Fork It Over The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater-Mantesh

by Unknown

  After Worth Ordering Again, my next vegan gastronomic rating is Just Plain Bad. In that classification I place Angelica Kitchen’s three-bean chili, one of those profoundly unsuccessful attempts to make a dish that ordinarily relies on meat taste as though the meat isn’t missed.

  Also Just Plain Bad was the overly spiced, overly smooth humus served with a lump of cauliflower plopped in it, a carrot-apple juice melding two incompatible flavors, and a translucent fruit-and-gelatin parfait that looked like baby food but would frighten any child who tasted it.

  Making my third vegan category, Bad Beyond Belief, was a “daily seasonal special” called Scary, Posh, Baby & Sporty. It had lots of everything, including tofu sour cream, yellowed cauliflower, gnarled radishes, and what seemed to be weeds. On a second visit, my special of “baked 2 4 8

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  ginger tofu triangles with udon noodles in a silky peanut sauce” arrived with sweet potatoes, broccoli, kimchi, mizuna, peanuts, and sesame seeds but without the tofu. In real cooking, unlike vegan cooking, main ingredients seldom if ever are forgotten by the kitchen.

  If Angelica Kitchen satisfies the repressed hippie yearnings of the vegan community, then Zen Palate addresses a different psychological need, a longing to connect with the mystical East. The decor of the Ninth Avenue branch is surprisingly trendy, with oversize sconces, sponged walls, and dimmed lights, but any decorative effort is overwhelmed by a drab, indifferent staff. The kitchen is determined to cook food quickly rather than well, and the outerwear of customers is strewn about, making the place look like a suburban rec room on NFL

  game day.

  I ate one dish Worth Ordering Again, a plate of delicate ravioli stuffed with a not unpleasant mixture of soy protein, bamboo shoots, and snow peas and topped with a subdued sesame-wasabi sauce. Very nearly Worth Ordering Again, but I wouldn’t, were the “sizzling medallions,” which I liked until the monotonous texture of the chewy little orange-flavored wheat-gluten blobs tired me out. Bad Beyond Belief were cardboard-like scallion pancakes with no scallion taste, pan-fried vegetable dumplings filled with a repugnant brown mash, and a dish called Dreamland. I thought Dreamland had promise. It contained deep-fried linguine, black mushrooms, and marinated ginger. This dish severely tested my karma, because after a single bite, I wanted to throw it across the room.

  Hangawi, a Korean vegan restaurant, turned out to be so much more admirable than the other two places that I would put it on a totally different spiritual and culinary plane. I didn’t love what I ate there, simply because the food suffered mightily from the limitations of the vegan diet, but I did find the cooking impressive.

  I approached Hangawi warily, because like most Americans, I find Korean cuisine a little too unconventional, with its emphasis on steam-ing, marinating, and casseroles that aren’t anything like the ones our mothers made. I yanked open the imposing outer door to the restau-F O R K I T O V E R

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  rant and entered a tiny anteroom. Then I had a choice to make: go forward or flee. To commit to a meal at Hangawi takes courage, for the staff confiscates your shoes, and then there is no escape. On the other hand, the polished wood floor feels really good under stocking feet.

  Joining me for this meal was the vegan who fell prey to her yoga instructor. She seemed in a pleasant enough mood, particularly for a vegan, although she complained of not having had sufficient time to enjoy her usual predinner massage. She told me she’d had some really good falafel for lunch. This is how vegans normally begin a meal, by reciting the details of their previous one, a side effect of a near starvation diet. The room, appropriately serene, had polished wood tables, screens, and lots of pots and ceramics. The music was mostly that Eastern-style wailing that sounds like a soprano holding a high note.

  As an aperitif, we tasted two drinks she recommended, cold pine-tree juice and hot citron-paste tea. Both were indeed delicious, and both were insanely sweet, which brings me to my fourth category of vegan cuisine: Shockingly Sweet. With no animal fat permitted in the diet and surprisingly few fried foods on menus, vegans seem to obtain almost all their pleasure from sweetness. Much of the food I sampled at Hangawi went directly to the gratification of that craving. The best dish, as it should have been, was a $29.95 plate of wild matsutaki mushrooms grilled over pine needles; the mushrooms had a clean, woodsy, earthy flavor, although I doubt they detoxified me, as promised. Vegans seem to believe that every bite they take has an immediate physiological effect on the body, while we everyday omnivores understand that it takes decades of burgers and fries to really mess us up.

