Eating

by Jason Epstein

  TEN

  LAST RESORTS

  When I find myself overwhelmed by human folly and the idiocy of nations, I think of exile. My first choice is Iceland, the homeland of my dear friends Ana and Olaf Olafsson and their children, Ollie, Arni, and Soley. Olaf is Iceland’s leading novelist and lives in Sag Harbor. He spends his weekdays in Manhattan, where he works for a large media conglomerate. On holidays and in summer, the family goes home to Iceland, some four and a half hours east of New York, whose three hundred thousand citizens share their island with five thousand elves and five hundred thousand sheep. The latter they consume at an annual rate of fifty-five pounds per capita, more than a pound a week. Americans eat a mere pound of lamb a year. But in Iceland eating lamb is an ecological necessity. Iceland’s multitudinous sheep are depleting the island’s fragile ground cover of grass, moss, sedge, and berries. This forage lends the lamb its fine flavor, but also keeps the island’s thin and irreplaceable topsoil from blowing out to sea. For Icelanders, eating lamb is a matter of survival. The free-range newborns left to roam each spring upon the mountain meadows are as delicately flavored, tender, and greaseless as the salt-meadow lambs of France. Smaller than either French or American lamb, Icelandic lamb lacks the heft and intensity Americans are used to, but this is a fair exchange for its delicate purity. Since Iceland derives most of its energy from the geothermal dome upon which the island sits, its atmosphere is uncorrupted by hydrocarbons. The shellfish, haddock, cod, and halibut from its clean waters are its major export. So far, the usually resourceful Icelanders have not marketed their surplus lamb as a delicacy, but now that their economy has been badly wounded by the banking crisis, perhaps they will turn to their lambs to restore their capital.

  Icelanders, descendants of medieval Norsemen whose ancient language they still speak, are not as insular as one might think of an island people in the remote North Atlantic, just beneath the Arctic Circle. Culturally, they are self-sufficient, from long experience of fending for themselves on rugged ground and perilous seas, a far more difficult habitat than North American settlers faced. The first thing one notices upon arriving in Iceland is that neither space nor emotion is wasted. The architecture is unembellished. The towns are shipshape. There must be rich Icelanders and poor Icelanders, and more of the latter since the collapse of Iceland’s economy, but the distinction between them and their neighborhoods is invisible, at least to strangers. The Icelandic manner is confident, welcoming, but reserved: the humor of survivors living on the world’s fragile edge. This reticence may explain why Icelandic lamb is little known to the outside world.

  Iceland’s rates of life expectancy and literacy are higher than those of the United States. With a population two-thirds the size of the New York City borough of Staten Island, Iceland has its own international and domestic airline, a resident opera company from which it exports tenors to La Scala and other companies, a famous rock star (Björk), a world-class novelist (Olaf Olafsson), a symphony orchestra, and until Halldór Laxness died ten years ago, a Nobel laureate in literature. Reykjavik, the capital, where about a third of Icelanders live, has nine theaters, and thirty or so restaurants, not including fast-food outlets. The Hotel Holt, with its first-class restaurant, is a member of Relais & Châteaux. Reykjavik has more bookstores than I could count, and several publishing companies putting out about a thousand new titles a year. Nearly all Icelanders belong to the national church, but perhaps a third of the population believe in elves or hesitate to admit that they don’t. Iceland has a coast guard to rescue fishermen in distress and protect its fishing grounds, but no army, navy, or air force. It has no enemies or spheres of influence. Until the banking crisis it was the fourth-most-productive economy per capita in the world, and the fourth-happiest.

  When I visited Iceland some ten years ago with Olaf, I knew nothing about the local cuisine and expected less from such a barren country. I had heard that the shepherds entertain themselves on long winter nights by retelling the Sagas and feasting on rotten shark, but Olaf says this isn’t true. Icelanders no longer eat rotten shark. Iceland grows its own vegetables, and even bananas in greenhouses heated by its geothermal springs. The sight of a sleek trawler unloading fresh cod and haddock and a flock of pint-size sheep blocking traffic gave me further hope. That night we dined on ptarmigan and reindeer at the Hotel Holt, and the following afternoon shopped for our dinner at a supermarket. Icelandic lamb racks are boned, the loins and tenderloins sold separately. We bought some of each, took them home, and browned them in butter, finishing the loins in the oven to barely medium rare. The tenderloins, about three and a half ounces each, we served from the pan with Icelandic boiled potatoes, caramelized in butter and sugar. We arranged the loins on a platter with local greens.

