Gastro Obscura | Cecily Wong
Gastro Obscura: A Foodie Adventurer’s Guide
By Cecily Wong and Dylan Thuras
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Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery By The Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.
Cecily Wong: My name is Cecily Wong. My new book is called Gastro Obscura: A Food Adventurer's Guide. I'm the co-author along with Dylan Thuras and it's out now.
Suzy Chase: Before diving into this book, I'd like to think my new sponsor, Bloomist. Bloomist creates and curates simple sustainable products that inspire you to design a calm natural refuge at home. I'm excited to announce they've just introduced a new tabletop and kitchen collection that's truly stunning. Surround yourself with beautiful elements of nature when you're cooking, dining, and entertaining and make nature home. Visit bloomist.com and use the code Cookery20 to get 20% off your first purchase or click the link in the show notes. Now on with the show.
Suzy Chase: Gastro Obscura is the follow up to the number one New York Times bestseller Atlas Obscura. I'm a big fan of Atlas Obscura. So can you define Atlas Obscura before we dive into Gastro Obscura?
Cecily Wong: Of course, so nice that you're a fan. I also love Atlas Obscura. That's how I came to the company. It's a website, but it's essentially just this giant database of things to see, places to visit, things to eat. It's organized like an atlas online so that wherever you are, you can find a place near you, and we focus on the obscure and the wacky and the overlooked and little known. So all of these places usually have some kind of unusual angle to them. And one of the coolest things about Atlas Obscura is that most of these entries are user submitted. So we have this huge community that kind of writes to us everyday and says, "Check out this crypt." And we do, and it usually ends up on the map so that you can check it out as well.
Suzy Chase: So Gastro Obscura is a treasure trove of extraordinary foods, hidden histories, astounding experiences, and obscure culinary traditions, with over 500 entries that span all seven continents and 50 states. So this is perfect for the holiday gift for that foodie in your life who has everything. This book is a celebration of diversity through the lens of food. I love that you always focus on the hidden stories and subjects. Tell us a little bit about that.
Cecily Wong: Yeah, what's really fun about this book is, as you said, it's 500 entries. It's huge. It spans the entire globe. But it's also filled with stories about foods that we actually already know and are common to us, but they have these very obscure little known histories. I like to talk about the pineapple. We all eat pineapple, we all know about it, but it's got this amazing history. When it first came to England, it was the most sought after fruit. It was extremely expensive. It was a status symbol. You could rent a pineapple for a party so that you could just have it as a showpiece and others would be impressed and then you would give it back and whoever owned the pineapple would sell it to someone who was richer than you to actually eat. And so the book is filled with these kinds of fun stories about foods that we already know about as well as foods that are completely obscure and I'd never heard of in my life.
Suzy Chase: I think Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip got a bunch of pineapples when they got married.
Cecily Wong: That makes a lot of sense. They've since come to mean kind of hospitality. That's why you see pineapples on like wallpaper and lamps shaped like pineapples. It's got this, this welcome vibe now.
Suzy Chase: So as we said, there's so much in this book. So for this episode, I'd like to cover five surprising facts found in Gastro Obscura. Okay, number one, Norway has the highest annual per capita pizza consumption of any nation on earth. What?
Cecily Wong: I know, it's really surprising. It's not the obvious choice. They eat 50 million pizzas every year, which is the most per capita of any country. And I think the most surprising thing is that 47 million of them are frozen. They have a deep love for frozen pizza.
Suzy Chase: That's what got me. I can't figure that out. And then I looked into it a little bit and the brand that kills all the other brands in the frozen pizza aisle is called Grandiosa, which I'd never heard of, but that's so odd that they're way into frozen pizza.
Cecily Wong: Yeah, no, it's really wild. And they have a very Norwegian specific way of eating it. Their classic pie is tomato sauce, Jarlsberg cheese, and paprika. That's just classic, classic Norway.
Suzy Chase: Why, yes.
Cecily Wong: Exactly. Our favorite. And then they like to bake it and then they drizzle ketchup over the top.
Suzy Chase: What?
Cecily Wong: Yeah, I know. Not for me, but I can see how ketchup would be seen as a accompaniment to pizza, I suppose.
Suzy Chase: Wow. Number two, Spam was illegal in South Korea until the 1980s.
Cecily Wong: Yes, it was. Until they started manufacturing Spam in South Korea, it was illegal. You had to get it at these outposts stores that were only for American soldiers. And so there was a lot of black market trading for Spam. Basically a lot of South Koreans started eating Spam during the Korean War when there wasn't a lot of meat in the country, but there was a lot of meat on the American bases, and so a lot of Koreans would go to these American bases and line up for essentially the soldiers leftovers or they'd look through the trash to see what they could find. And a lot of what they found was canned Americana, like Spam, hot dogs, processed cheese, canned beans. And so all of these things they began to cook with and they made a stew with these American products, but also with like kimchi and gochujang and vegetables, and it's called Budae Jjigae, which essentially means army based stew. And it's still a super popular dish in Korea right now. There are restaurants that just specialize in it. And so a lot of Koreans had this like serious taste for Spam, even after the war, and it was illegal, they couldn't buy it. And so they would go to great lengths to secure the Spam so that they could make this stew that they'd kind of grown fond of.
Suzy Chase: So, number three, honey was used by the Persian army to defeat the Romans in 67 BCE. This was probably the craziest thing I learned.