  My Date with a Vegan

  She wore a dress with spaghetti straps, quite elegant by vegan standards, in the photo that appeared in the personals section of the Veggie Singles News. I wrote to her, suggesting lunch. She responded, recommend-ing Zenith Vegetarian Cuisine, a vegan restaurant in the Hell’s Kitchen section of Manhattan. Actually, any restaurant dishing up vegan food is Hell’s Kitchen to me.

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  She looked lovely, head to toe. Well, maybe not her toes, since they were encased in vegan-sanctioned Payless nonleather shoes. She told me she had been on three previous dates with men who had answered her singles ad, and all of them had turned out to be vegetarians, not vegans. I was relieved to learn that there are not as many vegans out there as I had feared.

  She told me she was twenty-nine, worked as a corporate travel agent, and lived in Queens with her eight-year-old daughter, who adores Chicken McNuggets. That’s as lax a brand of family veganism as I’ve ever come across. She told me she didn’t get along with the first vegetarian because he was too macho and insisted on paying for the meal.

  “We went out to shoot pool after dinner and I won,” she said. “That didn’t go over too well.” She said she didn’t get along with the second man because of his attitude. When they got to the restaurant and she asked him where he wanted to sit, he replied, “On your lap.” I agreed that was an inappropriate comment for vegans and vegetarians alike.

  She said he was an Israeli.

  I told her that was a pretty typical comment for an Israeli.

  Her third date was the most promising, but the budding relationship stalled when he started lecturing her on the breakdown of the American family, how every household needs a man. This is not an approach recommended to anyone attempting to charm a woman who is a single parent.

  I wished her the best of luck in future dating endeavors and warned her about the seductive powers of the vegan yoga instructors she was certain to meet. She promised she would ask my advice before she ever went out with a “crazy nut-job yoga instructor.” I had done my duty. If I can save even one woman from one of them, I will have left the vegan world a better place.

  As long as there have been vegans, I have looked upon them as persons with whom I would not want to break bread—actually, one bite of the F O R K I T O V E R

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  revoltingly dry corn bread at Angelica Kitchen should be enough to make even vegans not want to break bread with vegans.

  I have now changed my mind. I had a lovely lunch with the woman who placed her advertisement in the Veggie Single News and would eat with her again, as long as she didn’t order the “eggplant chips” at Zenith. I had a nice dinner with my friend at Hangawi, but she was my friend before turning to veganism and so we could talk about the old days, before her life centered around tofu.

  I’m not even certain any longer that vegans are the worst people who have ever lived. After all, Adolf Hitler was merely a vegetarian.

  GQ, april 1999

  S H E E P T H R I L L S

  “Aye, I liked the old days,” said John Marsh, a fifty-year-old butcher dismayed by how genteel modern haggis-making has become. He picked a fine, fat haggis out of the display case at the shop where he works and pointed to the list of ingredients.

  “Nowadays,” he added, “it all has to be labeled. An old butcher I worked for who started b
ack in the thirties taught me how to make haggis. He said, ‘The more crap you put in, the better it is.’ In the old days anything left over at the end of the week we took out of the freezer and flung in the haggis. Making haggis then, it was a good laugh.” I had come upon Marsh at the well-regarded Lindsay Grieve Family Butchers, located on the main street of Hawick, one of those Scottish towns with a name impossible to pronounce, no matter how simple it looks. I had driven there to purchase a haggis, which I added to the growing pile on the backseat of my rental car. Some men travel alone, but I went nowhere in Scotland without a carload of haggis—canned haggis, shrink-wrapped haggis, plastic-wrapped haggis, and, whenever possible, haggis enclosed in the genuine stomach of a sheep. (One good thing about haggis: it doesn’t express its unique bouquet until after it’s cooked.)

  My mission was to taste every haggis I could find, or at least keep trying until the haggis hangover I was developing compelled me to stop.

  I started in Edinburgh and made my way in an ever-widening circle around the city, traveling as far south as the Borders—the region just 2 5 4

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  above England—and as far north as Pitlochry, a town known to have a butcher keen on haggis lasagna.

