexpected treats.

The first of them is the wine. This year, it’s brown. I don’t think I’ve ever had brown wine before. It’s a colour distantly related to the rosé of a Bandol rosé from Provence – a brownish, peachy pink – but darker, dirtier. The white wine that they have here is fine, drinkable, unremarkable, but this stuff, an ancient liquor that has been around since before Homer’s day, whose legacy probably reaches back beyond the Minoan past, over 3000 years ago, and for which the epithet ‘red’ is a euphemism, is another matter. It’s a special thing. Trodden (rather than pressed) by the bare feet of local farmers and their wives, from the vines that grow on the steep, south-facing slopes above the tavern, some call it
kerasi,
some call it rough,
some call it potent. I’d call it diabolical, both in flavour and effect. Dionysus is alive in it.

It doesn’t make you tipsy; it’s more psychotropic than that. It makes you slightly mad. True enthusiasm – god-filled-ness – takes over, and you let loose the ties to common consciousness. This, of course, can be dangerous. Bad things can happen. Rows, break-ups, betrayals, perilous risks such as canoeing back around to the next bay across the phosphorescent sea in the dark – under its influence you feel anything could happen. It’s a last, lost playground of, if not Dionysus himself, then some other minor Olympian.

This is all assuming you can get it down. It’s bitter, it’s sour, there are overtones of vinegar, and notes of honey. It’s a crazy wine, all over the place. At least, until something out of left field happens.

At first, at the beginning of the meal, I simply couldn’t get it down. One sip, and I turned to the white wine instead. But then something happened. A conversion experience overcame me, appropriately enough, with the eating of a goat stew. What we were served was young goat, not kid but teenage, large enough to have chops as big as an average lamb chop, though with finer, sharper ribs. You had to be careful not to cut your lips on them. The meat had been stewing gently all day in olive oil made from trees growing up the dry hill above the restaurant, and in the selfsame brown wine, made from the nearby vines. Thyme and sage, a little salt, some melted onion, and that was it.

It was glorious. The meat had kept its shape and its tender consistency, but softened away to nothing after a few chews in the mouth, releasing a flavour like lamb but without the tang, like fillet steak but without the saltiness, like venison but without the gaminess. It seemed the ultimate meat, the perfect, ideal, meatiest kind of meat. Ur-flesh. And goat is, after all, more or less the West’s original meat. When Homer’s heroes broke off from
battle or sail, it was occasionally to wild venison that they turned, sometimes to lamb, but most often to goat. And when the gods needed honouring and placating with an aromatic sacrifice, it was goat thigh bones wrapped in goat fat that usually sizzled and smoked into the sky.

This goat’s long hot bath in the brown
kerasi
wine transforms my palate. I don’t know what the chemistry of this experience is, but after a few mouthfuls of the goat stew, when I next sip from my little tumbler of rusty-brown fluid, the hitherto rejected wine has become totally different. All the rough edges have gone. Suddenly the wine is fragrant, focused, sweet in the right places, strong just the way I want a wine to be strong. I can’t remember ever having a wine this well suited to a meal.

Under the vine trellis, with the sea lapping fifteen yards away, a stony bare headland reaching out into the night, the water turning a viscid purple around it, and the sky dark as a red grape now, with a new moon like a fingernail paring, and one pinprick of a star beside it – and out the back the silvery ancient olives with trunks as thick as Doric temple columns, and the White Mountains of western Crete dark now, a dull deep grey that seems to be melting, becoming gauzy and porous, in an analogous way to how these goat chops have softened after their day over the fire: it all suits the wine down to the ground. There’s nothing on earth I’d rather be drinking than this small glass of brown liquid poured from the copper carafe – still nearly full – that a quarter of an hour ago caused me to wrinkle my nose in disdain. Somehow, it’s as if it has become an emissary of the land all around us, and by letting it in, I’m letting the whole landscape in too, am slowly dissolving, as the evening progresses, into the very softness of the Aegean night.

At the back of the hotel and restaurant is a small whitewashed cell where two big plastic vats of the wine stand, the product of these very hills. Next to them are three gleaming steel vats of olive oil, filled from the Phoenix’s own trees.

