A Glossary of the Daring Palate

A Glossary of the Daring Palate

Zoophagy — literally the eating of animals, but used in this volume in its narrower, particular Victorian sense: the deliberate, curious tasting across the whole range of the animal kingdom, pursued as a programme rather than a mere diet. The nuance is worth keeping — the word names not the ordinary eating of familiar meat but the naturalist's impulse to try the untried, from eland to earwig; the near-doctrine of the Acclimatisation Society and of Darwin's Glutton Club. Its charm and its hazard are one and the same: an appetite that respects no category will, unchecked, respect no limit either — which is the reason Chapter Six exists.

Acclimatisation — the nineteenth-century project of introducing and naturalising exotic species into new lands for food, sport or profit, pursued by learned societies in Paris, London and the colonies; charming in its optimism, and the direct ancestor of many a later invasive-species disaster — the rabbit loosed across Australia and the starling across North America both trace, in fact or in spirit, to the same confident enthusiasm.

Entomophagy — the eating of insects; ordinary and nutritious across much of the world, practised by some two billion people, with Western squeamishness the anomaly to be explained rather than the food.

**Koji (Aspergillus oryzae)** — the domesticated mould at the root of much of East Asia's fermented larder, from miso and soy sauce to sake; its enzymes break protein and starch down into savoury glutamates and sweetness. It is the benign, cultivated cousin of the wilder microbes that drive the bolder ferments of Chapter Three, and a reminder that most "rot" a culture prizes is in truth a mould or bacterium kept firmly on a leash.

Hákarl — Iceland's cured Greenland shark, made safe to eat by fermentation and long drying that break down the flesh's naturally toxic load of urea and trimethylamine oxide.

Surströmming — Sweden's fermented Baltic herring, lightly brined and left to sour in the sealed tin until it swells; prized at home, notorious abroad for its pressure and its smell.

Casu marzu — the Sardinian sheep's-milk pecorino ripened with the living larvae of the cheese fly Piophila casei; a genuine traditional delicacy of ambiguous standing under modern European food law.

Pídàn (century egg) — the Chinese preserved egg cured in an alkaline mix of lye, ash, salt and clay until the white sets to a dark amber jelly and the yolk to a green-grey cream; an everyday delicacy, not a stunt.

Umami — the savoury "fifth taste" of glutamates and certain nucleotides, first named by Kikunae Ikeda in 1908 and anatomised in Volume I of this compendium; the deep note beneath much of the world's fermented food.

TMAO / TMA — trimethylamine oxide, the compound that keeps deep-sea and polar fish from freezing, and trimethylamine, the pungent, fishy amine it degrades into; the chemistry behind both the toxicity of fresh Greenland shark and the reek of surströmming.

Core disgust — in the psychology of Paul Rozin and April Fallon, the basic food-rejection emotion, rooted in the mouth and organised around contamination and animal-reminder cues; largely learned, not innate.

Taboo — a culturally absolute prohibition; in Mary Douglas's reading, a matter less of hygiene than of classification — the policing of "matter out of place" within a society's ordering of the world.

CITES — the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (1973), the treaty that regulates or forbids cross-border trade in threatened species; the legal reason many a historical delicacy is now off the table.

IUCN Red List — the International Union for Conservation of Nature's authoritative global inventory of the conservation status of species, from Least Concern to Extinct; the naturalist's first reference before admiring any wild food.

Pemmican — the calorie-dense travelling food invented by the Indigenous peoples of the North American plains: lean meat dried hard, pounded to a powder, and worked together with roughly its own weight of rendered fat, sometimes with dried berries and nothing else. At around seven thousand calories to the kilogram it is among the most concentrated whole foods ever made; it was the strategic staple of the fur trade — worth a small war, in 1814 — and the ration that hauled sledges across Antarctica. Its one great lack is vitamin C.

Hoosh — the hot stew of the heroic age of polar travel: pemmican boiled up with broken sledging biscuit and melted snow into a thick, warming pottage, the single reliably hot meal of a marching day on the ice, and the word that tolls through every polar diary of the era.

Scurvy — the disease of vitamin-C deficiency, scourge of the long sea voyage and the polar sledging journey alike; it loosens the gums, reopens half-healed wounds and drains the strength, and it stalked expeditions that lived on preserved rations even as the fresh meat that prevents it was left behind at the depots.

Rabbit starvation (protein poisoning) — the sickness that overtakes a body fed on very lean meat with too little fat, named by Arctic travellers who found that a diet of nothing but rabbit, however plentiful, left them ill and wasting. It is the reason pemmican is built around fat rather than protein — and the reason a "leaner, healthier" pemmican is a contradiction in terms.

Type specimen — the single physical specimen (the holotype) to which a species' scientific name is permanently anchored, and against which all later identifications are judged; famously, in Darwin's case, a lesser rhea very nearly eaten before it could be preserved.

Hippophagy — the eating of horse-flesh; the subject of a self-conscious Victorian dining movement, an ordinary foodway in parts of Europe and Asia, and a firm taboo in others — a clean case of edibility as a cultural fact rather than a chemical one.