  Haggis is heaven to a Scotsman. It is a foodstuff that resonates with the glories of days gone by, even if to outsiders it is nothing but a sack of oatmeal and innards. The primary ingredient is offal, known as “pluck” in the local vernacular, which consists of the liver, the heart, and the lungs of the chosen animal, usually a sheep. Add oatmeal, fat, and spices, wrap it in a casing made from the stomach, and you have the authentic national dish, as delectable to Scotsmen as sweetmeats served with afternoon tea. A friend of mine calls haggis the first meal in a bag.

  That this food is a treasure rather than a peculiarity is almost certainly the responsibility of Robert Burns, who called it the “Great chieftain o’ the puddin’-race!” in his famous ode, “To a Haggis.” To be fair to Burns, the Scots might well have overestimated his passion for haggis, inasmuch as he also wrote “To a Mouse” (“Wee, sleekit, cow’rin’, tim’rous beastie”) and “To a Louse” (“Ha! where ya gaun, ye crowlin’

  ferlie!”). Regardless, the January 25 birthday of Burns is a major holiday, and on that night a lumpish haggis is piped into banquet halls with all the pomp and ceremony of a medieval banquet.

  Testaments to the magnificence of this dish abound, yet nowhere in my research was I able to uncover a single utterance about the flavor—or, more materially, the smell. There are plenty of plaudits, but no tasting notes. That job, I realized, had been left to me.

  Haggis isn’t everywhere. It’s not like it’s stacked up in every petrol station, clothing store, and souvenir shop. That would be shortbread cookies. Traditionally, haggis is prepared and precooked in butcher shops, then brought home and warmed up. (These days it’s mostly microwaved.) I set out to pick up samples of the most renowned, figuring I could bring them to B&Bs, where the proprietors would be happy to work up an evening meal. That last piece of business was a bit difficult to arrange—after all, B&B doesn’t stand for Bed & Dinner.

  My first stop was the Melville Guest House in Edinburgh, operated by Juli and Mel Jerome, who serve evening meals in their dining room, The Crock and Spurtle. (The Scots tend to name everything, not just F O R K I T O V E R

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  pets.) Before dinner, I went shopping at a local supermarket for what the Jeromes assured me was the best canned haggis, Grant’s Traditional Recipe. I located it in the “ready meals” section, not far from the canned pork tongue. At Marks & Spencer, the famous specialty store, I discovered a variation of haggis made entirely with pork products. Pig lungs, indeed! And I also bought a haggis from Crombie’s, a stylish downtown butcher shop where it was a bit pricier than the usual $3 to $4 a pound.

  Then there was Macsween, perhaps the most famous haggis-maker in all the rugged land. I drove out to the suburbs, where the plant is located, to pick up both the traditional and vegetarian versions. While there, I tried to impress Jo Macsween with the magnitude of my quest to eat more haggis in a shorter period of time than any man alive. I can’t say she was impressed. “When my brother and I worked on the production side,” she responded, “we ate some of each batch. We had haggis five times a day.”

  Back at the B&B, I learned my first lesson: haggis isn’t pretty. Once the packaging is cut open, the contents spill out, looking like crumbly meat loaf. The odor, however, is complex and distinctive, with the musti-ness of an old bookstore, the tang of a Turkish spice market, and the animality of a butcher shop’s back room. At different times, with different haggis, I would note allspice, sage, cinnamon, and even ginger.

  They all had a perfume I’d call eau d’abattoir, the not-entirely-unpleasant smell of the inside of an animal.

  Macsween’s is a haggis-eater’s haggis, pungent and impressive.

  Crombie’s was much more subdued, almost to a fault. Grant’s suffered from what I call the Dinty Moore effect, tasting like the can it came from. The vegetarian haggis could well have been vegan fare; it reminded me of a life-sustaining lentil-barley mash. The all-pork haggis was unapproachable; it brought to mind the body of a decaying animal lying in a meadow of wild flowers.

  The Jeromes served tatties and neeps—mashed potatoes and mashed turnips—with the haggis. So would everybody else. For many Scots, tatties and neeps is the first solid food they eat as a child, which might account for the unshakable bond they have with it. As the week 2 5 6

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  wore on, I became less and less appreciative of all the mashing that took place for my benefit. Haggis appears to come with no other accompaniments, even if you beg.

