Smithsonian.com

Poster via Gulf of Maine Cod Project, NOAA National Marine Sanctuaries/Courtesy of National Archives

In 1951, the Richfield Spring Mercury ran the following:

Bravely doing his bit to combat the high cost of meat, the manager of the New Jersey Bell Telephone Company’s cafeteria recently listed on the menu “pot roast of whale-prize beef of the deep.”… It was an experimental project, resulting in varied reactions to the finny fare, even though it was “on the house” Some said it tasted like fish, though the whale is a mammal. The overall reaction, however, was good enough to warrant a return of the mammal delicacy on a “pay-as-you-go” basis.

Sixty years later, whales rarely, if ever, enter our cafeterias or our culinary consciousness. The prevailing approach to the charismatic megafauna plays out in the cat-and-mouse game (with its own sensationalist reality TV show) between whaling ships and environmentalists in the waters around Antarctica. We tend to see whales as symbols of conservation, and sometimes even symbols of conservation’s excesses.

A temporary worldwide moratorium on commercial whaling went into effect in 1986, but given its exceptions and loopholes, more whales are being killed annually than before the ban. Something is awry. If the efforts of whale huggers worldwide aren’t working, then could markets be the solution? Three American scientists recently resurrected an idea first floated by ecologist C.W. Clark in 1982 to save the whales by setting a price on their heads. The article appeared in the journal Nature. Much like carbon credits, conservationists could buy whale quotas, pocket the credit, and save as many whales as money could buy. A minke might fetch $13,000, whereas fin whales might be priced at $85,000.

It’s an intriguing proposal—one that made me wonder if we’d soon be eating whale again. Well, barring the unforeseen and unlikely overturn of the federal Marine Mammal Protection Act, don’t expect to see whale margarine or “beef of the deep” making a comeback.

Here’s where D. Graham Burnett, the author of an epic history on cetacean science called The Sounding of the Whale comes in. With the help of artist Keil Borrman, he’d like to give you a taste of the taboo flesh—or rather a reproduction of the flavor and texture taste of whale meat. On Saturday, he’s planning to serve an elk carpaccio infused with jojoba oil essences (a botanical alternative to spermaceti oil), a pan-fried pork belly served with jellied crustacean court-bouillon and a lightly smoked ham prosciutto, served in linen. So it’s not exactly whale.

“We want to sensitize people to the quirkiness of the different possible relations one can have with these animals,” Burnett told me. “Nineteenth century whale men had certain kinds of intense intimate relationship with their quarry—in part based on food. They not infrequently ate from the carcasses whales they killed. They cut them up right there.”

We no longer experience those tastes and senses. They’ve long been cut off from the modern cafeteria—perhaps for good reason—but the playful provocation does raise the question of what it really means to know these animals.

D. Graham Burnett’s book launch and “whale” meat tasting will be held on January 28 in Brooklyn.

The Eagle headed across the harbor at Dane

The first aeronauts who ascended the sky in a candy-colored hydrogen balloon brought with them mercury barometers, thermometers, telescopes and bottles of champagne. Later, when the acrobatic balloonist Vincenzo Lunardi took off in London, he lunched on chicken legs as he “rowed” across the sky. As Richard Holmes writes in The Age of Wonder, Jean Blanchard and John Jeffries packed bread, chicken and brandy on their hairy trip across the English Channel in 1785.

Given the legacy of polar exploration and the abysmal reputation of modern in-flight cuisine, I was curious to find out what S. A. Andrée packed to eat during his intended flyover of the North Pole. Of the 19th century explorers—a parade of some 751 fanatics—who tried to reach the last mysterious destination on earth, risking cold and starvation, only Andrée, a single-minded Swedish futurist, made the attempt in an aerostat. He had become fascinated by hydrogen balloons after visiting Philadelphia in 1876 and, upon returning to Sweden (on account of some stomach troubles he attributed to drinking ice water!), he set about designing balloons that could be used for exploration. In 1897, Andree took off for the pole on board the Eagle, complete with a tuxedo he intended to wear upon his arrival in San Francisco.

In Alec Wilkinson’s new book The Ice Balloon, he describes what the three men ate on their voyage into the unknown. “Around noon, they had a meal: chateaubriand, the king’s special ale, chocolate with biscuits and raspberry syrup, and water”—an intriguing al fresco dining experience amid the polar fog.

Andrée never returned. His voyage remained a mystery until 33 years later when sealers found the expedition’s remains, including photographs and journals, on the island of Kvitøya. The balloon had only flown for less than three days and the men then fought their way across the ice. Some suspected that the explorers’ subsequent fare sealed their fate—both in terms of what they had eaten (eating polar bear liver causes hypervitaminosis A; eating undercooked meats runs the risk of trichinosis and botulism) and what they had not eaten (lack of fresh foods and vitamin C leads to scurvy). The tale that Wilkinson tells nearly defies the imagination, the least of which is because the foolhardy polar adventurer did something almost unheard of today: He ate extraordinarily well in the skies.

Photographer unknown/Skeletal Growth of Aquatic Organisms/Science

The necks of geoduck clams can grow up to two and a half feet long. Pick one up and it’s hard not to conjure up a tender part of the human anatomy. As Mark Kurlansky writes, the “long phallic neck squirts water and then sadly falls flaccid.” They’re also a staple of the Chinese New Year, served as xiàng bá bàng (“elephant trunk clam”). Since geoducks (pronounced goo’e duk and originally meaning “dig deep”) live for over 150 years, they can become really meaty—up to 14 pounds.

