Near a Thousand Tables (16 page)

Compared with reindeer, the bovine herds which rolled across the American plains in the cowboy era were just one notch or so further along the scale of domestication. Writing in the early 1920s, James H. Cook described his years in the saddle, driving decoy herds to mingle with the wild cattle, riding around and around them, singing the “Texas lullaby,” which, he claimed, had a calming effect on the unbroken steers. The “singing cowboy” is not an entirely monstrous invention of the entertainment industry. Stampedes were an occupational hazard and the only way to catch a cow once one had started was to trap it with a lasso; or failing that the cowboy could “catch it by the tail with his hand, and taking a turn around the saddle horse, dash suddenly ahead, causing the steer to turn a somersault.” The horse then came to a sudden stop, and the rider jumped off and with one of the short “tie-ropes” which he always carried under his belt, “hog-tied the … brute…. When brought to bay by this treatment, their rage would be such that it … would be horns versus pistol if a strong animal regained his feet before his pursuer could tie it down.” When the fallen beast's legs were thoroughly benumbed and stiffened, it could be surrounded with tame cows and released. If that didn't work, the captive would be felled again and tied by the neck to a tame old ox who would drag
it to the corral
.

To give up hunting in favor of herding is always a mixed blessing. Animal company can be bad for you. The herdsmen's stocks are reservoirs of infection. On Columbus's second transatlantic expedition, it was probably pigs and horses, not people in the first instance, that took, to the New World from the old, the diseases that began the precipitate collapse of
Native American populations
. Even in the twentieth century, the influenza virus incubated in ducks in China, “while pigs served as the‘mixing vessel' in which avian and human flu viruses
exchange genes
.”

Nevertheless, peoples who make the transition from hunting to herding have the advantage of reliable access to food and, in some respects, an enhanced cuisine. Even herds reared by long-range transhumance, which tends to bring old, tough animals to the table, gives herders prospects of a better meal than their hunting counterparts. Not only can the herdsman breed for the table: he can pick on a particularly appetizing specimen, elevating a meal or dish to special status. He can isolate individual beasts for fattening on a milk-rich diet or the finest grasses. He can cull choice young animals for the pot and create triumphs of cruel gastronomy, like the baby beef of the gauchos or the Wyoming cattleman's sonofabitch stew based on the organ meats and brains of an unweaned calf, flavored with the milky, partially digested contents of the tube—lined with a filter of the consistency of marrow fat—which connects the beast s
two stomachs
.

In the gastronomy of sedentary cultures, wild game or mature animals from erdsmen's stock are always hung before cooking so that bacterial degradation can work away at the meat and soften the muscle: the process is made to last for up to three weeks in the case of venison compared with three days in the case of farmed beef. Joints can be consumed, according to need or taste, at different stages of what is best described as decomposition, though generally sold to consumers as “aging.” Although accounts of the cuisine of hunting and herding cultures emphasize freshly slaughtered meat, it seems likely, in view of the prevalence of overkill in the historic profiles of hunting peoples, that the flavor of rot must always have been familiar to their palates. “Aging,” as butchers now call it, begins as soon as the beast is dead. Myoglobin, which maintains oxygen in the muscles, degenerates into metamyoglobin: this process is a slow form of a similar process which continues during cooking. The meat begins to acquire a brown color, resembling its cooked state. Enzymes act on the muscles, making the meat tender. Finally, bacteria get to work, effectively devouring collagen. If “gaminess” is favored by modern gourmets it is presumably because genuinely hunted food has become an expensive rarity in urban society: a savor which would be deprecated in farmed foods is a guarantee of authenticity and a tincture of adventure when encountered in the products of the hunt. Acidic fruits have a tenderizing effect on fresh game—which is why so many recipes combine huntsman's meats with sauces based on the fruits of the animals' habitats. Reindeer is traditionally appropriate with cloudberries, boar with prunes, hare with juniper berries or in the sharp sauce Italians call agrodolce. In England, roast or grilled venison is customarily served with a wonderful concoction called Cumberland sauce, which is based on redcurrants, but succumbs to self-conscious sophistication by admitting added orange peel and port. The English habit of serving pork with applesauce perpetuates a style of serving originally
devised for wild boar. As a general rule, the wilder the meat the leaner, so that most sedentarists' recipes for game or for herdsmen's stock call for barding with fat from domesticates. Among reindeer gourmets, for instance, rages an irresoluble dispute over whether pork fat should be added to stews. In other respects—except for obvious differences of emphasis that arise from the facts that most hunters and herders are transhumant and cannot be bothered with a lot of heavy cooking apparatus—there is nothing peculiar about herding and hunting cuisines.

