When it comes to our senses, vision and hearing get us through the bulk of our workaday lives, but to reach deeper into our spiritual selves, nothing jogs the memory or jars the soul like smell and taste. And nothing stirs long-forgotten feelings like food, which is why "Culinary Quests," the globe-trotting culinary experiences in our Food & Drink Issue, is such a remarkable collection of anecdotes. As you read dispatches of delicacies from the far corners of the world, not only does it make you hungry (I gained 40 pounds while copy-editing the thing) but it also transports you back to your own journeys.
Nathaniel Rich wrote about the "numbing spicy" flavor of Sichuan cuisine, which causes physiological and psychological changes in its consumer. "The brain floats in a euphoric ether," Rich wrote, which is exactly how I used to describe the hottest of the hot German mustards at the Hofbrau House in Peoria, Ill., a post-deadline hangout when I was at The Peoria Journal Star. We would order platters of sausage and cheese, accompanied by several varieties of mustard, the hottest of which, I was convinced, increased brain activity — even as it shut down your other cognitive and respiratory faculties. It was like something out of "Flowers for Algernon": as the mustard stung the nerve endings in my brain, I would have some of my greatest ideas and most profound moments of self-realization. But, alas, as the "mustard high" subsided, so did the elevated intellectual properties that came with it. But it was always worth the watery eyes, pulsing temples and sweaty brow!
As I read of David Sax's discovery of the world's best matzo ball in Budapest, meanwhile, it was June 1991 again, and I was eating in a gritty riverside cafe as fireworks exploded over the Danube. It was the last night of the Soviet occupation, and Gypsies were dancing in the streets. In search of some authentic Hungarian goulash, I allowed my British traveling companion to navigate the menu, which seemed to have been written in ancient Magyar. He ordered two plates of goulash, and the waiter brought us two plates of hot and salty liver and onions. The world's worst liver and onions. That smell will stay with me forever, but it just might make me the only person you know who associates the smell of liver and onions with independence.
Elisabeth Rosenthal's account of eating reindeer, seal and polar bear in Greenland, took me back to my backyard near Seattle in the summer of 1998. We had paid a visit to the exotic-game butcher shop on Aurora Avenue and brought home packages of, among other things, kangaroo, rattlesnake, rabbit and bison. Strange smells from my grill filled the neighborhood as we washed down intrepid bites with McMenamins raspberry ale. As Rosenthal noted about her fare in Greenland: "Nothing, absolutely nothing, tasted like chicken." (The bison ribs were the highlight — enormous and meaty and juicy — and we tore into them lustily, hot off the grill, with our hands and teeth, much as William Neuman described eating carne en vara on the Venezuelan plains.)
Finally, John Willoughby's ode to the steak-and-potato pasties of Copper Harbor, Mich., took me right back to Dublin. Having awakened early, I let the family sleep as I set off alone along the quay on a wettish Irish day. I was looking for an American Express office, but instead I found a small bakery wafting savory dreams into the street. I went in and found a wrinkled, little man in a brown tam and woolen sweater vest (Hello, Central Casting? Need somebody to play Little Old Irish Baker for some tourist?). He sold me an awful cup of coffee that I quickly discarded in favor of four piping-hot beef pasties, spicy with onions and potatoes, that surely were the secret to warming your bones on a damp Dublin morning.
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