Tuesday, August 18 2009
Things That Make You Go . . . Bleargh!
Never drink anything that can stare back at you
Wines and cordials flavoured with various additions like herbs, spices, seeds and fruit are part of the long tradition of Western medicine, and we're so used to the idea that few of us rarely think of drinks like Chartreuse being a health tonic (they called it 'the elixir of life) or Jaegermeister being a stomach remedy (for all its taste, I'd rather drink Pepto-Bismol™, thanks). There is even a kind of spiced mead (fermented honey drink) called metheglin, derived from 'meddyglyn', meaning 'medicated'. I need to be medicated to taste mead, or anything else made from bee-sick.
Asians take their medicine far more seriously. Many Asian cultures have densely complex belief systems around the consumption of various animals and plants to instill health, vigour and increased prowess, ahem, in the imbiber. To outsiders it seems strange and to some it's even kind of icky, but those feelings are cultural artefacts, based on our innate desire to reject unfamiliar foods, a survival adaptation of sorts.
And the backwards is true enough too: when I was in college in Japan most of my friends were disgusted by cheese and butter, thinking that it was all rotting milk. I was even teased (in a friendly way, as I choose to recall) as being 'bata-kusai', butter-stinker because I ate dairy products. Different strokes for different cultures and traditions.
So it was with a certain nostalgia that I ran across this entry in the cognac.com website on Asian liqueurs. Three decades ago I took a trip to Okinawa with some classmates to tour around and hang out on the beaches (which are wonderful) and we wound up in a bar that specialised in the local drink, Awamori. It's a kind of whisky made from distilling fermented rice. In the rest of Japan this rice liquor is called 'shochu', but the Okinawa variety is made with different rice and fermented by different micro-organisms, and the Okinawans are proud of it. After several rounds of the local pride, which, after the rough 'n' ready shochu I was used to, tasted pretty smooth, my chums insisted that I get a big ol' manly drink of the local specialty.
'How sharper than a serpent's tooth
is the tongue of a pickled college boy'
They make this delightful beverage by drowning pit vipers in awamori and leaving them in the crock so you can be assured you're getting top-quality snake-juice. I'd like to say I that I gathered my courage and manfully drank it down, but the truth is I'd had enough beverages to make it seem sensible to drink snake-corpse-liquid at that moment. I recall it being bitter and quite vile, but I was told it would make me big and strong and other things. It may have helped, who knows.
Nowadays I stick to lesser thrills, and I'm even perturbed if I find a fruit-fly trying to access my wine glass. Guess I need manning up again--where's my snake jar?
| Posted by Tim AT 5:03PM | 0 Comments |  |
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