Why are some hunted animals domesticated and not others? It is often claimed that some species simply cannot be domesticated but it seems more likely that those left to run wild are exempted for other reasons arising from the culture of the hunters or from the nature of the environment they inhabit. Kangaroos could be herded if people really wanted to manage them by that method. Some are easily tamed. A friend of mine had a pet kangaroo when he was a boy. After release into the wild, the kangaroo often returned to visit him, climbed the steps and knocked on his bedroom door. Docile specimens could be captured in their prime or reared from babyhood as breeding stock. Or the management methods traditionally used by aborigines in some parts of Australia, which include the use of fire to control the kangaroos' grazing areas, making them accessible for the hunters, could be extended or developed to the point where totally managed herds were being manipulated by man. The zebra is another creature that seems disinclined to submit to human control. Most zebras defend themselves viciously. But in medieval Abyssinia the Negus had a zebra-drawn chariot and even so rebarbative a species produces animals of varying degrees of intractability: selection of suitable specimens could, in the course of a few generations, result in
a domestic breed
.

Bighorn sheep were hunted in prehistoric times in what is now Wyoming by being driven into wooden catch pens, where they were clubbed to death. But this technique was never extended in full domestication, even though—to judge from their modern descendants—these animals were probably submissive
on capture
. The only explanation which suggests itself is that the habitat of these sheep was at a higher altitude than that of the hunters, who were willing to make seasonal forays into the mountains but not to adapt permanently to a milieu suitable for a pastoral life.

The last and biggest difference herding made was by bringing dairying into the range of food production techniques. This seems not only to have introduced a galaxy of new foodstuffs to the diets of peoples who used them but also to have had an effect on human evolution. In most hunting cultures people are not just indifferent to dairy products: they actively dislike them and in many cases the metabolism rejects them. Lactose intolerance is a condition of many cultures.
Indeed, the ability to digest animal milk is a physical peculiarity of Europeans, North Americans, Indians and peoples of Central Asia and the Middle East. Most people elsewhere in the world do not naturally produce lactase—the substance which makes milk digestible—after infancy In many parts of the world where livestock has been herded and farmed for centuries and even millennia, it is still normal for most people to respond to dairy products with distaste or even intolerance. Dairy products do not feature in Chinese cuisine: milk, butter, cream and even such preparations as yogurt and buttermilk, which are digestible without the aid of lactase, are despised barbarian flavors. The Japanese reject them and one of the distasteful features of early European visitors to Japan was that in local nostrils they “stank of butter.” In 1962, when 88 million pounds of powdered milk arrived in Brazil as American food aid, it made people feel ill. Marvin Harris, who was there at the time, found that American officials responded with resentment and blamed locals for “eating the powder raw by the fistful” or “mixing it with polluted water.” Really, they were just
unused to it
. Brazilian ranching has always specialized in meat, not milk.

