Whenever I think about the foods I'd travel a long way for, it strikes me that the steaming plates of it that pop up in my demented mind all have origins as "peasant food." Most preparations come from devoted yet severely impoverished folks who cleverly find solutions to their starvation problems by producing chow so tasty that rich folks wouldn't think of debasing their delicate and refined palates with the likes of it.

Duck!

Yank a dozing duck off the lawn, de-feather and disarticulate its bones, marinate it for days in salt and herbs, then clean and cook it slowly in its own fat. Store it the same way you cooked it, covering the flesh in layers of snowy white fat in a crock crammed into a cool corner underneath the house. It'll keep all winter.

What you have after you pull out a leg and broil the fat off is a fine example of duck confit, cleverly contrived preserved duck which just happens to taste better than any other duck preparation in the universe, mostly due to the concentration of flavors the process lends to the duck flesh. And its inventor has also solved the age-old problem of what to do with left-overs when you don't have a refrigerator-freezer combo at your disposal slowly sucking away at the earth's limited energy sources. This is just one clever application of available ingredients and it comes from France. There are others from all over.

Who comes up with these things?

Take haggis. (I know! I hear you quite clearly parroting Mr. Dangerfield's "please!") Who besides the desperate but clever mother of a starving family would have thought to use the "stomach bag and pluck" (heart, liver, and lungs) of a sheep to create a football-sized trussed bag of steaming offal-infused oatmeal?

And you wash this all down with the Water of Life, of course--that wee and essential dram of Scots whisky.

This meal of unlikely throw-away components is tied together spiritually by the whisky. You see, whisky, like haggis, is formed from readily available grain. It all starts with fermentation of barley mash using invisible yeasts billowing from the heavens, a gift from God so perfect it has religious fundamentalists denying its heavenly existence. (Or at least fighting its transformative process: It was, after all, the Methodist bishop Welch who became rich from a patented and quite modern process to prevent the inevitable fermentation of grape juice.)

Fermented beverages fixed the problem of fetid and even dangerous water in antiquity. Other fermentations occur, for example, in cheese making, creating tasty ways of preserving essential animal protein as well.

The informed traveler can partake of these little bits of history by searching out foods that have been prepared (and refined) for decades. They probably won't show up on Michelin multi-starred restaurant menus, not unadulterated by the latest fad in prematurely picked, miniature vegetables in any case.

An Ending Prayer

Dear Lord: While I hope to be rich at some time in the future, may my palate never become so refined that I have to search out ever more delicate flavors to avoid offending it.

Guido

Want to go to Whisky School? Well, if you've got three days on your Scotland vacation you can!

Want a Haggis Recipe?

Did you know that they're working on fermenting the waste products of Portuguese cheese making so it can help cars run cleaner?