Cultivate an appetite through rigorous exercise of the organs of speech.

Grow root vegetables and, if possible, talons.

Salivation is important, but in most cases it will not be necessary to consume the saliva of other creatures, e.g. in the form of Aerodramus swiftlet nests.

Go to the ocean—primal eater—and watch how it wags its tongue.

Make sure the bread and the soup are singing in the same key.

Beware of the sea cucumber, which turns itself inside-out to avoid becoming a meal.

The best food is the most obvious: a fan never runs out of air to chew.

If the meat is rotten, eat the maggots.

Forks to the left, spoons to the right and a steak knife’s macron over the dish’s O.

Oxidation is too unpredictable. Use gastric acid and fermentation.

Set an extra place at your table for the anthropologist with the most delectable buttocks.

When eating smalahove—Norwegian sheep’s head—
the ear & eye must be consumed while still piping hot,
before their abundant fat starts to congeal.

Belgians prefer their cow tongues warm
and their pig tongues cold
with a vinaigrette.

Testicles are among the most versatile of foods,
delicious sautéed & sauced,
fricasseed, battered & deep-fried, put in pies,
poached or roasted.
The penis, or pizzle, is mostly
just fed to dogs.

According to the Talmud, tractate Berachoth,
the spleen is the seat not of anger or melancholy
but laughter. The Greeks roast it
over an open fire: splinantero.

Eating humble pie originally meant
eating a meat pie made with umbles,
originally numbles: those glistening parts
in which no one takes much pride.

Sweetbreads, which are offal,
should not be confused
with sweetmeats, which are mere confections.

I hate your guts, we say
to someone so detested
even their innocent viscera seem repulsive.

The lungs when put
to culinary use
are called lights.

*

Updated 1/25/12 to add a new sixth stanza, prompted by a comment from rr, as well as a new eighth stanza.

—First thing I did when I got back from D.C. was wash all my empties. Because bottling beer is complex enough without having to worry about cleaning all the bottles yet. If they’re already clean, all they need is a soak in sanitizer solution.

See, brewing is a great motivator.

—Heh. So you have a basic set of bottles which you reuse all the time?

—Yes. They’re brown. Too much light can spoil beer.

—Do they have the cloudy shoulders that come with age and jostling?

—I don’t think so. They don’t get jostled much.

—I think all the soft drinks and beer bottles in the various African countries I’ve been to have that.

It shows up more on bottles with a curvier shape and darker glass. Maybe yours don’t have a shoulder.

—Maybe not enough of one.

—Have you ever collected sea glass?

—Only rarely. I don’t get to the sea much, you know.

—Ah, your loss.

But you know what I mean, all rubbed and opaque but with the promise of translucence.

—Yes.

—So if you jostled your beer a bit more (which I don’t recommend, obviously) then you’d get well-worn beer glass with the same quality ’round its shoulders.

If you put sea glass in your mouth it becomes more jewel-like, but only until the spit vanishes. But it tastes of salted sun.

Ingredients

1 lb ground venison
1/4 cup minced onion
2 tsp minced garlic
1 12-oz can of coconut milk
3/4 cup whole-grain rye bread in large crumbs
1 egg
1/2 tsp ginger powder or 2 minced slices of fresh ginger root
1 tsp garam masala
1/2 tsp five-spice powder
1 tblsp Hungarian paprika
lots of fresh ground black pepper
1 tsp salt

Directions

With a fork or some similar implement, stir and blend the coconut milk into something resembling a liquid, then pour a bit of it onto the bread crumbs in a mixing bowl to soften them up. Dump the rest into a large kettle on the stove and heat on medium low until it simmers. Beat the egg, add it to the breadcrumbs, then add all the rest of the ingredients and mix with a spoon or your fingers until you’ve produced a more or less uniform mass. Shape into eight to ten balls and place them in the simmering milk, which should submerge them about half-way. That’s O.K., because you’ll turn them over every ten minutes or so to prevent them from sticking. They should be done in 40-45 minutes, and you’ll be left with just enough sauce to spoon over top.

