We have a shambling little orchard out in the back yard. It has an aversion to bearing anything much except spotty plums and the occasional fig, which the birds generally beat me to. But I noticed when the plums formed this year I was out there beating off the birds for a whack at the early crop. The same applied to the seldom strawberries that poke their heads up from the unwilling green around the drive. The house was a crying admonition of bellyache, but I was munching happily away. There is nothing really wrong with adolescent plums and pale pink strawberries. Even today I prefer them to their full-blown brethren. I guess it’s a childhood habit I’ll never kick.
“I am always surprised,” the Old Man said to me once long ago, “that there is such a thing as an adult. I am surprised any young’un ever grows up to votin’ age. Boy young’uns and billy goats, maybe, got less regard for their innards than anything I know of, including hogs, and a hog will eat anything, including its own pigs.”
This homily was designed to justify a large dose of castor oil as antidote for the consumption of a large number of green peaches. Green peaches do not give you the bellyache as alleged; castor oil does. To my mind someone bigger than me was compounding the felony, with me as the victim.
“Green peaches, green plums, green blackberries, green figs, green grapes, green apples, green pears,” the Old Man said in a sing-song voice. “Why do all boys have to eat things when they’re green? They can’t taste good and they tear up your stomach and you get punished besides. Why? “
“I reckon I just can’t wait,” I said. “They always look so good when they’re green. I even like the way they taste.”
The Old Man grunted in disgust. “It’s your stomach,” he said. “Go ahead and wreck it.”
He stalked off, muttering. I knew what ailed the Old Man. The doctor had nailed him with some sort of light diet for a stomach disorder, and had put him plumb off fried foods, desserts, and almost anything else he liked. The Old Man wasn’t mad at me for eating the green peaches; he was mad at himself for not being able to do what he wanted to any more. He reckoned somehow that reducing him to an infant’s diet was a reflection on his age.
Looking back, I expect I must have had a zinc-lined stomach, at that. I still have one today, and can only credit the early practice I had with inedibles, or a mixed bag of what was supposed to be inedible, in combination.
As a man I have withstood the kind of food you get at cocktail parties—the kind of canapes that would gag a goat. In a restless itch to stride the world I have rambled Mexico without succumbing to what is commonly called “Montezuma’s revenge.” The tourist in Europe generally falls afoul of what the Spaniards called the turistas, and blames it on a change of water, a change of diet, the local cooking oil, strange sea food, green vegetables, bad ice, peculiar wine—anything at all.
I really can’t say why nothing upsets my stomach, unless it was the early training of that poor repository of juvenile whim to expect and accept anything at all. I could and did chase sour pickles with ice cream. They said you shouldn’t mix sea food with sweets. If they had made a shrimp-flavored ice cream I would have been the first to ask for it. You supposedly couldn’t combine watermelon with certain things, and garlic with other things. I combined watermelon with everything and I can still munch garlic by the clove. I have eaten sheep’s eyes with Arabs, raw sea food with Japs, fried grub worms with Africans, and all manner of strange exotic fruits everywhere. I do not recommend this as a diet for everyone. All I can say is that nothing I eat makes me sick.
As a kid I had a sort of inventive mind. Nobody frowned on eating raw clams and oysters, fresh and salty dripping from their beds. If clams and oysters were sea food, I reckoned, then so were fish and crabs and shrimp. I never went to sea (going to sea was shoving the dinghy off the shingle and ramming home the oarlocks) without a plentiful supply of salt and a bag of fruit. The fruit nearly always included lemons and limes against the scurvy, because a solitary seafarer never knew when an exclusive diet of salt horse and hardtack would breed scurvy and inspire the crew to mutiny.
I had not read at the time that lime juice would cook fish if left alone, in the Polynesian fashion, but it did not take me very long to discover that raw fish and raw shrimp and raw crab meat were delicious if well-salted, sprinkled with lemon or lime juice, and left a short while in the sun. I got particularly fond of mullet, which we used for bait when we were surf casting. The Old Man complained bitterly that I ate more cut bait than the fish did, but die half-dried, heavily salted mullet was delicious, particularly if accompanied by a chocolate bar.
A quarter-decade later I encountered biltong in Africa. Biltong is made by slicing thin sheets of meat and spreading it on bushes to dry in the sun. It turns black and is almost unswallowable, but is a power of comfort to chew and is most nutritious. The old Boer voortrekkers used it as a staple, much as our coon-capped trail blazers dived into the wilds with a bag of pemmican or jerky, which is practically the same thing. A really well-cured biltong will break off in short sticks, like crumbly candy, and is delicious as well as sustaining.
Biltong came as no surprise to me, nor did dried fish in the Pacific and Japan. They only tasted vaguely familiar, as if I had been there before.
As a kid I cooked the fruits of my gun about as sketchily as any savage. We made long safaris on Saturdays, which were as full of adventure as any major safari I made in later years. Even in the air-rifle stage we had attained considerable skill with the Daisies, and later the fifty-shot BB pump guns. Robins, song sparrows, jorees, thrushes, woodpeckers, and the big flickers—the yellowhammers—were regarded as major game, and the occasional dove, rain crow, or once in a long while a quail or marsh hen were placed in the elephant, lion, buffalo category. What we shamelessly slew we cooked over a hasty fire—sketchily skinned, hastily gutted, and unwashed—impaled on a green stick and merely scorched. But it tasted good at the time, and oddly it tasted just as good later...
