Dear Time-Reader

Get a group of correspondents talking about the food they have sampled in their travels and you soon have a culinary atlas of the world.

For example, James Burke recalls the time he was introduced to yak-butter tea. It was at the Himalayan border pass of Jelep-la, nearly 15,000 feet above sea level, cold and sleeting. "A party of Tibetan muleteers was seated around an open fire. I was invited to join them and a wrinkled old hag was ordered to make tea. She poured a quart of dark, steaming tea into a wooden churn, added a quarter-pound of dirty, strong-smelling yak butter and a heavy dash of salt. After this was thoroughly churned, it was served in a wooden bowl. Oily globules were floating on top. Anywhere else it would have been a nauseating concoction, both in sight and smell. But here in the rarefied cold of the Himalayas it was like a rich, hot soup. After two full bowls, my numbness and exhaustion were gone, and I was off down the steep trail like a mountain goat."

According to Correspondent Alex Campbell, a South African Bushman will eat anything from a mouse to an elephant. In the Okovanggo swamps of Bechuanaland in 1951, he sampled a Bushman meal: "They produced an elephant foot, spiced with cloves, nutmeg, salt and pepper, wrapped in wet clay and baked for five hours in a scooped-out anthill. The result was a pleasant, jellylike dish which tasted like baked oyster. While waiting for it to bake we had an hors d'oeuvre which tasted like popcorn--fried flying ants and wild honey."

A Japanese delicacy favored by Sam Welles is toasted octopus cooked in oil over a charcoal brazier. John Dowling lists a dish he was served in Pnompenh, Cambodia: monkey soup and noodles. One day in 1944, far from his usual Georgia cooking, Correspondent Bill Howland arrived cold and hungry at an Alaskan trading post that boasted a cook who was half-Eskimo, half-Russian. Howland was invited to have dinner. Says he: "It was roasted young bear, garnished with potatoes and gravy, as savory as any dish turned out by Escoffier." On one of his northern trips, Bob Schulman discovered a simple but tasty article called "squaw candy": a fillet of salmon dry-smoked over a low fire.

In Spain, says Piero Saporiti, when a person offers you food or drink it is an insult to refuse. One day in the city of Bilbao, he met a Basque friend whose vice, was bragging about his native regional food. "Having eaten badly that week," says Saporiti, "I decided to test my friend. The conditions: he could introduce me to the most 'exquisite' dish of my career and if my palate agreed, I would pay the bill. We stopped at a restaurant where my friend whispered some hasty instructions to the waiter. Minutes later came wooden forks and an earthenware crock full of hundreds of steaming, crackling, silvery creatures. And I had my first taste of baby eels (angulas), shiny and tiny as pins. They are boiled in a brew of black sauce and garlic, then fried in sizzling olive oil with garlic and red peppers, and must be eaten with a wooden fork. I paid the bill."

Sometimes native table rules add a certain fillip to the art of dining. When he was in the Middle East, says Jim Bell, he found that whole roasted sheep eaten Bedouin style (i.e., with hands only) is guaranteed to satisfy the hungriest man alive. The only problem is one of etiquette: the guest of honor is supposed to eat the sheep's eyeballs. Keith Wheeler, now on Bell's former beat, likes an Iranian dish of young lamb and rice called tchelo kebab, "which Iran should have nationalized instead of oil."

In covering the visit of Queen Elizabeth II to Queen Salote of Tonga (TIME, Dec. 28), Richard MacMillan recorded his choice menu: 4,200 roasted suckling pigs, 2,100 chickens, baked taro and yams, fresh pineapple, watermelon and bananas, shellfish and coconut milk.

In 1953 Cranston Jones visited the small, sunburned, impoverished and nearly starved village of Bica, in the Brazilian state of Ceara, without rain for three years. "With the proud hospitality of the backlands we were invited to share the only food in the village. The meal was xique-xique (cactus), grilled over a small fire and eaten with a morsel of desert rat. When we left, we gave the mayor what food we had in the car: some oranges and biscuits. He thanked us and said the gift would go to the village children."

George Harris found his favorite meal at home in Chicago. "My bride Sheila," he says, "could not cook at first, but she could read, and we started with six cookbooks. After several weeks of rather strange food I came home one evening to a chicken souffle as savory as a politician's dream." Harris learned later that the recipe his wife had followed called for a souffle made from icebox leftovers. Having no leftovers in her kitchen, she had spent the entire day cooking up bits of leftovers to satisfy the recipe.

Cordially yours,

James A. Linen

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