scottobear | 7857 - via cixel - Monkeys and Tiger Penis Wine

'Occasionally someone would tear off a monkey's arm to make a bit of soup'

It may not be to everybody's taste, but Òendangered speciesÓ are back on an underground menu near you. You can literally have anything you want from rhino's horn, to tiger penis, to Virgin's nipples. Stewart Lee Allen's new book on forbidden food is a taste sensation as these titbits prove

Smoked Green Makaku

It's been ten years since I took a rusty barge down the Congo River, but my memories remain vivid. Like the moment I realised my dorm cabin was doubling as the boat's brothel. Or the time our captain lost his temper and deliberately drove the boat aground for three days. Or the sweltering hot rooms below deck where stowaways were hung from their wrists and whipped. But it's the expression on the faces of the smoked monkeys that I remember best, contorted in an agonising howl, lips blackened from smoke, eye sockets charred and empty.

Smoked primate is the nouvelle cuisine of Central Africa and every day dugout canoes pulled up out of the endless jungle to unload stacks of them for delivery to the market place in Kisangani. By the end of the trip, the decks were covered with what looked like piles of withered children curled up in fetal position. Occasionally someone would tear off an arm to make a bit of soup. It was that kind of journey.

I didn't realise then that I was witnessing the birth of a culinary trend that many believe will finally lead to the extermination of mankind's closest relatives. Primates, like chimps and apes, have been on endangered species' lists for many decades, but their numbers had stabilised until a recent breakdown in traditional food taboos put them back on the fast track for oblivion.

'If the taste for bushmeat continues to spread at its current pace,' says Anthony Rose from the Institute for Conservation Education, 'all African apes and most other non-human primates may soon be threatened with extinction.' Hundreds of wildlife organisations have recently made the issue a top priority, including famed ape-specialist Jane Goodall, who has predicted the extinction of wild apes within 50 years if the culinary fad continues.

The problem began with logging companies sending foreign workers into the deepest parts of the African jungle. Keeping their workers fed in these areas is extraordinarily complicated. So to maximise profits, many of these companies simply gave their workers guns to hunt 'bushmeat'-- gorillas, chimps, gazelles, anteaters and whatever else they could find. Many of these animals have always been on the local menu, but most tribes considered it taboo because of their obvious kinship to humans. Seeing foreigners munching on monkey chops for the last few decades, however, has normalised this as food. 'You must come to my house,' one of my fellow passengers used to urge. 'My mother, she makes the best monkey!'

This local consumption has recently been exacerbated by a growing export market. The chimp jerky on my boat, for instance, was destined for the second largest city in the Congo, Kisangani, so it could be shipped to places such as Brussels, where African expatriates willingly pay up to $20 for a plate of Ma's smoked green makaku stew.

The lure of this easy cash, combined with the local consumption and better guns, is causing slaughters in numbers unimaginable in the recent past. Some estimate the market is now worth a billion dollars a year, that 10 per cent of the meat in some African towns comes from primates, and that the international market, estimated at one billion dollars, consumes a quarter of a million metric tons of primate meat a year.

With an estimated 200,000 chimps left in Africa, the maths isn't hard to do. The recent extinction of Ghana's red colobus monkey has already been blamed on this phenomenon.

It's not just the monkeys that are threatened. Primates, whose genome code is 98 per cent identical to that of humans, carry a version of the HIV/AIDS virus, and specialists have long suspected that this was the source of the human virus. Only nobody could figure out how it had been transmitted. Then in 1999 a team of researchers stumbled across a chimp that the US army had frozen 20 years earlier and after, an exhaustive genetic investigation, deduced that the first human victim of AIDS had been infected by a dish of chimp about 50 years ago.

The Virgin's Nipples

The French may be the most vocal about sex and baking, but the Italians have the most colourful renditions. The bread called copiette is made to resemble a couple having sex, a reference to the ancient tradition of schtupping in a wheat field to help ensure its fertility. Roman wives have vagina shaped pastry called prucitanu that they traditionally give their husbands at Christmas. If dissatisfied, they give him the viscotta di San Martinu, a phallic looking biscuit named after the patron saint of cuckolded husbands. Well-hung grooms wear seven donut-shaped pastries called xuccarati around their members during their honeymoon to calm fearful brides. One cookie is removed and eaten each day until she's ready for the full monty.

The most common of these erotic mouthfuls is the minni di virgini, or Nipples of the Virgin, a custard-filled pastry shaped like a woman's breast and topped with an aroused candied cherry nipple. The story behind this delicious pastry, however, is enough to take away your appetite. It seems that it commemorates the martyrdom of St Agatha, who had her breasts cut off by Roman pagans for refusing to renounce Christ. She's now the adopted patron saint of breast cancer victims and is traditionally portrayed offering her breasts on a serving plate.

To make your own minni di virgini:

3 cups basic pastry dough

1/2 cup basic pastry cream

Candied succatta or chocolate pieces

Candied cherries, cut in half

Confectioners' sugar

Preheat oven to 220C. Divide the dough into eight pieces and roll into small rectangles. Place two tablespoons of pastry cream on one half of the rectangle and sprinkle with chopped candied pumpkin or chocolate (about a quarter of a tablespoon, or as you like). Fold the other half of the dough over to make a square. Seal it well, and then, with a glass or pastry cutter, cut out a circle-shaped mound from the centre about three inches in diameter. Put the halved candied cherry in the middle, and bake for six to eight minutes until lightly browned. Sprinkle with confectioners' sugar and serve.

(This recipe feeds eight and they're best enjoyed warm.)

