Far Afield: Rare Food Encounters from Around the World

Text and some photographs copyright © 2016

by Shane Mitchell

Additional photographs copyright © 2016

by James Fisher

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Ten Speed

Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing

Group, a division of Penguin Random

House LLC, New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

www.tenspeed.com

Ten Speed Press and the Ten Speed Press

colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random

House LLC.

Some of the essays and photos in this book

have previously appeared in slightly different

form in Saveur, Travel + Leisure, and Australian

Gourmet Traveller.

All photographs are by James Fisher with the

exception of those appearing on pages 8.1–8.2

which are by the author Shane Mitchell.

Some of the photographs have been previously

published.

Map on pages fm.1–fm.2 courtesy of Shutterstock.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mitchell, Shane, 1957- author. | Fisher, James, 1976-photographer.

Title: Far afield : rare food encounters from around

the world / by Shane Mitchell ; photographs by

James Fisher.

Description: Berkeley : Ten Speed Press, 2016. |

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016012457 (print) | LCCN

2016020966 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: International cooking. | Mitchell,

Shane, 1957—Travel. | Travel photography. |

BISAC: COOKING / Regional & Ethnic

/ International. | COOKING / Essays. |

PHOTOGRAPHY / Photoessays & Documentaries. |

LCGFT: Cookbooks.

Classification: LCC TX725.A1 M5375 2016 (print) |

LCC TX725.A1 (ebook) | DDC

641.59—dc23

LC record available at

https://lccn.loc.gov/2016012457

Hardcover ISBN 9781607749202

Ebook ISBN 9781607749219

Cover design by Margaux Keres

v4.1

prh

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1: MANTRA RAM / RABARI TRIBESWOMAN

Godwar Province, Rajasthan, India

CHAPTER 2: CHRISTINE & JEAN-JACQUES / GAUCHOS

Salto, Uruguay

CHAPTER 3: TIMA & ALI / FISHERMEN

Lamu Archipelago, Kenya

CHAPTER 4: KAKI / DEPARTED SPIRIT

Mixquic, Mexico

CHAPTER 5: JAYSON & ALBERTA / TARO FARMERS

Waipi‘o, Hawai‘i

CHAPTER 6: SINDRI / SHEPHERD

Fornihvammur, Iceland

CHAPTER 7: KIPALONGA / MAASAI WARRIOR

Loita Hills, Great Rift Valley, Kenya

CHAPTER 8: JULIO / POTATO FARMER

Qullqi Cruz, Peru

CHAPTER 9: HAMADA / REFUGEE

The Jungle, Calais, France

CHAPTER 10: INUI-SAN / SHINTO PRIEST

Kyoto, Japan

SOURCES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR & PHOTOGRAPHER

INDEX

IF YOU WANT TO GO FAST, GO ALONE.

IF YOU WANT TO GO FAR, GO TOGETHER.

—AFRICAN PROVERB

INTRODUCTION

Umami Road

It was not a soft landing. Lying on a grassy patch, the Arctic wind roared around me as the runaway horse, trailing a broken harness, skidded down the rocky incline and disappeared from sight. It took a while to catch my breath. When I sat up, searing pain shot along my left arm, and it was shock enough to knock me flat again.

The Vikings found me that way, cradling my arm, cheeks cold and wet from the autumn squall. Sindri, Siggi, and Agnar clustered around. One of them held my taciturn mount.

Come on, Siggi said gruffly. Best thing is to get back on the horse.

Something is wrong with my wrist, I replied. It may be hard to stay on.

We were in the glacial highlands, miles from the nearest road. Agnar tossed me into the saddle and led the horse along the steep track while cheerfully recounting how many bones he had broken wrangling Icelandic stallions. Two front teeth, ribs, a shoulder—the same one twice—and a leg. I think he was trying to distract me.

No one had told me how hard it was to herd sheep.

The same applies for pulling taro corms out of a pond in a Hawaiian valley or fishing with a hand line on a dhow drifting along the coast of East Africa. But, throughout our travels together on several continents, photographer James Fisher and I were lucky enough to see what life is like for people who are firmly rooted in their culture and landscape, in some of our most isolated or marginal communities, where keeping the food chain vital remains a daily chore. Each profile in this book—as well as James’s remarkable images—represents a distinct tradition or practice not often witnessed by outsiders, some of which are millennia old, reaching far back into the collective culinary memory. It took us almost ten years to locate them all; the search involved a lot of knocking on doors, lurking around farmers’ markets, begging invitations, and detouring from more mainstream assignments into what the poet Robert Service called the map’s void spaces. Why go? Researchers claim certain people have a variant DNA sequence, specifically identified as DRD4-7r, which has been tied to the traits of curiosity and restlessness. It is sometimes cited as the underlying predisposition for exploration that drove the first humans to migrate out of Africa. Popularly called the wanderlust gene, it’s as likely a rationale as any for why some of us wind up in fringe places, happily poking into kitchens not our own.