  A few months later, in Sag Harbor at dinner with the Olafssons and friends, we began with Icelandic langoustes, which Olaf had ordered from Iceland the day before along with five pounds of lamb and some fish. We napped the langoustes with garlic-infused butter and followed them with bits of steamed cod and haddock caught in Iceland the day before, and then the lamb, sautéed quickly in butter and a little salt with a dab of rosemary-infused demi-glace, barely thickened with a trace of arrowroot. With the lamb we served some fresh peas and roasted tomatoes. Our neighbor Sheila Lukens, with her sixth sense of what goes with what, supplied three bottles of Bandol Rosé (Domaine Tempier).

  To protect Iceland’s delicate soil, the lamb population has been reduced by 15 percent since 1990, but the government still fails to promote its surplus overseas as a delicacy, the Kobe beef of lamb. The loins, together with the smaller tenderloins, are sold boned and fresh from September to early November, when the six-month-old lambs are butchered. Since there’s no way to house the flocks over the winter, they are sold the rest of the year frozen, which does not affect their flavor or texture.

  ICELANDIC LAMB

  For our dinner for six, we sautéed in butter three pounds of boned loins, about three ounces each, and tenderloins, one to two ounces each, and made a light sauce of shallots, cooked in butter until softened, then dusted with arrowroot to make a light roux. We added half a bottle of Pinot Noir, which we reduced by half, and poured in seven ounces of veal and duck demi-glace (ordered from dartagnan.com), and reduced the mixture again by half, until it had just begun to thicken, then turned off the flame and steeped a branch of rosemary in the sauce. The shelled peas we cooked without water, and we roasted six medium tomatoes from the garden until soft in a 350-degree oven with fresh thyme, chopped garlic softened in a little olive oil, and a sprinkling of sugar.

  A few years ago, our friend Frances Cook, who was then United States ambassador to Oman, invited us to stay with her in Muscat, the capital of this enchanting if reclusive sultanate at the opposite side of the world from Iceland. Oman, on the Arabian Sea, tucked between the United Arab Emirates, to the north, and Yemen, two thousand miles to the south, somewhat resembles the state of California. It has occurred to me amid our wars and rumors of war that Iceland in summer and Oman in winter might offer a decent refuge, assuming a few airlines survive the world’s meander toward chaos. Here the language is Arabic and the religion Islam, but English is taught as a second language in a thousand state schools, and the Omani version of Islam—Ibadhism—preaches justice, tolerance, and nonviolence. Omanis may wear what they please. Men wear Western clothes or traditional Arab robes and turbans. Women’s tribal dress can be elaborate: fine gold-shot cotton, or embroidered caftans of a heavy material often accented with gold coins. Under a blazing sun one day in the otherwise empty rose and golden desert, I saw an Omani woman wearing a tribal half-mask, dressed in a gold-trimmed caftan. With a long stick she was herding a flock of twenty or so black goats, a magnificent sight against the yellow sands. Tribal masks are optional but discouraged by the government, which is aggressively modernizing against the day, not far off, when the oil is gone. Omanis in the eighteenth century controlled the East African coast as far south as Zanzibar, where they add
ed cloves and sugar to the island’s native pepper crop and ran a flourishing spice trade. Omanis also dominated the East African slave trade, specializing, I was told, in Ethiopian women, valued for their beauty, which may explain the Omanis’ often startling good looks. This opulent past colors Oman’s oil-rich present with soft infusions of old colors, textures, and tastes. Even today you can walk along the shore at Salalah, Oman’s southern port, which served the China trade four centuries ago, and find undisturbed shards of centuries-old Chinese blue and white porcelain strewn on the beach, or you might wait in Salalah’s modern airport beside a young Bedouin woman in a birdlike silver half-mask, the silken cuffs of an expensive blouse visible against her hennaed wrists and delicate hands resting on her smart black caftan trimmed in gold coins.