I find the very idea of drinking unmodified milk disgusting; and the way butter is prized for frying is one of the features of North European civilization to which a lifetimes effort has failed to reconcile me. For similar reasons of personal prejudice, I find it hard to understand why, in parts of the Middle East where olive oil is available, sheep's butter is regarded as the finest lubricant for dishes of boiled rice or buckwheat: this seems to me a throwback to the herdsmen's prejudices introduced centuries ago into the cuisines of the region by pastoralists of the Arabian desert and Eurasian steppe. It must be acknowledged, however, that some of the greatest triumphs of world gastronomy have been achieved in the course of the struggle to make milk digestible. They are called cheese and are produced by allowing or promoting the growth of bacteria in milk, then extracting the solids which form as the fats and proteins in the milk separate and coagulate. The flavor, color and consistency of the cheese all depend on the kinds of bacteria involved and, to a lesser extent, on the nature of the cheesemakers' interventions to promote curdling. The possible combinations are innumerable—perhaps infinite. New cheeses are being invented all the time.

When and how did the first come into being? Neither question can be answered in the present state of knowledge: cheese making is documented in rock art from the seventh millennium
B.C.
and in the archaeological record from the fourth at least. It can be presumed to be of greater antiquity still. I have a conceit which I find irresistible: the history of hunting and herding is reenacted in cheese. In a phase corresponding to the hunt, exposed milk is left as a trap for bacteria
gathered at random. The discovery follows that certain beneficial effects can be guaranteed by regulating the conditions under which milk is left to sour: in effect, this means that particular bacteria are being “herded.” Nowadays, mass production delivers a substance which hardly seems worthy of the name of cheese: pasteurization destroys the relevant bacteria at the start of the process and the desired effects are engineered instead by the introduction of selected cultures.

Wild food is getting hard to come by. In the United States, supposedly the land of abundance, it is impossible to get game except from a handful of highly specialized shops which do not exist even in major centers of population. A German acquaintance of mine who proposed serving Hasenpfeffer to friends in Philadelphia had to travel to New York to get hare. Even game still widely hunted in the States, like wild turkey, or culled for conservation reasons, like venison and bear, can rarely be bought and, for most people, remains unsampled outside a small clutch of smart restaurants. Even in Europe, traditional wild foods like venison and rabbit have been largely replaced by domesticated versions. Grouse and pheasant moors are now so intensively managed that the gamekeepers really ought to be reclassified as farmers.

Hunting is now thought of as a primitive way of getting food, long abandoned except as an aristocratic indulgence, or leisure for those inclined to blood lust. This is an utterly mistaken view. The world's food supply still depends on hunting, almost as much today as in the era which preceded the “Neolithic revolution” and the intensification of agriculture. The amount of food yielded by the hunt has increased in the twentieth century—by an informed guess—by a factor of nearly forty and the twentieth century may go down in history not only as the last age of hunting but as the greatest. I am speaking, of course, of a relatively specialized and—today—highly mechanized form of hunt: the hunt for fish.

Fishing really is a form of hunting. The huge increase in the demand for fish in the recent history of the developed West seems to have become associated in most people's minds with the contemporary health obsessions discussed in the last chapter. I suspect, however, that the spectacular increase in demand for fish in the rich West is the result of a romantic prejudice in favor of the last major food yielded by a kind of hunt. If we fail to classify it readily as a hunt, it is only because of deceptive appearances. Fishing is obviously not hunting of the same kind as is practiced on land in the kind of agrarian and industrial societies which, overwhelmingly, prevail in the modern world. Fishing, in most cultures, is a modest occupation with none of the aristocratic savor of the chase through the forest or
the shoot on the moor, the hawk's swoop or the uncaged leopard's leap. But, until recently, in traditional societies of what is now western Canada and the Northwestern United States, chiefly canoes, manned for the hunt, specialized in the tracking of dangerous sea creatures, including whales and large sharks. Scenes painted on ceremonial robes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries show speared behemoths dueling with the hunters. Among the ancient Moche of what is now Peru, the marlin hunt had enough prestige to be worth depicting in art. Today, trawling remains a form of hunting which still makes a major contribution to food resources worldwide. It has become a matter of routine, but remains steeped in its own rituals. It has become unheroic but it remains a quest. The fish have to be chased by the trawlermen. If the weather turns bad, the prey can escape. Sometimes the hunters lose their lives.