I was going to add dried currants, but forgot. Chopped almonds might’ve been a nice touch, too. As for the lack of a photo: they were meatballs. Presentation was not a central concern.

pink & white carousels
from a run-down amusement park
graffitoed by nematodes.

They fit oddly in the palm
with their rats’ tails & severed tops.
What planet are they from?

They’re marooned—no eyes
to sprout grappling hooks,
no way to win back the sun.

But when I slice them open:
starch-white deserts
unriffled by any wind.

The grains ended up being about 2/3 what I normally use for a five-gallon batch of beer, I thought, but with the extra sugars, it should be about enough for four gallons. I brought the water up to the usual temperature, dumped in the grain bag, swirled it around a bit, and put the lid on the pot. I’ve found, by the way, that that’s really all I ever have to do to maintain mash temperature: a large volume of liquid in a lidded steel brewpot doesn’t drop more than a couple of degrees in an hour at room temperature. There’s absolutely no reason to do the usual homebrewer thing and use a picnic cooler mash tun. Since I hadn’t added any wheat or unmalted grains, I didn’t need to go through any complicated step-infusion process. An hour at 150 degrees F should be enough to accomplish the essential magic of converting malt to maltose.

Sparging, for me, consists of lifting the grain bag out and placing it in an enormous colander (from a Swedish vegetable steamer/juicer) over another pot or bucket, and slowly dribbling hot water over it with a soup ladle. It’s kind of meditative, especially if you have some good blues to listen to. I’m sure there are more efficient ways to sparge, but I don’t have much room in this small house for lots of extra gear, and besides, who really cares about efficiency? Getting every last drop of fermentable sugar off the grain is for industrial brewers watching their bottom line. I think that kind of outlook can be damaging to the more generous, experimental and joyful spirit of homebrewing. Besides, I knew I’d be replenishing my honey supply that afternoon, so I could easily spare a couple pounds of that.

When I got back mid-afternoon, I turned the stove back on, brought the wort to a boil, and yes, added some local wildflower honey. That morning I had also remembered to sterilize and refrigerate a gallon of water to add at the very end, to aid in the rapid cooling of the wort. So I boiled the wort for about an hour and a half, until it came down to the three-gallon mark.

As usual, I skipped the hops. Given how quickly the flavor of hops can disintegrate in storage, there’s probably a reason why the majority of American homebrewers can’t afford to be as slack as I am. I did, however, use some quite fresh dried mugwort that I’d gathered just a couple weeks before — somewhere around a pint of it, I guess. That was the primary antimicrobial bittering agent. I scrounged up a few more odds and ends of herbs and spices, I’m not sure exactly what. I remember adding some calamus and licorice root and a handful of coriander seeds, as well as some Indian sarsaparilla, which always goes especially well with mugwort. There might’ve been other things.

I don’t normally brew this way. In fact, this was the first time in many years that I didn’t carefully weigh and measure everything and write it all down for future reference. But I have to say, it felt liberating not to. I wanted to see just how many beermaking rules I could get away with violating and still have a drinkable ale at the end of it. I’ve never owned a hydrometer, so I’m used to not knowing the alcohol content of what I brew. Some brewpubs are so geeky about this, they even list the specific gravities of each beer on their chalkboard menus — as if that’s going to be meaningful to anyone but brewers. But I really think taste and not alcohol content should be our focus. Also, in my regular culinary activities, making meals and baking bread, I like to get away from the written word as much as possible and concentrate on internalizing methods and processes rather than recipes. Why not extend that to beermaking?

Two weeks later, at bottling time, I did attempt to measure the bottling sugar (more dried malt extract). But unfortunately it clumped up and spilled out over my half-cup measure into the brew. I was shooting for 3/4 of a cup, but might’ve ended up with a bit more than that, I thought. I started to worry that the bottles would over-carbonate and foam over when opened.