  When Judy and I landed at Muscat, after an overnight flight from London, we were puzzled to find that, once we had cleared Immigration and still in our morning jet-lag fog, we were led, without explanation, by an official out to the tarmac, where Frances and a pair of helicopter pilots awaited us under a hot morning sun. As I tried to orient myself, I saw through the shimmering heat a 747 rumbling to a stop on the runway, turning 180 degrees and rumbling back the other way. Frances said, “It’s the Sultan’s. He doesn’t like to use it, but owning a 747 is obligatory for sultans. Our sultan has two of them. The pilots are taking this one out for its morning exercise.”

  Still in a daze, we were now in an Omani Air Force helicopter rising into the Jebal Akhdar, the formidable Green Mountain Range that looms over Muscat. The mountains are rugged, steep, sharp-edged, inaccessible, beautiful, menacing. We came to earth on a high meadow. My ears popped as Judy, Frances, and I stepped out of the helicopter and followed the pilots toward a low-slung stone villa painted white, facing a green lawn and a screen of young fruit trees in bloom, against a Magritte-blue sky. I was told that we were at the rest house of the minister of defense in the mountain village of Saiq and were expected for lunch. The air force cook, Frances said, was formidable, envied by the other services. I was now thoroughly disoriented. What brought me around was a glorious display of local fruit—apricots, pomegranates, dates, melon, grapes—on a table under an awning on the tile patio. Lunch with the handsome air force officers was an unctuous chicken curry whose components I could only begin to parse. This was followed by a pit-roasted goat. I glimpsed our chef at the kitchen door, barely five feet in height, with the handlebar mustache of a sergeant major, a broad smile, and a white Nehru cap.

  I had eaten roast goat many times in New York’s barrio and in Mexico, where villagers still wrap the quartered animal in banana leaves, tie it in a basket of palm fronds, and bury it overnight in a smoldering fire pit, so that on the following day the spiced meat falls away in caramelized shreds. Our Omani chef followed the same procedures. This fire-pit cookery was probably brought to the New World by the conquistadors, whose Spanish ancestors had themselves been conquered some nine hundred years earlier by Muslim Arabs, whose desert cuisine, along with their genes, had mingled for centuries with those of the Spanish. It is this desert cookery, introduced to the New World by the gold-crazed Spanish as they stumbled toward what is now Kansas, that probably became the ancestor of today’s slow-cooked, spicy barbecue, the brash New World descendant of our Omani chef’s fugue of melted dates, powdered cloves, cardamom, cumin, cinnamon, and black pepper, the treasure of Oman’s long Zanzibar sojourn.

  New World goat in the Hispanic style can be agreeable when it is served moist and not overdone or heavily spiced, but the meltingly tender goat that we ate on the Jebel Akhdar that April afternoon, when the apricot and pomegranate blossoms trembled on our mountain meadow against an impossibly blue sky, was nothing like it. I was reminded of another April day, in 1954, in Rome, when in the Piazza Navona Barbara and I first tasted the slow-roasted unweaned lamb that the Romans eat at Easter and call abbacchio, whose traditional method of preparation probably descended from the Arab or perhaps Indian original. In Rome, the lamb is not dry-roasted in a fire pit but slowly braised in an oven.

  This preparation, in which the slightly caramelized meat falls away from the bone, like that of a braised shoulder or shank rather than the traditionally pinkish leg of lamb, must have been practiced long before recorded history, when fuel was more valuable than time, and parsimonious cooks conserved the heat of a wood fire by smothering the embers with earth and relying upon the stone lining of the pit to release its heat slowly through the night. Today this technique can be approximated by slow braising in a heavy covered pot, either on the stovetop or in the oven, which is how the Roman cooks must have prepared our memorable abbacchio.

