Medium Raw

8 Lust

It’s Christmastime in Hanoi again and the Metropole Hotel is lit up like an amusement park. In the courtyard, a monstrous white tree with bright red ornamental balls towers over the swimming pool. The decorative palms shine blindingly bright with a million tiny bulbs. I’m on my second gin and tonic and planning on having a third, settled back in a heavy rattan chair and feeling the kind of sorry for myself that most people would be very content with. There’s incense in the air, buffeted about by the slowly moving overhead fans: a sickly-sweet odor that mirrors perfectly my mixed feelings of dull heartache and exquisite pleasure.

I often feel this way when alone in Southeast Asian hotel bars—an enhanced sense of bathos, an ironic dry-smile sorrow, a sharpened sense of distance and loss.

Today, this feeling will disappear the second I’m out the door. Once I’m away from the sight of the other lone Western travelers, each, I imagine, with their own weltschmerz-loaded back story, their own unfulfilled longings, sitting there with their Gerald Seymours and their Ken Follets next to unringing cell phones. After strolling ever so slightly tipsy yet confident through the lobby, the service staff in ao dais and traditional Annanite headgear address me (as they do all the guests) in French: “Bon soir, Monsieur…Ça va?” I’m through the doors, and suddenly the air fills with the roar of a thousand motorbikes and those feelings are gone, replaced by a giddiness, a familiar rush of overwhelming glee at being back in the country I’m crazy in love with.

The only way to see Hanoi is from the back of a scooter. To ride in a car would be madness—limiting your mobility to a crawl, preventing you from even venturing down half the narrow streets and alleys where the good stuff is to be found. To be separated from what’s around you by a pane of glass would be to miss—everything. Here, the joy of riding on the back of a scooter or motorbike is to be part of the throng, just one more tiny element in an organic thing, a constantly moving, ever-changing process rushing, mixing, swirling, and diverting through the city’s veins, arteries, and capillaries. Admittedly, it’s also slightly dangerous. Traffic lights, one-way signs, intersections, and the like—the rough outlines of organized society—are more suggestions than regulations observed by anyone in actual practice. One has, though, the advantage of the right of way. Here? The scooter and the motorbike are kings. The automobile may rule the thoroughfares of America, but in Hanoi it’s cumbersome and unwieldy, the last one to the party, a woolly mammoth of the road—to be waited on, begrudgingly accommodated—even pitied—like the fat man at a sack race.

Linh is driving—and I’ve finally, after many hours and many times as his passenger, given up on the strictly Western practice of hanging on. Nobody else does. Not the three-year-old child whipping past me, standing in front of his father and mother. Not grandma, riding side-saddle behind her son-in-law and daughter over there, or the hundreds of thousands of young men and women, chatting on cell phones or exchanging comments from the backs of other bikes. Somehow we all manage to stay aboard without gripping our drivers around the waist or shoulders—or even bracing ourselves from the back. Somehow it all works; we manage to move quickly—sometimes very quickly—through space, together and apart, without flying from our seats or colliding with each other. Thousands, millions of us, a moving conversation of words, glances, gestures, and the shrill honks of our horns with an ever-changing cast of characters snaking through Hanoi’s Old Quarter, around its lakes, weaving through crosscurrents, breaking over and around the bigger, sadder four-wheel vehicles like stones in a river, barely noticing the souls trapped glumly and impatiently inside.

Is anyone in this city over thirty?

It seems not. Statistically, it is said that nearly 70 percent of the population are under that age, and, if the streets of Hanoi (or any city in Vietnam, for that matter) are any indicator, that number seems even higher. Nobody among them remembers the war. They weren’t even alive for it. Much like our post–World War II baby boom, they must have gone straight home from the battlefield and done an awful lot of fuckin’ around here. Everyone—everyone, it seems—is young and either on the way to eat, returning from eating, or eating at this very minute, absolutely choking the sidewalks on low plastic stools, filling the open-to-the-street shop houses, slurping noodles or nibbling on delicious-looking bits, drinking bia hoi, the fresh beer of Hanoi, with varying degrees of joy and seriousness of intent.

My old favorite, bun cha—juicy hunks of pork served in room-temperature, sweet-and-sour green papaya juice—are grilling over charcoal by the curb; bowls of bun oc, the bright, reddish, steaming mix of snails, noodles, and crab roe–infused broth are recognizable from the hunks of fresh tomato on top as I sweep by. Sizzling crepes; banh mi sandwiches—crunchy baguettes overloaded with headcheese, delightfully mysterious pâté, pickles, and, often, a fried egg; bun bo Hue—a sort of heartier, more highly testosteroned version of pho (noodles heaped with slices of beef and pork); slabs of blood cake—and nearly every delicious goddamn thing you can think of. Tiny electric-red slices of chili peppers, crunchy sprouts, Thai basil, roughly yanked cilantro, mint, green banana slices, wedges of lime everywhere. Everywhere.

Parties of ten, twenty Vietnamese cluster around and hover over hot pots of beef parts and whole fish.

Or they just ride.