Beijing Libido

The Chinese are the world's reigning omnivores. They eat cats. They eat dogs. They eat monkey brains, fish bladders and gorilla paws. They gulp down Tibetan lamas, and it seems just a matter of time before the running dogs of Taiwan slide down the national gullet. But their appetite for what Western minds might perceive as socially unacceptable shines most bright when it comes to aphrodisiacs. It's almost as if someone had run down a list of protected species and ticked them off one by one. The recent stability of the world's tiger population, for instance, is now threatened by Chinese demand for the animal's penis. You can get tiger penis in capsule form or in the ever popular Òthree penisÓ wine, which is actually more like whisky.

Some 50,000 seals have the same bit of their anatomy hacked off every year for similar reasons, making their little man 500 per cent more valuable than the rest of the carcass combined. The horn of the rhino now sells for $54,000 a kilogram in China. The eggs of the endangered leatherneck sea turtle also rate high on the list.

But the lust for exotic erotica is universal. Seafood of any kind rates high, but whale mucus is particularly popular in the Middle East. Malaysians suck blood from a freshly decapitated rattlesnake to get going. Japanese mix the testes of the poisonous puffer fish with hot sake, and the Romans once fancied the feet of the skink lizard. Everything from cockroaches to leeches to jackal bile to asses' milk has been vainly rubbed on weary members for so long, it's a wonder that the damn things haven't been rubbed right off.

The only men who consider the ladies' feelings appear to be the Mongolians, who once used goats' eyelids as a sexual enhancer; apparently those wiry eyelashes drove the girls crazy. But it's the British who win the prize for perverse quirks Ð Elizabethan men found prunes so titillating that brothels kept jars of them on the bedside table.

How most of these items came to be considered love engines is anyone's guess, although many bear a vague resemblance to genitals, particularly the ever-popular sea cucumber, that squirts out white threads when alarmed. None of these aphrodisiacs are particularly effective, which is perhaps their sole virtue; scientists now hope that the proven effectiveness and relative cheapness of the drug Viagra will decimate the market for tiger penises.

Mitterrand's Last Supper

When French President Francois Mitterrand realised he was about to die of cancer, he invited his friends over for a final New Year's Eve Dinner: December 31, 1995. The first course was oysters. Then came foie gras. Then roast capon. But no dessert course, no cheese: the last flavour Mitterrand wished to savour belonged to the flesh of the endangered ortolan, a songbird the size of a human toe that is a crime to buy or hunt, and is illegal to eat. Mitterrand devoured it in the traditional manner, first covering his head with an embroidered cloth, then inserting the entire bird in his mouth.

If guilt is a flavour, and it definitely is, then l'ortolan is one of the world's greatest dishes. The lemon-coloured songbirds, called buntings in English, originally appeared in French songs as symbols of innocence and the love of Jesus. Then a tribe near Bordeaux began trapping them as they migrated south to Africa, pulling them out of the sky with little wooden traps called matoles hidden high in the treetops.

The birds must be taken alive; once captured they are either blinded or kept in a lightless box for a month to gorge on millet, grapes, and figs, a technique apparently taken from the decadent cooks of Imperial Rome who called the birds beccafico, or Òfig-peckerÓ. When they've reached four times their normal size, they're drowned in a snifter of Armagnac.

This sadistic mise en scene has transformed the bird from a symbol of innocence to an act of gluttony symbolic of the fall from grace. In Collette's novel Gigi, for instance, the tomboyish main character prepares for her entry into polite society with lessons in the correct way to eat lobsters and boiled eggs. When she begins training to be a courtesan, however, she is said to be Òlearning how to eat the ortolanÓ. Not that it was only courtesans who indulged. The tradition of covering one's head while eating the bird was supposedly started by a soft-bellied priest trying to hide his sadistic gluttony from God.

Cooking l'ortolan is simplicity itself. Simply pop them in a high oven for six to eight minutes and serve. The secret is entirely in the eating. First you cover your head with a traditional embroidered cloth. Then place the entire four-ounce bird into your mouth. Only its head should dangle out from between your lips. Bite off the head and discard. L'ortolan should be served immediately; it is meant to be so hot that you must rest it on your tongue while inhaling rapidly through your mouth. This cools the bird, but its real purpose is to force you to allow its ambrosial fat to cascade freely down your throat.

When cool, begin to chew. It should take about 15 minutes to work your way through the breast and wings, the delicately crackling bones, and on to the inner organs. Devotees claim they can taste the bird's entire life as they chew in the darkness: the wheat of Morocco, the salt air of the Mediterranean, the lavender of Provence. The pea-sized lungs and heart, saturated with Armagnac from its drowning, are said to burst in a liqueur-scented flower on the diner's tongue. Enjoy with a good Bordeaux.

What could be more delicious? Nothing, according to initiates, who compare the banning of the ortolan to the death of French culture and continue to eat them at the risk of being fined thousands of pounds.

ÒIt is a most incredible thing Ð delicious,Ó says Jean-Louis Palladin, a French chef who once smuggled 400 ortolans into the United States for a dinner at his restaurant in Washington's Watergate Hotel (he hid them from customs in a box of nappies). Palladin sneers at the idea that the covering of the diner's head is to hide their shame from God.

ÒShame? Mais non! It is for concentrating on the fat going down the throat. It is really like you are praying, see? Like when you take the Mass into your mouth from the priest's hand in church and you think about God. Now that is what eating l'ortolan is really most like.Ó

President Mitterrand appears to have agreed. Although so ill that he was passing out between courses, France's last truly great leader broke the traditional limit of one bird per dinner that night in 1995. He ate two. It was the last thing he tasted. The next morning Mitterrand began refusing food.

He died within the week.

http://www.sundayherald.com/25926