Gastronaut extracts
Introduction

Hello. You hold in your hands a gastronautical questbook, a practical guide for the adventurous cook and a personal journey through the crazy, twisted, mixed-up world of food. If you see it as a manual for culinary show-offs, I can live with that. I just want to encourage you to play with your food. The first half of this book is for your bedside: a mixture of essays and tales of culinary adventure. If that inspires you, then I hope the second half will travel to your kitchen to join you on some wild gastronomic projects. Barring a handful of recipes that I’ve included because I thought they’d tickle you or because I just couldn’t stop myself, everything here is real and practical. That said, I don’t expect you to cook from this book every day or even every week, but rather when you have the time and inclination to have some fun, to make something spectacular and to explore the culinary hinterland.

But why bother playing with food? Well, bear this in mind: you will eat 20 tonnes of food in your lifetime, and you’ll spend 2946.62 days eating, shopping, cooking, queuing or hunting for it. That’s 16% of your entire waking life. You could spend that time making comfort food, eating burgers or fussing over canapés, but Christ alive, what a waste of a life. We’re a race of dreamers, alchemists, poets and explorers, and my guess is that you, dear reader, are one of those and you’re not willing to see life slip through your fingers. Much better to maximize your excitement-to-mastication ratio by every now and then spending an inordinate amount of time slaving away over a crazy recipe in search of a moment of epiphany.

Whenever I’ve been asked what my moment of culinary epiphany was, I’ve lied through my teeth trying to make up something clever. The truth of the matter is that I fell in love with cooking before I fell in love with food, and for two very simple reasons. The first was named Jane and the second, Denise. These were two highly fanciable girls in my home economics class when we were 13 years old, and whenever the teacher wasn’t looking, we’d play a game whose rules were completely incomprehensible, but which invariably ended up with us fondling each other’s bottoms with floury hands. It quickly dawned on me that great things could be achieved through cooking.

Food is so much more than fuel – it’s a catalyst for emotion, an historical journey, a rite, a celebration, a three-times-daily act of giving and receiving love and a fine opportunity for exhibitionism. For myself, I wouldn’t claim that I dive into the culinary unknown every day, but most weekends I like to destroy my kitchen (with my two-year-old daughter as my wingman) in a flight of gastronomic fancy, and I hope that once in a while you will, too.

Experimenting with food is more than just fun – it’s essential. In the 1580s the potato was an obscure poisonous tuber, but some gastronaut persevered until it became one of the world’s most successful crops, sustaining life for billions. But, by then relying on this miracle discovery, we failed a nation by creating a monoculinary culture. Ireland’s tragic potato famine was mostly due to over-dependence on a single strain of that self-same crop. We are omnivores with a diverse diet and, in our primitive state, insatiable culinary curiosity, and this is one of the reasons why, in evolutionary terms, our species has been so successful. We are highly adaptable in times of want, unlike the koala bear, for instance, which lives exclusively on eucalyptus. If the eucalyptus season is a bad one, whole populations of koala bears are wiped out. We have the ability to move on to other crops (annoyingly, we can’t actually digest eucalyptus – the koala has had to develop a special stomach to cope with such a poisonous herb). We must avoid the temptation to stick with what we know, and continue to experiment, to take risks in order to survive.

But is over-reliance on a small set of foods really a problem in the modern age? Absolutely. Our current problems with obesity are caused by a dietary dependence on specific food types, and it’s killing people right now. A reliance on powdered baby milk causes terrible problems, especially in the developing world. Richer nations have a long history of manoeuvring farmers across the world into growing commercial crops that create a devastating lack of adaptability, and modern agribusiness offers the joys of the GM seed-to-chemical cycle of financial dependence. There are strong arguments for and against GM crops (and organic foods, for that matter), but none of it sits well with me yet.

We may hate GM, but we still need to find a way to feed a hungry, changing world, so we must keep experimenting with both new and ancient foods. I’m not saying that we’ll be the ones to save the world, but who knows what you and I will find on our adventures?

I ought to dish out some apologies here: I’m sorry to all my friends and family who’ve been guinea pigs as I gamble recklessly with their appetites; who’re rarely served their food before midnight, and smile even though they’re too pissed to taste it. And above all for their enthusiasm – together we’ve discovered a whole encyclopedia of successes and a fair few disasters.

I’d also like to apologize to you, dear reader, for having to endure the many moments of indulgence in this book that I failed to cull. In my defence, they are inextricably linked to the exhilaration of culinary adventure, so I thought I might just get away with them. I hope that this book heralds a few adventures for you, helps you have a little fun and perhaps unlocks some secrets. And if you stumble across anything new and wonderful, or have any glorious failures, I want to know all about it.

When are you free for supper?

Ó Stefan Gates 2005