Cecily Wong: This is one of the craziest things that I learned too ,weaponized honey. Basically, this is a honey that specifically is made in the Black Sea region of Turkey because there's a kind of rhododendron that has a neuro toxin that when bees eat it and then produce their honey, it can have psychological effects. And so, as you said, in 67 BCE, the Romans were invading what is now Turkey and King Mithridates and his men were trying to fend them off and so what they did is they placed honeycombs along the Roman's path, this kind of special mad honey, and the Romans ate it and the paralysis kind of set in and they lost kind of physical and mental capacity and then Mithridates and his men came back and they killed all the Romans. And I think like 1000 Romans were killed because of honey related death.
Suzy Chase: I guess this only comes from just a couple of species of rhododendron?
Cecily Wong: Yes, exactly. They only a couple species that grow specifically on these steep cliffs around the Black Sea contain this neurotoxin.
Suzy Chase: And it also causes a sharp burning pain in the throat. That's fun.
Cecily Wong: Yeah, doesn't that sound great?
Suzy Chase: That sounds wonderful. And you can buy this online apparently for over $100.00 a pound.
Cecily Wong: Yes, you can. It exists and I'm not going to say that I'm not interested. It depends on how much you take, and if you take a small amount, like Europeans would, it's supposed to just have very mild effects and you kind of loosen up, but then you take usually over a tablespoon and that's when things start getting a little too loose.
Suzy Chase: Okay, you can try it first.
Cecily Wong: Yeah, okay. Sounds good. We can split a bottle.
Suzy Chase: Yes. So, number four, I love this. There's an annual black tie ceremony modeled after the Academy Awards that recognizes Indian restaurants.
Cecily Wong: Yeah, it's fantastic. It is genuinely modeled after the American Academy Awards. They call it the Curry Oscars, or I guess David Cameron calls it the Curry Oscars, and it's the black tie affair and they're honoring the best in curry across the UK. And they televise it. It's syndicated across Europe, Australia, the Middle East. It's a big deal. It's held in London every year.
Suzy Chase: If you Google the British Curry Awards, you can see last year's awards. It's really cool.
Cecily Wong: That seems worth watching. I would like to see that.
Suzy Chase: Champagne, which we all love, most of us love, was once thought to be an energy drink.
Cecily Wong: I keep saying these are all my favorite stories. This might be my favorite story. It starts in London during the London Olympic marathon. It's 1908. It's a super hot day. And 55 runners begin and only 27 actually cross the finish line because so many of them are drunk. They keep drinking champagne and dropping out of the race because for a really long time people thought that champagne and wine was better at hydrating athletes than water. And so at this London Olympic marathon, like the front runner, he's winning the race and then he gets too hot and then they offer him some champagne. He takes it. And then like soon after he's passed out. And then someone else takes the lead and he's got like a two mile lead and then he also accepts the champagne and he's out of the race. And then, so there's there's champagne, but people also are gurgling brandy. Brandy is also thought to be this rejuvenating liquor for marathons.
Cecily Wong: And they don't fare that well either. The front runner ends up being this Italian pastry chef who drinks throughout and by the time he reaches the end, he's like in terrible shape, he's getting his heart massaged by medics, he's running the wrong way, and he actually gets supported across the line by a medic, which means that they actually take his gold medal away and they give it to the next person.
Suzy Chase: Oh my gosh.
Cecily Wong: And it's just a mess. Yeah. It's amazing to think that this is a live spectator event. You're watching these people just get absolutely soused and then just struggling to make it across. But this was, I mean, this was considered standard practice giving athletes alcohol. Even later in the Paris games, I think in 1924, they restocked all the hydration stations with wine instead of water.
Suzy Chase: They called it rejuvenating effervescence. Like what? It's crazy.
Cecily Wong: I mean, it sounds great. Who doesn't love champagne? But like my God, there's no way that I'm running a marathon and thinking, I mean, unless I'm dropping out, like it's my decision to stop.
Suzy Chase: Then you're getting that glass.
Cecily Wong: Absolutely, and probably the brandy as well.
Suzy Chase: Gastro Obscura is a trip around the world with photos and descriptions of unique foods categorized by location, a wonderful addition to a foodie or world travelers coffee table. The desire to eat and travel go hand in hand. Did you take any trips over the summer or do you have any travel planned for this year?
Cecily Wong: I recently moved to Oregon where I grew up as a kid. I've been in Brooklyn for the last 15 years and I had a baby this year. There hasn't been a lot of travel. We've been kind of sticking around Oregon and eating a lot around here. But in terms of larger travel, I have a mountain list of places that I'm excited to go to as soon as it's time, both with the baby and in the world.
Suzy Chase: So now to my segment called Dream Dinner Party, where I ask you who would you most want to invite to your dream dinner party and why? And for this segment, it can only be one person.
Cecily Wong: This is a great and hard question, and I'm going to choose Haruki Murakami, the novelist and writer. I love him. I'm primarily a fiction writer and he's one of my favorite novelists, but I also just love the way he writes about food. It's so simple and it's so alluring. A character opens the fridge and makes a sandwich and I want to open the fridge and make a sandwich, and I usually do, and I just think it would be so great to eat with him and see what he has to say about whatever it is we're eating.
Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?
Cecily Wong: I am on Twitter @cecilyannwong. I am also at CecilyWong.com and you can find us at AtlasObscura.com, which will also get you to Gastro.
Suzy Chase: To purchase Gastro Obscura and support the podcast head on over to cookerybythebook.com. And thanks so much, Cecily, for coming on Cookery By The Book Podcast.
Cecily Wong: Thank you so much for having me. This was great.
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