  Back in New York at Eastertime after our Omani adventure, I did not dig a hole in the garden, line it with stones, and roast a goat overnight. I did, however, order from my Italian butcher a fifteen-pound lamb. Since these are not likely to be widely available, a twenty-pound spring lamb will do. The preparation is simple, but first the cook must deal with the problem of squeamishness among guests, who may recoil from young lamb as if it were the family poodle. Surely it is not an act of kindness to kill an innocent young lamb, but neither is it kind to kill the pigs that end up in our BLTs. We are omnivores, and in our various cultures—or under extreme conditions in all cultures—we will eat almost anything. In China, where snake soup is a popular restorative, the Chow dog—as in “chow mein” or “chow line”—was bred for the wok, and rats, according to the novelist Patrick O’Brian, were avidly hunted and eaten by Royal Navy midshipmen during the Napoleonic Wars, and surely by their counterparts in other navies throughout history. In my own Chinatown neighborhood, innocent frogs sit in barrels, unaware of the cleaver that awaits them; the French joyously swallow entire buntings in a single bite. Only unwavering vegetarians are entitled to deplore well-prepared infant lamb, but their complaint, though admirable, will not spare the life of a single edible creature.

  BRAISED YOUNG LAMB

  If you are not handy with a cleaver and saw, ask your butcher to split the lamb in two lengthwise and divide each leg in three pieces and each shoulder in two, leaving a few ribs attached. Then divide the remainder of the rack and the saddle into four pieces. Following a recipe by Marcia Dorr in A Taste of Oman, I made a rub of equal amounts of powdered cinnamon, cumin, cloves, and cardamom sufficient to cover the pieces of lamb, added half as much fresh-ground black pepper as each spice, and let the lamb rest in this rub for two hours or so. The previous night, I had soaked two pounds of pitted dates in water to cover, and in the morning ran the softened dates through a food processor, adding maybe a half-cup of Omani date syrup—an optional ingredient which may not be easily available outside of Oman. In a heavy kettle, I browned the lamb in two cups of peanut oil, poured off and discarded most of the oil, removed the lamb, and threw in the puréed dates and syrup, a cup each of lemon juice and sherry vinegar, and some sea salt, and reduced the liquid by half. Then I checked the salt again, arranged the lamb in two layers, covered the pot, leaving the lid slightly ajar, and braised the lamb over a medium-low flame, turning the pieces from time to time so as not to scorch it. I checked the lamb occasionally for tenderness and to make sure that the liquid had not evaporated. If it had evaporated, I would have added a little water. After an hour or so, the meat was caramelized and falling off the bone.

  PURÉED PARSNIPS

  I served it with three pounds of parsnips, which I cut in chunks and boiled till tender, then puréed in a food processor with a cup of half and half and a touch of powdered ginger.

  My friend and neighbor Sheila Lukens contributed two bottles of a fine Mt. Eden Syrah, and so ten of us celebrated the annual rebirth of the land in Omani style, more or less.

  ELEVEN

  WHY WE EAT

  Strip away the trimmings and you will find that all living things, from dainty amoeba to lumbering elephant, from wiry Barack Obama to leafy maple, share a common structure: an alimentary system supporting a reproductive apparatus. Why this of all possible arrangeme
nts should be our fate is anybody’s guess. But it is plain that in the great game of survival every living thing requires nourishment in order to replicate itself and defend the tenuous grip of its species on its place in nature. Because survival demands excess, fussy feeders and reluctant breeders vanish from the gene pool, leaving stronger appetites in charge: witness the maple feasting on sunlight, then showering its multitudinous seed on the ground, or the voracious trout and its redundant spawn, or the human obsession with these twin excesses, haunting our dreams, stories, art, and music.

  All other living things rely on instinct or design to govern their hunger and lust, for unregulated desire means conflict, corruption of the habitat, and eventual extinction. The isolated forest regulates itself. The lion takes a zebra from its herd, shares it with its pride, then sleeps like its pussycat cousin sated on Purina as the herd moves on, food for another day. But when human beings encounter a pretty face or fowl, external constraints are needed. Hence our collective submission, older than recorded time, to priests, magistrates, and sacred texts to curb desire: a survival strategy embedded in ritual, law, and conscience called civilization. This uniquely human condition is foreshadowed in the expulsion of our ancestral parents from their garden of primal instinct and thrust into lives of self-denial—of either/or—a burden and an opportunity devolved upon their progeny to the present day.