I’m sitting in a sagging booth at Los Mezcales, finishing my beef cheek and tongue tacos and considering ordering the pork skin. A thought comes to my mind: Why am I so in love with this food? I salivate at the sight of the words fat or tendon on a menu. I recently returned from South Korea, where I spent a few months as a resident artist. When not in the studio, I obsessively spent most of my recreational time eating and drinking the local cuisine. However, this adventurous eating wasn’t always my style. In fact, for most of my life, I was an extremely picky eater.
I’m now a far cry from the person who, 10 years ago, would shy away from anything not found at Cracker Barrel. I have been thinking about where this out of the norm food lust came from. It wasn’t my upbringing. I truly enjoyed my corn breaded and mashed potatoed rearing, but chicken feet and pig intestines were never on the dinner table. I do know that the Travel Channel show “Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations” definitely opened my mind to exploring more about food culture. If you haven’t seen this extremely educational show, it follows a snarky veteran New York chef around the world as he eats the local diet, ranging from street vendors on dusty streets all the way to a modern square-plated fusion joint. This was the first time I had seen people enjoying eating something new and thrilling, without it being portrayed as an oddity. I was the strange person, by only eating from chain restaurants and supermarkets. Bourdain was simply asking locals what they ate and sitting down with them to share a meal. This was the same street food that society always told me was dirty and dangerous. The idea of eating a dish that’s been served in a city for hundreds of years and will be served for another hundred more thrilled me.
I got my first chance for culinary exploration while in South Korea, where I ate everything under the East Asian sun. I ate knee cartilage stew, live octopus, room temperature blood sausage from street vendors, and fish head stew. I never once got sick and I felt more Korean than I would have if I had been eating at one the many modern, western-style restaurants that are advised by the tourism board.
I became accustomed to the scorching spicy stews and chili pastes that were part of the daily diet in that part of the world, but, most importantly, I was trusting others. I rarely knew what I was ordering. I wanted to eat what locals ate, but I knew this was relative to what locals I was speaking of. Korea is modernizing quickly. Western food is often seen as a sign of progress and is incredibly popular with Korea’s youth. Although many choose this over what their parents were raised on, many are still in love with traditional food. The line for one of the more popular chicken feet restaurants in Seoul is always out the door, despite its location in a college party neighborhood.
I know I am not alone in seeking these unusual meals. There is an ever-growing movement of people who are eating and cooking with unique ingredients. This trend is much older than my recent interests. With the farm to fork, local and organic food movement, we find more and more restaurants serving older or more obscure recipes. This new expansion in desired food is portrayed in modern food-related television, blogs, and literature. But from watching these programs, I don’t really get a personal story about how someone goes from perceiving boiled calf’s head as something gross to something desirable. I want to learn how this change from food square to foodie happens, in myself and others.
To explore this question, I went to some local experts I know personally. Right below my art studio is a local popular restaurant, Eiderdown, which I find myself patronizing frequently. I have known a few of the cook staff for a few years. Since taking up residence so close, I’ve spent plenty of breaks from work discussing food over a pint of quality beer at their bar. I find this place to be a haven for lively conversations on pickled herring, intestines, and pork tendon. The executive chef, Brian Morgan, is the person who sent me to Los Mezcales to get my beef cheek tacos.
Morgan started his career at the Outback Steakhouse in Richmond, Ky. while he was still in high school. He worked his way up to Louisville’s Bistro Le Relais.
“I remember my first taste of veal stock reduction on a stale piece of Blue Dog bread standing over the dish tank like it was yesterday,” said Morgan. “Le Relais was the first place I tried sweetbreads, foie gras, chicken liver, or duck confit.”
What was once alien to Morgan 10 years ago has now become the norm. You may already know of Eiderdown’s extraordinary menu, full of dishes like duck fat popcorn, sweetbreads, and beef tongue. He learned to cook some of these ingredients during his classic dishwasher-to-stovetop education at Le Relais, where they use classic recipes to prepare French dishes.
So why does Eiderdown serve these unusual dishes? Morgan is dedicated to serving these dishes because they are simply interesting food. He seeks to make interesting and challenging food, rather than the same classic dish over and over. He wants to sustain and share the feeling of excitement in eating something new. He wants to build something great from humble ingredients.
Eiderdown is using unusual ingredients to make good food, which also helps local farmers contribute to a sustainable local food movement. When a local organic cattle farmer says he is trying to unload 50 pounds of beef hearts, you’d better believe Morgan and his cooking staff are going to pour over old cookbooks trying to find ways to adapt old and contemporary cooking practices with new and interesting results.
Eiderdown’s lead prep cook, Nate Sturdevant, is a fan of what he calls underdog food. He and I have had a few conversations about his ongoing hunt for food oddities – food that is disappearing from American pantries and is now mostly bought at international markets catering to immigrants – such as Russian canned smoked mackerel, pickled herring, and offal. His entry to the food underworld was through livers and Germantown’s well-known and reliable braunschweiger (pork liver sausage) sandwich. While working in many of Louisville’s best restaurants, he enjoyed preparing and eating pig feet with the immigrant kitchen staff, much to the dismay of the waitresses and waiters. He enjoys the uncommon and mysterious edibles, which has led him to become such a big influence at his latest gig at Eiderdown. You can find his fingerprints on many of the most daring dishes on the menu.
So have I really learned why this kind of cooking has increased in popularity recently? Not really, but I have a few guesses.
In our homogenized food culture, the daring individuals look for meals that break the mold – something that may have a cultural history, but also breaks down mental barriers that we have held for so long. We don’t eat raw meat because we’re told it is harmful. Then, the first time we try raw meat and nothing bad happens, and it tastes good, we get a thrill. Suddenly, the world becomes less scary and the things that once seemed untouchable become points of interest. Also, if the meat is local, we are more willing to take a chance. When eating becomes a personal risk, we like to know where that risk is coming from. Local farms seem less foreign to us. Knowing the meat is local also helps us gain a better connection to the life of your meals. We both drink the same water and breathe the same air as our meal did.
I also have a guess as to why more people are eating parts that are hard to disassociate from the cow, such as lips, cheeks, or tongues. There is something personal about eating tongue, instead of miscellaneous ground beef. Knowing the animal was raised locally, sustainably, and humanely helps.
This new attitude toward food can easily continue with trips to new cultures. When planning your next vacation, explore blogs and websites for places that serve truly local food. Seek the best markets to find good street vendors. If you’re going to Helsinki, you don’t want to spend your time looking for an “I ‘heart’ Finland” T-shirt. Instead, look up where you’d find the best vendace roe (freshwater whitefish eggs) or poronkäristys (sauteed reindeer).
To ingest something is to make it part of your body by adding its molecules and proteins to your own. To eat someone else’s food is a truly personal ritual. It is a level of trust. It’s long been part of many societies’ cultural traditions to welcome guests by feeding them; not to eat the food is to insult your host. Eating the local fare is the best way to take a piece of that culture with you. At the end of the last lecture I gave in Korea, during the Q&A, someone asked what souvenirs were going home with me to the United States.
I answered, “Without a doubt, I ate the most important souvenirs I got in Korea.”
–James Robert Southard
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