— Heinrich Harrer, Seven Years in Tibet (1953)
Redmond O'Hanlon's Jungle Tuck
TURTLE BRAIN
Chimo and Culimacare joined us from Chimo's house for breakfast and Simon returned, silent, from his walk. We ate turtle (rich, chewy) and manioc (like sawdust). Simon, declining both, opened a tin of Spam and sat apart on a rock of his own. Galvis, intending to cheer up his new friend, went to sit beside him…
Galvis took a severed turtle head out of his mess tin, picked its brains out from the neck with a fork, ate them, and turned to Simon. He held the blackened head in his fingers in front of Simon's face and moved the jaws open and shut.
"Quack!" said Galvis. "Quack! Quack! Quack!"
— In Trouble Again (1988)
ARMADILLO RISOTTO
As night fell we unloaded our ordinary stores from Chimo's dugout and, leaving Valentine on guard, we set off downstream with the presents, with bowls of manioc, ready-cooked spaghetti, and — the centerpiece — our giant pot full to the brim with agouti and armadillo risotto.
— In Trouble Again
MONKEY EYES
We cut steps up the high muddy bank and made camp. Chimo and Pablo spread palm fronds on the ground and began to prepare the Howler monkey, scalding it with boiling water and scraping off the fur. Its skin turned white, like a baby's.
That night, when Pablo had jointed the body and Galvis boiled it, Chimo handed me a suspiciously full mess tin. As I spooned out the soup the monkey's skull came into view, thinly covered in its red meat, the eyes still in their sockets.
"We gave it to you specially," said Chimo with great seriousness…"If you eat the eyes we will have good luck."
The skull bared its broken teeth at me. I picked it up, put my lips to the rim of each socket in turn, and sucked. The eyes came away from their soft stalks and slid down my throat.
— In Trouble Again
ELEPHANT NOSE
"I give up," said Lary, scrutinizing the very tough, gristly, grey lumps of meat hiding among the fresh green manioc-leaf saka-saka in his mess-tin…"Marcellin," said Lary, chewing hard, "what is this stuff?"
"Elephant nose!"
Lary set down his mess-tin. He stood up, lurched slightly, held on to the corner of the hut, retched twice, and was sick onto the ground.
— No Mercy (1997)
Bread Famine in the Sierra
July 6 [1869] — Mr. Delaney has not arrived, and the bread famine is sore. We must eat mutton a while longer, though it seems hard to get accustomed to it. I have heard of Texas pioneers living without bread or anything made from the cereals for months without suffering, using the breast-meat of wild turkeys for bread. Of this kind they had plenty in the good old days when life, though considered less safe, was fussed over the less. The trappers and fur traders in the Rocky Mountain regions lived on bison and beaver meat for months. Salmon-eaters, too, there are among both Indians and whites who seem to suffer little or not at all from want of bread. Just at this moment mutton seems the least desirable of food, though of good quality. We pick out the leanest bits, and down they go, against heavy disgust, causing nausea and an effort to reject the offensive stuff. Tea makes matters worse, if possible. The stomach begins to assert itself as an independent creature with a will of its own. We should boil lupine leaves, clover, starchy petioles, and saxifrage rootstocks like the Indians… We chew a few leaves of ceanothus by way of luncheon, and smell or chew the spicy monardella for the dull headache and stomach-ache that now lightens, now comes muffling down upon us and into us like fog. At night more mutton, flesh to flesh, down with it, not too much, and there are the stars shining through the Cedar plumes and branches above our beds.
July 7—Rather weak and sickish this morning, and all about a piece of bread.
— John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra (1916)
Congolese Monkey Stew, Batetela Style
MY FRIEND DOUG Kelly, a widely traveled Foreign Service officer, served in the Peace Corps in Tshumbe, central Congo, in the 1980s. Over the course of two years there, he frequently observed the Batetela people prepare and eat monkey. Most of the Batetela inhabit an area in the Sankuru district of Kasai Oriental province. Their language, Otetela, is considered very difficult to learn by other Congolese. In fact, it is often referred to as "le Chinois du Congo."
The Batetela are fortunate in that their homeland is still relatively rich in wildlife. The most common wild game, and thus the cheapest, is monkey. Following is the recipe for a repast of monkey cooked a la Batetela, as Doug Kelly describes it in a letter to me:
Take a dead monkey and hack it up. Keep the hands intact, but you can slice the rest of the carcass any way you want. Don't leave the pieces too big, because they will take longer to cook and you want to eat it soon because you are hungry.
Place the hacked-up pieces, including the intact hands, in a pot of boiling water and boil away. Don't add any spices, because you don't have any, and don't use too much water, because you're going to want to drink the watery "gravy" and you want it to have a lot of undiluted monkey taste.
After the monkey has been boiled for quite a while, take it out of the water and serve it on a bed of rice or millet. (Note: The Batetela are the only people who grow rice in Congo. The Arabs taught them how in the nineteenth century, when the Batetela were raiding tribes to the south and selling the captives into slavery to the Arabs. Millet is the traditional Batetela grain and is still raised in the dry season. Other Congolese tribes prefer manioc, or "fu fu.") Pour some of the monkey-water gravy on the rice or millet. Eat the whole concoction with your hands, or a spoon if you feel formality is necessary.
Now comes the good part. Serve the intact hands to your guests. A monkey hand resting on a plate looks like pretty upscale dining, at least if you are sitting in a mud hut in Sankuru. If you are the favored guest, eat the whole hand — the Batetela never leave any bones when they are eating meat, unless it's a particularly big pig femur or something equivalent. For monkeys, ducks, and chickens, it's everything down the hatch. You are encouraged to gnaw the monkey knuckles, removing the meat before cracking them open with your teeth and sucking out the marrow. Yum.
Sampling Fried Sago Beetle in New Guinea
Stef cooked a dinner of fried catfish, along with a healthy portion of sago beetle. The larvae were fried brown in the pan. They were crisp and sort of fishy tasting on the outside, probably because they had been sauteed in fish oil. Inside, the larvae were the color and consistency of custard. They were unlike anything I had ever eaten before, and the closest I can come to describing the taste is to say creamy snail.
—Tim Cahill, Pass the Butterworms (1997)
Dog Meat in Asia