  The next night I arrived to a greeting from curious horses at Whitehill Farm B&B, just outside Kelso, with the haggis I’d gathered up from Lindsay Grieve in Hawick, David Palmer Butcher in Jedburgh, and J.R.

  Mitchell & Son in Kelso, shops located just north of the border with England. I’d asked the manager of Palmer’s, Allan Learmonth, if he had encountered any competition from nearby English butchers, and he said they’d indeed had the temerity to enter haggis competitions. “We wiped the floor with them,” he bragged.

  My welcome from Betty Smith, the proprietor of Whitehill, was somewhat restrained, and I soon realized why: I hadn’t brought haggis from her favorite butcher, George Lees of Yetholm. So off I went. The Borders countryside of Scotland is a watercolor painting, and I had no reason to regret a fifteen-mile drive. My outing took me past ancient crumbling stone walls, sculpted hedges, rolling fields, and tumbling hills.

  Only the roadkill is disturbing, beautiful ring-necked pheasants no match for breakneck Scottish drivers.

  When I walked into the shop, located in a town of six hundred, I informed Lees (a dead ringer for Patrick Stewart) that I had come to buy a haggis. He replied, “Good for you.” He said his recipe was taken from a book printed in the nineteenth century, but he’d adjusted it.

  “Our recipe doesn’t include lungs. I don’t fancy eating lungs myself.” Joining David and Betty Smith and me at the four-haggis hoedown was another guest of the B&B, Susan Flack, who was born in Scotland but lives in England, where she seldom has the opportunity to enjoy haggis. “Not many there will eat it with me,” she complained. I invited her to dinner after hearing this heartbreaking boarding school tale: “At St. Margaret’s School in Aberdeen the dinners were unspeakably disgusting and they forced me to eat everything I didn’t like. I was ten and always hungry. Once a year, on Burns Night, they served haggis, and the girls under eleven weren’t given it—they got boiled eggs instead. I got desperate, wouldn’t eat the eggs, and they gave haggis to me. Maybe it F O R K I T O V E R

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  was made of things I wouldn’t eat if they were spread out on a plate, but I loved the meatiness and the spiciness. It was heaven.” Flack looked joyfully at the long oak dining room table heaped with haggis. The Smiths remained comp
osed. I found myself twitching a bit.

  The Grieve haggis won our competition handily. Everyone had a different reason for preferring it, but it seemed pleasingly beefy to me. Second was the haggis from Lees, which had an appealing liver flavor and a smooth, rich texture. For dessert Betty Smith served lemon flummery, a lemon-chiffon pudding so light I couldn’t stop expressing my gratitude.

  That left just two oddities on my haggis agenda, the first being venison haggis from Fletchers outside Auchtermuchty. The secret to finding the farm is to turn left after reaching the Tay Valley Cat Welfare Society, not before. When I drove up, a herd of farm-raised deer perked up at my approach, then fled across a pasture, moving as gracefully as a school of fish. I paid for my haggis in the honesty box, then brought it to Ninewells Farmhouse in Newburgh, located high on a bluff over the Tay River. The view from the porch of this B&B encompasses river, fields, hills, deer, sheep, cattle, and a tiny train that occasionally chugs past, rattling like a toy. Sir Walter Scott, it is said, looked out from this very spot and declared the view the best in Christendom.

  Correctly sensing that I might be tiring of haggis unadorned, Barbara Baird stuffed it into a chicken breast. Although she cooked the dish beautifully, the chicken flavor was crushed by the omnipotent offal.

  The venison haggis, however, was one of my favorites—herbaceous, meaty, and rich. For dessert she prepared crannachan, a pudding that appears almost without fail at the annual Robert Burns dinners. It’s prepared with cream, oatmeal, honey, raspberries, and whiskey, and is as rich as butter.

  My final meal took place at Landscape, an impeccable Victorian B&B owned by Kathleen and Robbie Scott. It’s located just off the main street of Pitlochry, a town that no tourist bus bypasses. I was desperately hoping that the haggis lasagna from Macdonald Brothers Butchers & Delicatessen would remind me of Italian food. Regrettably, it did not.