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ADAM: This year marked the 200th anniversary of Oktoberfest, and today (October 4th) is officially the last day of the festivities. So you should probably suck down a beer or double-team a sausage.
LAURA: The oxymoronic thing about Oktoberfest is that most of it doesn’t actually occur in October. But the first one did: It was held on October 12, 1810 in Munich to celebrate the marriage of Bavarian Crown Prince Ludwig. The matrimonial event lasted for five days and included a giant horse race, which means Prince Ludwig was possibly the world’s first bridezilla.
ADAM: The racing nonsense persisted until 1960, but long before that, the main activity had switched from watching sprints to getting blitzed. Plus soon after Oktoberfest’s inception, the celebration was lengthened to multiple weeks and moved into September, where the days were longer and the weather warmer.
LAURA: The best Oktoberfest food is easily weisswurst, a girthy veal sausage that you wrap your lips around and then suck on till the meat squirts out, a method known as “zuzeln.” To watch us get our zuzeln on, check out our video on Oktoberfest foods. We might make a penis joke or five.
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This is a cup of Falooda, which we had at a Burmese church picnic. It’s a complex dessert that traces its origins back to ancient Persia and pretty much kicks simple American milkshakes onto the short bus. They begin by shoving a ladle into a pink pot of ice cream and milk, pouring in some rose syrup, and then mixing it with tapioca, flan, and a few different gelatins. And those little black caviar-looking things on top? Those are basil seeds. As in, the embryonic herb that will grow up to become the garnish in a Caprese salad. In many Asian cuisines, basil seeds are soaked, which makes them gelatinous, and then thrown into drinks and desserts, such as Falooda. It’s like eating a basil abortion. Bon appetit!
To watch our video of us slurping down Falooda, click here.
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That circled blur is a live shrimp jumping out of a bowl, trying to escape being our dinner.
Last week we posted video of us eating drunken shrimp, the notorious Chinese dish where live shrimp are soaked in alcohol, then eaten while still twitching. Frankly, the dish is sort of like gastro-date rape: You get the shrimp hammered enough to impair their mobility and then take advantage by forcing them down your throat. Which is probably how drunken shrimp ended up on the list of the “Cruelest Dishes in China.”
To find out how guilty we should feel about eating still-living shrimp, we asked Emma Creaser, an associate professor of marine physiology at Unity College and our go-to expert for all matters involving the mastication of live sea creatures, to tell us how much pain the creatures would have been feeling. Here’s what she said:
“Alcohol is often used as an anesthetic for invertebrates, including shrimp, in biology. We judge them to be anesthetized when they stop wiggling or ‘trying to escape.’ For your meal it would thus depend on how long you let the shrimp sit in the alcohol, and thus how wiggly it still was before you ate it. Shrimp have some concentration of nerves into centralized knots, but whether they ‘feel’ pain, even sober, with the same angst as we do is unknown. However, you might console yourself by remembering that shrimp are eaten alive by almost all of their other predators.”
Since our shrimp bathed in booze for a good 20 minutes, and they seemed pretty mellow-yellow when we ate them, we’re categorizing them as “highly anesthetized.” Plus we take comfort in the reminder that shrimp are routinely eaten alive by other predators.
At least we were thoughtful enough to buy them a drink first.
To watch our video of the shrimp hopping out of their bowl and into our mouths, click here.
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ADAM: The World Cup has put South Africa in the spotlight for everyone who cares about soccer. And Americans too! So in preparation for Sunday’s championship game, we went to Fort Greene, Brooklyn, and gorged at Madiba, New York’s most festive purveyor of South African cuisine. (We learned about Madiba at a soccer event hosted by the South African wine, Nederburg. Thanks, Nederburg!) As luck would have it, we got to Madiba right after last week’s Ghana-Uruguay game, so the place was overflowing with African soccer fans, who were still partying even though they lost. That means we got to hear annoying horn noises in person!
LAURA: We kicked off our meal with Bunny Chow, which, like monkey gland sauce and Sugar Babies, sadly does not contain the mammal after which its named. “Curry in a Bread Bowl” would have been a more apropos moniker, since that’s what it is: a scooped-out loaf filled to the brim with curried stew. It’s a popular street food in South Africa and originated in the 1940s, when apartheid laws kept black people from eating in restaurants. To keep business from tanking, Indian restaurant owners, or banias, slung their curries into hunks of bread (instead of bowls) and sold the dish out their windows, creating a very early version of take-out food with edible doggie bags.
ADAM: And that’s how Bunny Chow proved racism creates great things! What a history lesson. Next we gulped down a rich oxtail potjiekos, aka stew, sucking the soft beef off the tail bones. Potjiekos (pronouced poi-kei-kos) literally translates into “pot food” and is the name for any stew cooked in a—yup—potjie. The potjies are three-legged cast iron kettles that range in size from Adorable (fits in your palm) to Holy Crap (gives you a hernia). They were originally used by wagon-train-traveling Afrikaans settlers, who never bothered to clean out the pots. Instead they’d leave in all leftover stew, then simply toss in more ingredients before every meal to replenish what had been eaten the night before. We sincerely hope that’s not how potjiekos is made at Madiba.
LAURA: A braai (pronounced bry) is a South African barbecue with customs similar to what we see here in the States. (Families do it on weekends and holidays; men helm the grill, women make the sides; Father’s Day cards make cliched jokes about it.) For our braai experience, we tried boerewors (above), a beef sausage with Dutch heritage that’s formed into a glorious spiral and tossed on the braai until the casing crisps up. It was served with a mild cornmeal porridge called pap (think grits, but thicker), which is the go-to side for all meats (“vleis”) ‘round these parts.
ADAM: How much do South Africans love their pap and vleis? Well, a local radio station recently created a song parody called “Pap En Vleis.” It was set to the tune of Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face.” Obviously. Check out an delightfully weird, choreographed, costumed performance below. We’re fairly certain this is what they do for half-time entertainment at every World Cup game. South Africa is awesome!
Eats Deets
Madiba Restaurant
195 Dekalb Avenue (Fort Greene, Brooklyn)
(718) 855-9190
Postcard from South Africa
To get our World Cupped, we hit up Brooklyn’s outpost of South Africa, the restaurant Madiba. While there, owner Mark Henegan showed us a potjie (above), the three-legged cast iron pot traditionally used to cook stew. Then he filled us in on the most awesomely alarming South African item on the menu: Monkey Gland Sauce.
“We tell people that we rip out a monkey’s glands then cook them, but that’s not true,” he explained. “No one’s sure where the name monkey gland sauce came from, but one story is that it originated when a big French chef came to Johannesburg. While he wasn’t paying attention, someone put fruit into his red wine reduction. He sipped it and shouted, “What is this?!? Monkey gland sauce?!?” But then he realized he loved it. So they put monkey gland sauce on the menu that night and it got written up in all the newspapers. That’s how monkey gland sauce became famous—it was the mixture of a well-known chef from France and the local people in the kitchen.”
At Madiba, they serve monkey gland sauce on ribs. Had it been made of real monkeys, we totally would have gunned it. Instead we opted for an even better main course. One made of bunnies! (Kinda.) Full post on the South African foods we actually ate coming later this week…
Yours in Mastication,
Laura & Adam