Just how big they get came into question in 1981, when J. D. Barnes published a review of the textbook Skeletal Growth of Aquatic Organisms in the journal Science. The book explains, among other things, how mollusk shells contain biochronologies of geophysical and paleoecological information, like the rings of a tree—albeit in an organism pulled by the tides and the moon. “They are now seen as virtual transcripts of what happened in their environment during their deposition,” Barnes wrote. “Of course, the transcripts are in code, and the deciphering of the codes has only just begun.”

Scanning electron micrograph of the ring structure from a 163-year-old geoduck/Are Strom/American Geophysical Union

Clamshells essentially act as kind of natural instrumentation for recording environmental conditions in their annual growth rings—from changes in lunar magnetism to the detonation of atomic bombs. First identified as climate proxies in 1992, the bands on a geoduck shell also provide a century-old record of fluctuations in the ocean’s surface temperature. Fascinating and important stuff, indeed.

What’s odd is that the 1981 book review included an intriguing photograph, found in the book and attributed to an unknown photographer, of a boy hunched over a wheelbarrow. The photo depicts a massive geoduck clam with its distinctive growth bands. The only problem: It’s a jackalope of the sea—except that rather than a mythical creature invented in 1934 by a skilled Wyoming taxidermist, the oversized geoduck is an unnatural exaggeration of an actual organism.

“The light on the clam comes from the right side and above, while that on the boy’s face and hand is clearly from the left,” biologist Stuart Landry wrote Science. “A clam the size shown would exceed the size limits for a sessile filter feeder.” Another reader reported that, indeed, he had seen the very photo in a gift shop, right alongside the postcard of a jackalope. (One collector identifies the photographer as Johnston #1768, and, indeed, there are other postcards involving gigantic clam wrestling.)

Perhaps the over-sized geoduck provides a lighthearted invention, exhibiting regional pride, like other tall-tale postcards depicting corn that fills an entire railcar or squash the size of trucks. The image may also hint at a more troubling issue—the indelible changes in the environment that are being inscribed onto clam shells. Certainly, something to chew on this year.

Want to learn how to cook geoduck? Check out the video below:

Meringue cookies. Image courtesy of Flickr user wiserbailey.

Chefs began whipping up meringue sometime in the early 1600s. The light-as-air confection is made by whipping egg whites and is used in a variety of desserts, such as Pavlova, macaroons and baked Alaska. It’s a delicacy that’s delightfully counter-intuitive. While most other foods get smaller and flatter as they’re beaten and smashed, egg whites are comparatively resilient and fluff up and expand under similar duress.

This past weekend I had a few egg whites left over after making another dish and thought I would try my hand at them. If these things were made by Renaissance chefs in the days before electric hand mixers, surely I could manage to whip some up myself. Unfortunately, mine were a flop—literally. The egg whites never puffed and peaked like they were supposed to; they sat in flat, unappetizing pats on my baking sheet. How could something seemingly so simple fail so spectacularly? Turns out there’s a lot of chemistry to consider when making meringue.

Although egg whites are 90 percent water, the relevant molecules are protein. Proteins are made up of amino acids, some that are attracted to water, others that are repelled by water. One you start beating the whites and introducing air, the water-loving bits cling to the water, the water-repelling bits cling to the air. The more you beat, the more bubbles with a protein coating are created and the more the whole shebang fluffs up. However, bubbles and proteins divided against themselves will not stand, and the foam will collapse without a little stabilizer. One way of doing this is to introduce an acid such as vinegar, lemon juice or cream of tartar, which encourages the proteins in the egg white to bond together. Another ingredient that adds structural integrity, in addition to providing flavor, is sugar, which works like a glue that holds the foam together.

But why don’t we want to use the yolk? This part of the egg contains fat, which interferes with how the proteins line up and coat all those bubbles that are supposed to bulk up your meringue. If the bubbles aren’t properly protected, your meringue will never have much body. This is also why chefs are discouraged from using plastic bowls for this purpose as they have a tendency to retain oils. So perhaps I wasn’t as careful as I ought to have been when separating my eggs and a bit of stray yolk made it into my whites. I’m also in the habit of using my hands to separate eggs. And even though I washed my hands beforehand, perhaps residual oils sabotaged my baking venture. So even though my first try didn’t go so well, tell us about your meringue adventures (or misadventures) in the comments section below.

Following up on our lists of historians and innovators to watch in the coming year, here are a list of great food writers who our bloggers are looking forward to following:

From Jesse:

The Perennial Plate is an online documentary series by Daniel Klein about food and communities. Season 1 had a Minnesota and Midwest focus. Season 2, which is still being rolled out, covers the continental United States.

Gilt Taste’s stories section is also worth watching as a “must-read” site. It started up last spring. While the section can get a little recipe-heavy during the holiday season, it features stories about food and culture from a wide variety of writers.

From Peter:

McSweeney’s, the book publisher, is putting out David Chang’s dude-centric Lucky Peach and also, get this, a cookbook written by Eat Pray Love‘s Liz Gilbert’s grandma.

Nicola Twilley of Foodprint/Edible Geography. She writes about “smellscapes,” the odors that define certain places; wacky food-based artists; edible insects; and she runs a lot of Q&As with interesting characters.

Naz Sahin, at Feasting Never Stops, runs a very visual blog with a great sense of humor—one set of photos shows anglers holding up their hands to show the size of the biggest fish they ever caught.

Cooked Books, by Rebecca Federman, takes a more literary approach. She’s one of the curators of the “What’s on the Menu?” project.

Also, keep an eye on the Gastronomica Twitter feed.