A Cook's Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal Review
"A Cook's Tour" by the wonderfully worldly and well-traveled Anthony Bourdain, is a book about food like no other, and it is simultaneously entertaining, exciting, and revolting. Tony travels the world in search of the perfect meal; it's an exciting quest for any chef to ponder, but along the way he comes across numerous local delicacies that can be best described as only for the strong of heart.
Although he encounters several problems with dishes from around the world (the Mexican sautéed ant eggs and Scottish deep-fried haggis with curry sauce and deep fried egg stand out), the most stunning for my money are the things he eats in Asia, and especially Vietnam. I for one would not be able to eat the traditional Vietnamese breakfast of soft-boiled duck embryo complete with feathers, followed by a steaming bowl of "chao muk", a hearty soup made from ginger, sprouts, cilantro, shrimp, squid, chives, pork-blood cake, and croutons; later Tony enjoyed some braised bat ("imagine braised inner tube, sauced with engine coolant"). Even worse than that, though, is the concept of eating a still-beating cobra heart, after a very special snake disemboweling ceremony.
While Vietnam takes the proverbial cake, the book features other gastronomic nightmares from around the globe, with Japan coming in second in the contest for unusual and disturbing foodstuffs. The foodie tour of Japan started out benignly enough, with an appetizer of "amuse-gueule of hoshigaka goma-an" (dried persimmon and fried soy curd with sesame paste), but quickly progressed to things like "suppon-dofu" (a soft-shell turtle in egg pudding with green onion and turtle broth), and culminated in the classic and beloved Japanese delicacy, "natto", which Bourdain describes as "an unbelievably foul, rank, slimy, glutinous, and stringy goop of fermented soybeans". After the natto, Bourdain finished with a dish described as "mountain potato": of this he said, "I could only handle a single taste. To this day, I have no idea what it really was.... The small, dark, chewy nugget can only be described as tasting like salt-cured, sun-dried goat rectum".
Throughout the book, Bourdain maintains his wry, sarcastic sense of humor, possibly as a survival tool to get him through his next meal. He mocks a vegan potluck dinner as the "real heart of darkness", discusses fabled and exotic foods such as the unbelievably rank durian fruit, and always manages to do it while being respectful of local traditions and cultures very different from his existence in New York City. This is a great book for anyone interested in foods and cultures of the world, and I recommend it highly!
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Product Overview
Anthony Bourdain, life-long line cook and bestselling author of Kitchen Confidential, sets off to eat his way around the world. But being Anthony Bourdain, this was never going to be a conventional culinary tour. Inspired by Apocalypse Now, Bourdain heads out to Saigon where he eats the still-beating heart of a live cobra (washed down with its blood), and then into Cambodia, the Heart of Darkness, where he travels deep into landmined Khmer Rouge territory to find the rumoured Wild West of Cambodia (Pailin). Other stops include dining with gangsters in Russia, a medieval pig slaughter and feast in northern Portugal, the Basque All Male Gastronomique Society in Saint Sebastian, paladars in Cuba (Commie Beach Party), rural Mexico with his Mexican sous-chef, a pilgrimage to the French Laundry in the Napa Valley and a return to his roots in the tiny fishing village of La Teste, where he first ate an oyster as a child. Written with the inimitable machismo and humour that has made Tony Bourdain such a sensation. A Cook's Tour is an adventure story sure to give you indigestion.
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