That was a week ago. This afternoon, I opened the first bottle to see if the stuff was actually O.K. To my delight, it fizzed to just the proper degree. There’s a pretty full mouth-feel, but more importantly, it tastes all right! It’s not the best beer I’ve ever brewed, but it’s far from the worst. In fact, I have to say it’s pretty damn drinkable. I’m having another one right now. The second-quarter moon is shining, and I think it’s just warm enough for some night-time porch sitting…

My first videopoem to use footage from another, equally fun hobby, homebrewing. The poem by D. H. Lawrence is now in the public domain, and I found it rather quickly because my copy of his complete poems is quite throughly annotated with marginalia by its previous owner — my poetry sensei, Jack McManis. Jack had put a big check-mark beside the title and underlined all the best parts, helping me see past its — to my mind — overly didactic framing.

Here’s the text.

Terra Incognita
by D. H. Lawrence

There are vast realms of consciousness still undreamed of
vast ranges of experience, like the humming of unseen harps,
we know nothing of, within us.
Oh when man has escaped from the barbed-wire entanglement
of his own ideas and his own mechanical devices
there is a marvellous rich world of contact and sheer fluid beauty
and fearless face-to-face awareness of now-naked life
and me, and you, and other men and women
and grapes, and ghouls, and ghosts and green moonlight
and ruddy-orange limbs stirring the limbo
of the unknown air, and eyes so soft
softer than the space between the stars,
and all things, and nothing, and being and not-being
alternately palpitant,
when at last we escape the barbed-wire enclosure
of Know Thyself, knowing we can never know,
we can but touch, and wonder, and ponder, and make our effort
and dangle in a last fastidious fine delight
as the fuchsia does, dangling her reckless drop
of purple after so much putting forth
and slow mounting marvel of a little tree.

Kummerspeck (German) Excess weight gained from emotional overeating. Literally, grief bacon.
—“15 Wonderful Words With No English Equivalent“

Strip of blubber
sputtering on
high heat,
red stripe
that whispers
to the whip,
curling like
a tongue
at touch of
something bitter,
shrinking
& shriveling like
a spent cock
or drought-
struck leaf,
turning brittle
as the cover
of an old pulp
magazine,
ah bacon—
if I were to
bring you home,
it would be
as a flag
draped over
a coffin,
red & white
& red,
or some
long rash
I’d feed with
nervous nails.

Sniffing the beer with the requisite solemnity and decorum, you inhale a complex bouquet of resinous, grassy and citrusy aromas, situated approximately at the ecotone between an old meadow/orchard and a maturing northern forest. Of course, since you are also the brewer, you can’t entirely separate your present experience from your three-week-long fantasy of how this beer would smell and taste. Will it measure up? you ask yourself. After all the labor invested in its creation, how bad would it have to be for you to admit disappointment?

At last you lift the glass to your lips and have a taste, letting the liquid flow slowly over your tongue. Goddamn, you say to yourself — this is a beer! And then hasten to think of some appropriate qualifiers so you won’t sound like a total Homer Simpson-like dumbass. It’s, uh, crisp and floral, medium-bodied, dry! (Can it be all those things at the same time? You sure hope so.) Assertively yarrowy but not astringent, with a sort of earthy, spicy undertone from the sarsaparilla. Carbonation is fairly low, as you’d planned.

There’s a lingering finish, mildly bitter: the yarrow does not want to let you go. The pint consumed, you wander outside. Yarrow is still in bloom and releasing waves of scent into the night air, and you experience a kind of gestalt. Some recently felled black locust saplings are contributing their own sharp tannins to the mix, and you feel a sudden, deep, almost carnal love for the world, which you realize has a lot to do with the alcohol and a little to do with the yarrow’s own potent chemistry. Fortunately, your northern European heritage of emotional repression prevents you from doing anything you might later regret. You go back inside and open another bottle.