...such as a couple of years ago in Africa. One day on a long walk after elephant we got hungry at midday, and nobody carries a chop box when he is fighting high grass after moving elephant. We called a halt, and somebody shot a small antelope, a gerenuk, I think it was. We whipped off the hide and emptied the stomach. We ate its heart and liver raw, and it was delicious. We roasted a few chops over a hasty fire. It may sound horrible, but the animal was still hot from life and tasted great after being liberally salted.
We performed a small series of experiments thereafter, and found that all birds and most small gazelle tasted wonderful, if you got them onto the fire while they were still warm with recent life. It was only after they cooled out and rigor mortis set in that they had to be aged and otherwise kitchen-treated to provide tenderness.
The birds were particularly good. We would shoot a batch of sand grouse, young guinea, doves, pigeons, or francolin, clean them while they were still quivering, impale them on a green stick, and pop them over the coals, and they were great. And these were no savage palates, either. We would go home to camp that night and sit down to a dinner which might include caviar, breast of guinea fowl, asparagus, and fresh fruit, washed down with a French wine such as Mouton-Rothschild or Chambolle-Musigny. One of the heartiest eaters of the half-cooked, only-just-dead birds was a Spaniard, who made annual pilgrimages to France merely to eat his way across the countryside and who was an expert on wines and sauces.
It did not really seem to matter what you ate, as a youngster, if you were actually hungry. One of the palatial meals I shall always remember (and still eat, when I am lucky enough to find an old-fashioned country store when I am quail hunting in the Carolinas) was what we had around noontime, when the birds had fed back into the cool of the swamp and the dogs needed water and a breather before hunting resumed around three-thirty.
A gourmet would shudder at this, perhaps, but what we ate was canned salmon (the same as we fed the dogs), canned sardines, oyster crackers or plain soda crackers, gingersnaps, and rat cheese. This was washed down with one of the enormous bottles of soft drinks they used to sell for a nickel, grape-or orange-flavored, and twice the size of a Coke. The Old Man called it “bellywash,” and so it was, but it made a delicious accompaniment to the sardines, gingersnaps, and rat cheese. If belching is a sign of politeness in some countries we were more than exceedingly polite.
All through the woods in the afternoon I gnawed on dirty—and sometimes bloodstained from the pockets of my hunting coat—peppermint candies and hard cooking apples from the barrel, with perhaps an enormous, bumpy, brine-rimed sour or dill pickle from the keg that stood in the cool of the store, amongst the kegs that held the various sizes of nails, under the shelves which contained the overalls and hickory shirts. If I was in funds I might also buy a bag of assorted cakes from the slanting stand that held them—crumbly vanilla johnny cakes, as big as coffee saucers, round sticky black chocolate cakes with vanilla goo between the cake halves, and great pink things with sparse slivers of white coconut glued to the top pastry.
To go home to an oyster roast, with that sort of backlog of fodder, did not seem strange, although roasted oysters are held by some to be indigestible enough without the aid of the earlier accompaniment, without the cool-of-the-evening swill of scuppernong wine at the nearest colored man’s farmhouse when your whole body is still hot from hunting.
And speaking of wine, for a man who in later life learned a little of vintage years and brand names, I was in on the birth of some of the more bizarre home-stomped beverages that ever assaulted a palate. Or a stomach.
With no regard whatsoever for the Volstead Act we young hellions pounded juice-oozy wild cherries into goo, fattened the mixture with sugar, and strained the fermented leavings into what we fondly believed was wine. Some wild and savage voodoo experiments were concocted in the cool of the caves we built—hideaways against the onslaughts of hostile Indians, parents, and if we had thought about it, revenooers. Dried apricots and raisins made an acceptable mash, as did grapes and fresh peaches. Mostly the stuff was nauseating to the taste, and usually contained collections of dead beetles and woozy flies, but the mere idea that we were doing something unsanctioned was sufficiently intoxicating.
I really do not know how we all lived through it. We chewed sour grass and smoked rabbit tobacco in our totem pipes. We combined sparkleberries with green persimmons and richened the mixture with all manner of nuts, from the rich tame pecans to wild hickories and chinquapins. Uncle Jimmy’s all-purpose store contained penny candies that must have been confected of equal portions of ratsbane and sugar. Irey Ivans, in colored town, specialized in Brown Dogs, which seemed simply to be made of peanuts and burnt sugar. The colored folk did interesting things with blackstrap molasses in candy form, which I loved. And I never turned a hair when confronted by roast coon or a mess of chitterlings or squirrel-head stew.
We ate these oddly assorted vittles avidly. I can remember clearly drinking stickily sweet condensed milk so thick you could cut it; and the yams we roasted in the woods were notable more for their content of ingrained dirt and wood ash than for their half-raw innards.
We had only one rule on food: If it grew wild, was bought in a store, or was condemned as unfit for consumption by parents it had to be delicious. Some of the less hardy scientists occasionally went green in the face and became ill. They were greeted with jeers, the same unfeeling juvenile taunts that were hurled at the timid souls who got seasick.
When I grew older I graduated to the vile corn liquor and the viler home-brew of the prohibition era, and never batted an eye. I survived Tunisian eau-de-vie (ugh!), Australian whisky, South Sea jungle juice, and some illegal seagoing mixtures of compass-cleaning alcohol and grapefruit juice. I have sampled Kaffir beer and Tanganyika pombe, which ferments after it hits the stomach. And I have survived, although the Lord in His wisdom only knows why.
When he discussed the range of my gustatory habits with something more than admiring disgust the Old Man dusted off the old chestnut about curiosity killing the cat. “But in your case,” he said, “it’s a very large cat, and anyhow you ain’t home yet.”
The Old Man was generally right about most things, and these days, on some mornings, I have a queasy feeling that his record for accuracy is still unbroken, even if it’s taken a long time to jell.