I’ve never been a big fan of Greek food – over-oreganoed, over-thymed and overcooked. But tonight I’ve been taught a lesson. There’s a culinary wisdom still alive in this ancient island culture. Goat, grape and olive: they’ve been nourishing humanity for 5000 years, and they still do.

Explorer-author Lawrence Millman has written fourteen books, including such titles as
Last Places
, An Evening Among Headhunters, Lost in the Arctic
and
Our Like Will Not Be There Again
. His essays and articles have appeared in
Smithsonian
,
Atlantic Monthly, National Geographic
and
Outside
. Lawrence chooses his travel destinations based on the internet: if a place doesn’t have internet access or a website, he packs up his gear and heads there.

So unusual are visitors to Fais, an outlier of Yap and one of Micronesia’s most remote outposts, that I felt all eyes gazing at me as I wandered about the island. ‘Look,’ those eyes seemed to say, ‘he walks upright just like us. He must be a human being too.’

To my own eyes, Fais seemed like a happy combination of the old Pacific and Monty Python’s Flying Circus. No-one was wearing Western clothes, not even the torn, permanently smudged T-shirts other Pacific islanders seem to consider the height of fashion. In lieu of tackle, shark fishermen would take a
coconut and thrust it into the shark’s mouth. The only book I saw on the island, a Bible, was being used as cigarette paper.

Not surprisingly, Fais had all sorts of taboos, and as much as I tried to act in accordance with them, I kept making gaffes. For example, one excruciatingly hot day I needed some sort of shelter, so I stumbled into an official-looking structure with low windows and a thatched roof. I stumbled back out again, for the chorus of nervous female giggles told me I’d invaded one of the island’s menstrual huts.

If I’d been a local, I would have been fined a year’s taro for this not inconsiderable blunder, but I wasn’t even reprimanded. For, as one of the island’s chiefs told me, ‘American menstrual huts probably look very different from the ones here.’

In spite of my gaffes, the island decided to hold a feast for me the evening before I was scheduled to leave. At first I protested, saying I was hardly worthy of such attention. ‘But we always give
wassolas
like you a feast,’ one of the other chiefs explained. I got the impression that even if I had been (for instance) a visiting child molester
wassola
(outsider), I still would have been given a grand send-off.

If you’re having a feast in this part of Micronesia, you don’t just sit down and open a hundred cans of Spam, although Spam is considered haute cuisine throughout the Pacific. Nor do you slaughter a pig, a goat or a monitor lizard. Instead, you go out and kill the appropriate number of fruit bats, aka flying foxes. These bats are such an important feast food in Western Micronesia that whole colonies of them have been wiped out, and some species are now close to extinction.

So there we were, my hosts and I, seated on mats in the open-sided village meeting house. Except for a few small children, everyone was chewing betel nut.

As Arctic explorer Knud Rasmussen famously remarked, ‘Give me winter, give me dogs, and you can have the rest,’ so a
denizen of the Western Pacific might remark, ‘Give me a mat, give me betel nut, and you can have the rest.’ Sitting on a mat confirms a mental state already predisposed towards relaxation, while chewing betel nut – not an actual nut, but the seed of the areca palm – produces a mild euphoria, not to mention a mouth condition that looks like terminal gingivitis.

At last a couple of boys arrived with our recently dispatched rodent meal. The bats had rounded ears and pointed muzzles – hence the name ‘flying fox’. It could have been my imagination, but I thought I detected sneers on their faces, as if they were plotting some sort of revenge on anyone who might consider them edible. The
fanihis,
as they’re called, were soon placed in an underground oven, then cooked, fur and all. The process took an eternity, since on Fais something isn’t cooked unless it’s overcooked.

I confess that the longer the bats were cooked, the more relieved I felt. For the fruit bat is the primary host of the notorious Nipah virus, and if a bat isn’t cooked long enough, it can pass the virus on to the diner. What happens to someone who gets infected by NiV? A choice array of maladies, including disorientation, encephalitis, convulsions, coma and – in roughly half the cases – death.

While the bats were cooking, I snacked on a jellyfish appetiser, drank palm wine and swatted mosquitoes. At one point, the island’s high chief sat down beside me. Through his son, who spoke some English, he asked me how I’d enjoyed my visit to Fais.

