Food is a way to travel the globe without a plane ticket, or space in MIQ. The people from Atlas Obsura who created a global phenomenon by finding weird and wonderful attractions around the world, now go off the culinary beaten track to find strange and unusual edible wonders of the world.
Dylan Thuras is the co-founder and creative director of Atlas Obscura and co-editor of Gastra Obscura and joined Afternoons to talk about the new book.
The first clue that it’s not your usual food book comes right at the beginning with a warning that not everything in the book should be eaten and can do harm. Thuras says that, while he hasn’t learnt that the hard way, he’s had some interesting experiences with food.
Photo: Screenshot
“I’ve definitely tried some things I was happy to try once but not eat or run back to. Part of the whole point of that whole introduction is to help people approach this book. It’s not a cookbook and it’s not even a bucket-list of food you must eat, it is a way of exploring the incredible diversity and ingenuity of food around the world.
“That’s sort of what we were looking for, stories that surprised you about food history, about ingredients, even restaurants which are incredible places where you can get interesting food items. We were kind of trying to prepare people for what they were in for.”
The book isn’t all horror show, however. There are fascinating tales about how seemingly humble dishes came together through historical clashes and collisions, one that struck Thuras was the Thai dish Pad Thai.
“Pad Thai was kind of invented by the dictator of Thailand in the 1930s and 40s and he wanted to kind of create a national identity for what was then Siam. He renamed Thailand and that was part of his campaign, to invent this dish that became, by force, the national dish of Thailand.”
Photo: supplied
And there are illuminating insights too. For instance, fish sauce, which is typically associated with Asian food, had its roots in Roman times where it was used in almost every dish they cooked. And the humble sandwich, often attributed to the Lord of Sandwich, is traced back to 200 BC China.
“It’s hard to put a claim for sure on what is the earliest possible sandwich, but we make a guess at it.”
The team located a Chinese term that translates to ‘meat in bread’, “a pretty good definition of a sandwich or hamburger.”
“You could get a halal version because the region in which it’s made has a Muslim population, you can get a lamb version or get it in pork, the kind of standard version, and it’s delicious. It’s made with a tonne of different spices so it has got a different flavour profile than you might think of as a normal sandwich.”
Dylan Thuras Photo: ObscuraAtlas.com
Bugs is considered at the extreme end of food for most westerners and one that might be particularly unappealing is maggot cheese made in Sardinia. Even Thuras is yet to try it.
“I would try but it comes with a little safety warning. Traditionally, a whole is made in the rind of this cheese so that a fly can go in and lay its eggs. The eggs almost act as a fermenting process, they change the cheese, change the flavour into a sort of gorgonzola and it gets kind of creamy. But traditionally, it’s eaten with the live maggots. You can eat it without the live maggots, but you normally don’t.
“The live maggots, you’ve got to eat them, chew them up and, if you don’t, they can cause you problems down there, you don’t want them wriggling around. So, yeah, I’ve yet to indulge in that particular delicacy.”
Sticking with Sardinia, and on the more palatable end, is the world’s most rare and revered pasta, the threads of God.
“The threads of God pasta is really only produced by a handful of women, five maybe, really know how to make this pasta in the traditional manner. You can’t make it by machine, people tried and it doesn’t work. It’s this incredibly laborious process of kneading and kneading and kneading this semolina flour and then stretching it out almost to an angel hair, then even thinner into these absolutely gossamer threads.
“It’s then kind of laid over each other in a grid pattern to form a kind of giant cracker that is usually cracked up and put into a soup. It’s an immense amount of work for something that ends up in a kind of simple dish but people make a kind of religious trek out to the women who know how to do this to honour this incredible pasta making tradition.”
