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Overview
James Beard Award-winning journalist Shane Mitchell and photographer James Fisher have traveled the world on assignment for food and travel publications such as Travel + Leisure and Saveur. Along the way, they have encountered the fascinating people who are keeping some of the world's oldest food traditions alive, such as taro farmers in Hawaii who have never left the islands, Maasai warriors in Kenya, and Icelandic shepherds who still use the techniques of their Viking ancestors. Full of compelling photography from far-flung locations, Far Afield profiles these people, sharing their unique and captivating stories along with forty recipes.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781607749219 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed |
| Publication date: | 10/25/2016 |
| Sold by: | Random House |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 212 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
INTRODUCTON
Umami Road
It was not a soft landing. Lying on a grassy patch, the Arctic wind roared around me as the runaway horse, trailing a broken harness, skidded down the rocky incline and disappeared from sight. It took a while to catch my breath. When I sat up, searing pain shot along my left arm, and it was shock enough to knock me flat again.
The Vikings found me that way, cradling my arm, cheeks cold and wet from the autumn squall. Sindri, Siggi, and Agnar clustered around. One of them held my taciturn mount.
“Come on,” Siggi said gruffly. “Best thing is to get back on the horse.”
“Something is wrong with my wrist,” I replied. “It may be hard to stay on.”
We were in the glacial highlands, miles from the nearest road. Agnar tossed me into the saddle and led the horse along the steep track while cheerfully recounting how many bones he had broken wrangling Icelandic stallions. Two front teeth, ribs, a shoulder—the same one twice—and a leg. I think he was trying to distract me.
No one had told me how hard it was to herd sheep.
The same applies for pulling taro corms out of a pond in a Hawaiian valley or fishing with a hand line on a dhow drifting along the coast of East Africa. But, throughout our travels together on several continents, photographer James Fisher and I were lucky enough to see what life is like for people who are firmly rooted in their culture and landscape, in some of our most isolated or marginal communities, where keeping the food chain vital remains a daily chore. Each profile in this book—as well as James’s remarkable images—represents a distinct tradition or practice not often witnessed by outsiders, some of which are millennia old, reaching far back into the collective culinary memory. It took us almost ten years to locate them all; the search involved a lot of knocking on doors, lurking around farmers’ markets, begging invitations, and detouring from more mainstream assignments into what the poet Robert Service called “the map’s void spaces.” Why go? Researchers claim certain people have a variant DNA sequence, specifically identified as DRD4-7r, which has been tied to the traits of curiosity and restlessness. It is sometimes cited as the underlying predisposition for exploration that drove the first humans to migrate out of Africa. Popularly called the wanderlust gene, it’s as likely a rationale as any for why some of us wind up in fringe places, happily poking into kitchens not our own.
Many of the following stories also focus on rituals where hospitality plays a key role. A wedding feast. A luau. Afternoon tea with refugees. A boy’s ascension to warrior. Food for the dead. Food for the gods. Being asked to witness, and occasionally participate in, these celebrations was worth the time and effort it took to get there. Some days, it even involved risking our lives. (James fended off a leopard attack in the Maasai Mara—his camera still has the scratches to prove it.) In creating this book, we didn’t fret over an omission of Southeast Asia, or the Middle East, or more easily accessed communities closer to home. Instead of rushing around in an attempt to be geographically inclusive, we got to sit longer in one green valley and watch a quiet man with such a heightened sense of place that he knew exactly where to position a child’s pinwheel to catch an odd little breeze for his own amusement, while everyone else around him was yammering away, oblivious of this exchange with nature.
The recipes in Far Afield are souvenirs of this long journey. They are a highly personal reflection of meals shared in the moment. Most are dishes intended for the family table, eaten with the hand where customary, skewered with a worn but favored utility knife, or scooped with a banana leaf from a cooking pot. The occasional meal at a street stall, a dive bar, or a modest restaurant, often the only one around for miles, easily adapted. Comforting food after a hard day’s labor. They are as simple as a scorched chapati smeared with chile paste shared by goatherders on the verge of the Thar Desert in India; as lavish as a birthday asado (barbecue) on the pampas of Uruguay, with a whole lamb roasting on hot coals and wine flowing like a river. You will note the lack of cookies in this book—but there is amazing pie. And doughnuts. Lime pickle that takes over a month to macerate will become a favorite; the okra dish that will convince you to finally appreciate this slimy member of the mallow family; tangy preserves made from wild rhubarb; and some kickass cocktails. A recipe for Peruvian cuy (guinea pig) didn’t make the cut. Neither did a kaiseki dinner at one of Japan’s most venerable ryokans. Umami, that most elusive flavor, so difficult to translate or transport, is occasionally lost somewhere back on the road.
“This isn’t how sheep are mustered in Australia.”
During the roundup in Iceland, James offered another perspective on what we were experiencing. (He grew up on a sheep station in the Outback, where penned grazing is the norm.) All day we’d sighted one or two animals at a time, skittering away from the shepherds who hunted them through mossy bogs and rain-slick ravines. We only had smoked lamb on flatkökur bread, the local equivalent of peanut-butter-and-jelly, smashed in our pockets. Hunger made me cranky.
“Keep hunting,” I said. “There must be a reason for doing it this way.”
Eventually, the two of us learned why Icelandic sheep wander the island at will, but not before my arm wound up in a plaster cast and James played drinking games with singing Vikings. Travel should be about expanding your universe, even if that means venturing beyond other people’s comfort zone. (Not everyone has that variant DNA sequence.) If you’ve chosen this book, however, your appetite for the map’s void spaces is just as insatiable. We’re glad to have you along for the ride.
Table of Contents
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION 6
CHAPTER 1: MANTRA RAM / RABARI TRIBESWOMAN 15
Godwar Province, Rajasthan, India
CHAPTER 2: CHRISTINE & JEAN-JACQUES / GAUCHOS 55
Salto, Uruguay
CHAPTER 3: TIMA & ALI / FISHERMEN 81
Lamu Archipelago, Kenya
CHAPTER 4: KAKI / DEPARTED SPIRIT 119
Mixquic, Mexico
CHAPTER 5: JAYSON & ALBERTA / TARO FARMERS 139
Waipi‘o, Hawai‘i
CHAPTER 6: SINDRI / SHEPHERD 169
Fornihvammur, Iceland
CHAPTER 7: KIPALONGA / MAASAI WARRIOR 207
Loita Hills, Great Rift Valley, Kenya
CHAPTER 8: JULIO / POTATO FARMER 231
Qullqi Cruz, Peru
CHAPTER 9: HAMADA / REFUGEE 251
The Jungle, Calais, France
CHAPTER 10: INUI-SAN / SHINTO PRIEST 279
Kyoto, Japan