Certain idioms inevitably get lost in translation, so when I replied that I’d liked Fais very much, although it had been a bit hard for a
wassola
like me to get used to seeing so many topless women, the chief looked quite appalled.

‘But all our women have heads,’ he declared.

When I gestured at a couple of topless women seated nearby, he seemed not so much appalled as confused. He must have
wondered how I could have managed to find my way around the island, given my inability to see an object so obvious as a human head.

Mercifully, the removal of the bats from the oven put an end to our surreal interaction. There was an expectant hush among my fellow feasters. Soon I had one of the bats in my hands, and then I was making an incision in its furry breast.

The meat didn’t have the sweet flavour I would have expected from a creature whose diet is exclusively fruit. It tasted more like what I would have expected from a creature whose diet is exclusively formaldehyde. Indeed, I found myself wondering whether formaldehyde was being used as a bat marinade on the island.

I ate the breast, then pushed aside the rest of the bat, mumbling something about how I preferred the meat even to that of monitor lizard.

But you’ve hardly begun to eat it, my hosts protested. They pointed to the bat’s hairy glandular pouches and large pharyngeal sacs, then made smacking sounds with their lips. They pointed to the bat’s wings and elongated external ears, and made even louder smacking sounds. Even the dorsal and pectoral flight muscles inspired them to smack their lips.

Well, at least nothing goes to waste around here, I told myself, and began nibbling on various parts of bat anatomy.

The ears weren’t bad. Not bad at all. No, they were downright awful. They tasted like they’d never been irrigated or even cleaned. Also, they left me with a mouthful of fur. As for the wings, they had the texture and perhaps even the flavour of monofilament.

Just when I thought my culinary trials had come to an end, the wizened elder seated next to me pointed to my bat’s penis, and with a certain universal gesture, he indicated that it would put lead in my pencil. Yet another gesture indicated that I should eat it.

Now, I’ve dined on plenty of exotic foods in my travels – smoked kitten in Borneo, seal eye in Nunavik, big-ass ant
(hormigas culonas)
in Colombia, half-digested stomach contents of a walrus in East Greenland and lutefisk in Minnesota – but I’d never eaten bat dick before. I can’t say that the prospect of eating it now appealed to me.

The elder repeated the aforementioned universal gesture, flashing me a lascivious grin. Even though I didn’t want any more lead in my pencil, I figured I’d be offending my hosts if I refused to eat the bat’s penis. Also, every traveller’s mantra is (or should be): Eat what your hosts eat, and then you’ll understand them a lot better.

So, with a quick flick of my knife, I sliced off the bat’s organ of generation, popped it in my mouth, chewed and then swallowed what tasted like a piece of leather soaked in Angostura bitters. No, I’m being overly kind. The organ in question tasted like a concentrate of uric acid wrapped in old tyre tread.

The feast went on, but I didn’t feel like approaching any of the scantily clad women seated around me for a postprandial liaison. The bat’s pièce de résistance, so to speak, had no more effect on me than if I had eaten a bowl of vanilla yoghurt.

A few hours later, the feast was over. As I was heading back to my tent, a teenage boy with a buzz cut approached me. ‘That was gross,’ he said.

‘What was gross?’ I asked him.

‘Eating your
fanihi
’s penis,’ he observed. His face was contorted into a grimace.

‘But I thought it was the custom around here.’

‘Maybe long ago, but not any more. Well, a few old guys might still do it, but they’d get better results if they just watched a porn video.’

Only connect,
said English novelist E. M. Forster. At least I’d connected with one person, the wizened elder, and validated a
time-honoured tradition in his eyes. Unless, of course, that elder had been pulling my leg. Might he have made a bet with his friends that he could convince the gullible American to eat a fruit bat’s penis? It didn’t seem altogether out of the question …

That night I hardly slept a wink. There seemed to be something trapped in my stomach. Something that desperately wanted out. Around 3am, I got up, staggered out of my tent, and liberated it, whereupon I imagined a furry creature suddenly rising from the ground and fluttering off into the night on big dark wings.