June 4, 2012
A Taste of Edible Feces
Herman Melville devoted an entire chapter of Moby Dick to the substance. The Chinese believed it to be dragon spittle hardened by the sea. Ambergris (that’s French for gray amber) is an opaque, hardened orb that floats for months or years at sea, until its waxy mass washes up ashore. It has have sometimes been described, inaccurately, as sperm whale vomit. Ambergris comes out the other end—the cetacean approximation of a human gallbladders stone, formed in a whale stomach as a protective barrier around sharp, indigestible squid beaks, and then excreted.
Of all the world’s feces, ambergris may be the only one prized as an ingredient in fragrances, cocktails and medicines. It’s eaten, too. Persian sherbets once included ambergris along with water and lemon. Casanova apparently added it to his chocolate mousse as an aphrodisiac. French gastronome Brillat-Savarin recommended a shilling’s worth of ambergris in a tonic of chocolate and sugar, which he claimed would render life more easy, like coffee without the restless sleeplessness.
Christopher Kemp, a molecular biologist who works (by intention, it seems) at a desk “cluttered with marginalia” exhumes these enigmatic tidbits in his new book Floating Gold: A Natural (and Unnatural) History of Ambergris. He includes obscure recipes found in footnotes to the annotated edition of John Milton’s Paradise Regained, in which “grey amber” was melted like butter onto roasted game encased in pastries.
Kemp also cooks with a piece of white ambergris: “It crumbles like truffle. I fold it carefully into the eggs with a fork. Rising and mingling with curls of steam from the eggs, the familiar odor of ambergris begins to fill and clog my throat, a thick and unmistakable smell that I can taste. It inhabits the back of my throat and fills my sinuses. It is aromatic—both woody and floral. The smell reminds me of leaf litter on a forest floor and of the delicate, frilly undersides of mushrooms that grow in damp and shaded places.”
Enigmatic, yes. Legal, no—at least not in the United States, where the mere possession of ambergris is illegal under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, as is the eating of whale meat itself. The taste remains mostly unknowable, an apt metaphor, perhaps, for the mysteries contained in our oceans at large.
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None for me, if only as a matter of principle, thanks. I chuckled when reading about how someone compares eating feces to a truffle. But, I would rather eat the truffle, and let someone else compare that to eating feces.
Aw, c’mon. Is that all there is? Now I gotta spend the night Googling because of a tempting but non-meaty morsel of ambergis.
And do they then bark at the moon?
“I chuckled when reading about how someone compares eating feces to a truffle. But, I would rather eat the truffle, and let someone else compare that to eating feces”.
Fungus or feces. I’ll pass on both, thank you.
Well, there’s always weasel poop coffee. That’s still legal.
How can Whale shit be Illegal? It may be rare but no harm is done to any whale by collecting along with other beach litter. I wouldn’t eat it but selling it to the French so they can make poop perfume is just fine with me.
kinda gives a whole new meaning to the command of “eat s…” doesn’t it. that command doesn’t seem to carry the same…….flavour…for me now!
Sorry, but ambergris appears nowhere on my bucket list!
But, why does the government think that preventing us from eating the whale excreta is helpful in the survival of marine mammals?
Nick, ambergris is an equivalent of ivory. It’s valuable and poachers will kill whales to get it. They don’t want to wait for it to maybe float their way.
I am wondering the same as Nick F. Why is it illegal? Inquiring mind
Funny, none of my gourmet cookbooks mention ambergris…
I wondered the same as Nick. I speculate that ambergris was harvested from whale carcasses. Since ambergris was so valuable and formed within the body of the whale over a long time, it would seem reasonable that whalers would examine the whale’s entrails for it.
Melville’s description makes it sound as though getting the substance from a live whale may not have been good to man or beast: “Who would think, then, that such fine ladies and gentlemen should regale themselves with an essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick whale! Yet so it is. By some, ambergris is supposed to be the cause, and by others the effect, of the dyspepsia in the whale. How to cure such a dyspepsia it were hard to say, unless by administering three or four boat loads of Brandreth’s pills, and then running out of harm’s way, as laborers do in blasting rocks.”
I’ll try it if I do get an opportunity. My friend is offering White Ambergris @ USD58.00 per.gram. So I’m kinda curious to try it out. After all what’s the harm in trying it…its just whale’s poop..:-))
A couple of years ago I bought a copy of a cookbook that was authored by members of Martha Washington`s family and ambergris was an ingredient in many dishes made for the President and guests at their home. They seem to believe it imparted a special flavor and had medicinal qualities to it. I have not tried to make any of the recipes as yet but I can tell you when I do I`ll leave that stuff out. I like free things but free feces washing up on shore is not my thing!!!!!!!