Many of the following stories also focus on rituals where hospitality plays a key role. A wedding feast. A luau. Afternoon tea with refugees. A boy’s ascension to warrior. Food for the dead. Food for the gods. Being asked to witness, and occasionally participate in, these celebrations was worth the time and effort it took to get there. Some days, it even involved risking our lives. (James fended off a leopard attack in the Maasai Mara—his camera still has the scratches to prove it.) In creating this book, we didn’t fret over an omission of Southeast Asia, or the Middle East, or more easily accessed communities closer to home. Instead of rushing around in an attempt to be geographically inclusive, we got to sit longer in one green valley and watch a quiet man with such a heightened sense of place that he knew exactly where to position a child’s pinwheel to catch an odd little breeze for his own amusement, while everyone else around him was yammering away, oblivious of this exchange with nature.

The recipes in Far Afield are souvenirs of this long journey. They are a highly personal reflection of meals shared in the moment. Most are dishes intended for the family table, eaten with the hand where customary, skewered with a worn but favored utility knife, or scooped with a banana leaf from a cooking pot. The occasional meal at a street stall, a dive bar, or a modest restaurant, often the only one around for miles, easily adapted. Comforting food after a hard day’s labor. They are as simple as a scorched chapati smeared with chile paste shared by goatherders on the verge of the Thar Desert in India; as lavish as a birthday asado (barbecue) on the pampas of Uruguay, with a whole lamb roasting on hot coals and wine flowing like a river. You will note the lack of cookies in this book—but there is amazing pie. And doughnuts. Lime pickle that takes over a month to macerate will become a favorite; the okra dish that will convince you to finally appreciate this slimy member of the mallow family; tangy preserves made from wild rhubarb; and some kickass cocktails. A recipe for Peruvian cuy (guinea pig) didn’t make the cut. Neither did a kaiseki dinner at one of Japan’s most venerable ryokans. Umami, that most elusive flavor, so difficult to translate or transport, is occasionally lost somewhere back on the road.

This isn’t how sheep are mustered in Australia.

During the roundup in Iceland, James offered another perspective on what we were experiencing. (He grew up on a sheep station in the Outback, where penned grazing is the norm.) All day we’d sighted one or two animals at a time, skittering away from the shepherds who hunted them through mossy bogs and rain-slick ravines. We only had smoked lamb on flatkökur bread, the local equivalent of peanut-butter-and-jelly, smashed in our pockets. Hunger made me cranky.

Keep hunting, I said. There must be a reason for doing it this way.

Eventually, the two of us learned why Icelandic sheep wander the island at will, but not before my arm wound up in a plaster cast and James played drinking games with singing Vikings. Travel should be about expanding your universe, even if that means venturing beyond other people’s comfort zone. (Not everyone has that variant DNA sequence.) If you’ve chosen this book, however, your appetite for the map’s void spaces is just as insatiable. We’re glad to have you along for the ride.

During harvest season, Rabari women toil along with their husbands and sons in the fields, but they also tend to the market chores, gather water from communal wells, and prepare meals for their extended families.

CHAPTER 1

MANTRA RAM / RABARI TRIBESWOMAN

Godwar Province, Rajasthan, India

Ma’am? said Kapil Singh. Hold on, we are going around a bend now.

In Rajasthan, many professional drivers decorate their vehicles with Horn Please warnings; statues of Ganesh, the godly remover of obstacles; and colorful tassels intended to repel raging demons. They have good reason. Years before, another driver revealed the secret to successfully navigating the back roads of India: You must have three things on your side, he claimed. Good horn, good brakes, good luck. It became my mantra.

Wheat was ripening on the flood plains when I arrived in Godwar, a marginal province of Rajasthan between ancient city rivals Jodhpur and Udaipur. Women tossed sheaves into bullock carts that lumbered off to threshing grounds. It is grueling labor, made almost unbearable in the months before monsoon with the arrival of a hot wind known as the Loo. Some call it the devil’s wind. It rises unbidden from deep in the Thar Desert, bringing destruction and madness. So the harvest is hurried. This grain came to India by way of the Levant, around 6000 BCE. Flatbreads integral to the northern Indian diet—naan, papad, paratha, roti, puri, chapati—developed as a result.

Riding in the back of an open Jeep steered by the angular young Kapil dressed in starched paramilitary khaki, we circled mounds of tan chickpea plants drying in the sun. Black-faced monkeys hung together near the entrance to a cavernous shrine. Young girls pumped water into clay pots at a village well. A boy pushed along a rubber tire with a stick, a load of firewood balanced atop his head. A Hindu priest wearing a white tunic slowly descended a long flight of stairs cut into the hill where, moments before, a leopard perched. The people of this region seem to have a concord with large cats—no one has been attacked for ages, although dogs go missing now and then. Godwar isn’t far from the original setting Rudyard Kipling intended for The Jungle Book.

My tailbone ached and my face felt as hot as a ghost pepper. Turmeric stained my fingers from the fritters bought for breakfast at a street stall. My left foot itched from a possible infection. Just when I couldn’t take anymore, an overcrowded bus roared toward us from the opposite direction. Men clung perilously to baggage on the roof and, as we swerved, tossed something down at us. Accustomed to being the target of nasty projectiles in more hostile situations, I flinched.

Flower petals rained down on my head.

A cheer went up from the passengers, all waving and laughing at the successful prank as the bus moved on. They left us where we had pulled over, by the side of the road, bemused.

The wheat harvest in Rajasthan. Rabari women are skilled embroiderers and have a fondness for geometric patterns.