If you’re in a car, you’re fucked for any of this. Most neighborhoods have no room for your spaceship to touch down. At best, you can glide slowly by, face pressed to the glass, or—if you care to torture yourself—open the window for a moment, let your nostrils fill with the complex admixture of a thousand and one delights, most of them unavailable to you. Sure, you can park a few blocks away, maybe—but then you may as well have walked. For the scooters and motorbikes, however, there’s the convenience of valet parking. Oh, yes. Since nearly every available square foot of sidewalk is packed with tables, there is precious little space for bikes. But not to worry, because every little com, coffee shop, street stall, and eatery has a kid outside who will helpfully take your scooter and helmet, scrawl an identifying mark with chalk on the seat, and find some way to jam it in between the scores of others out front. It’s the only way the system works. When you’re done? He will helpfully extract it and have it ready for departure.

Some things never get old. Some things are just…classic. You never lose appreciation for them. Your enthusiasm may wax and wane ever so slightly, but you always come back. Whether it’s the Rolling Stones’ “Let It Bleed” or doing it doggie-style, good is simply…good. There may be other things in life, but you can pretty much spend eternity considering the matter of the former—or latter—and you’d be hard-pressed to improve on either of them.

I feel exactly like this with Hanoi-style pho. I may love the Southern versions of this spicy noodle soup fiercely, and appreciate—even need—from time to time the difference, the rougher, spicier, less subtle charms of Saigon’s often cloudier, more assertive sisters. But I wouldn’t marry any of them.

Using sexual metaphors to describe food is a practice blithely, even automatically employed by most food writers—yours truly being a frequent perpetrator. But it seems particularly appropriate when describing pho in Hanoi—even though it’s usually a morning routine, as opposed to a late-night, post-bar, fall-into-sloppy-embrace kind of a thing. Visiting a popular pho shop, particularly later in the morning, after the first waves of hungry people on their way to work have been through, resembles nothing so much as the set of a porn shoot.

Here, as there, the landscape of desire is strewn with crumpled tissues, the spent expressions of human lust. Short pink plastic trash baskets overflow with little white paper balls, wet tumbleweeds are littered everywhere. Walk three feet up to the counter and they will cling embarrassingly to the soles of your feet, trail back to your table as if you are hurriedly exiting a peep-show booth. Unlike with sex, however, this walk of shame comes before touchdown. For one’s efforts, after a long wait on line, the handover of a few dong (the unfortunate name for Vietnam’s unit of currency), a jostle, and a squeeze in between strangers at a low table on a sidewalk, one is rewarded with perfection.

Broth—usually (but not absolutely always) the savory-sweet extraction of many beef bone, heavy on the marrow. Not too dark—definitely not too light. Chances are, there are three or four enormous pots of the stuff going now behind the counter, steam rising to the ceiling, the proprietor ladling the stuff straight off the top. Locals will tell you it’s all about the broth. If the broth isn’t right, the best ingredients in the world aren’t going to save it. Rice noodles. And they’d better be right, too. Too soft, too old, or too cooked? It’s shit. Too chewy? Same. Handmade and cooked to order—or at least in constantly ongoing batches, please. Classically, in Hanoi, the meat component is beef—and beef tendon, but preferences vary as to the exact mix. The counter behind the glass of my favorite place in the Old Quarter is stacked with pre-boiled beef shoulders: the perfect balance of lean and fat; and many prefer this—and only this: sliced ever so thinly onto the surface of their broth, where it wilts and relaxes and nearly dissolves into sublime tenderness. Some purists, however, insist entirely on raw beef, sliced at exactly the right degree of thinness and at the very last minute, added to the broth on the way out, so that the customers can “cook” it lightly themselves in the hot broth of their bowl by simply tossing it gently with their noodles. I, like many locals, prefer a mix of raw and cooked. The unattractive-sounding tendon, cooked properly by a master pho-maker, should be the best thing in the world—even for the uninitiated. Rather than being rubbery or tough, as one would expect of tendon, it should have just enough bite, just enough resistance, dissolving into fatty, marrow-like substance after just a few chews—a counterpoint to the wispy, all-too-brief pleasures of the beef. There’re usually very few of the slender, translucent little tubes in one’s bowl, and if you’re unhappy to discover one on your spoon, then they’re doing it wrong.

You complete pho at the table—and unlike with many similar dishes, where everybody’s got their own way of doing things, in Hanoi there seems to be an accepted orthodoxy. A dot or two of chili paste, a tiny drizzle of chili sauce, a generous squeeze of lime, toss lightly with chopsticks in the right hand—and spoon with the left. Ideally, one wants a perfect marriage of beef, broth, and noodle in each mouthful. Slurping is encouraged. As is leaning down into your bowl. As is lifting the bowl to near your mouth.

There will be a generous plate or basket of greens, herbs, and sprouts next to a bowl of pho—usually Thai basil, mint, and cilantro—and one adds as needed, periodically incorporating elements of freshness and crunch and a welcome bitterness to one’s mix, and one can pick idly at the occasional leaf as well, as kind of a palate cleanser.

I am hardly an expert on this subject, by the way—merely an enthusiast. But this is what I have observed and been told, over time. What is not debatable is that a perfect bowl of Hanoi pho is a balanced meeting of savory, sweet, sour, spicy, salty, and even umami—a gentle commingling of textures as well: soft and giving, wet and slippery, slightly chewy, momentarily resistant but ultimately near-diaphanous, light and heavy, leafy and limp, crunchy and tender. There—and nearly not there at all. Were this already not enough to jerk a rusty steak knife across your grandma’s throat, empty her bank account, and head off to Hanoi, consider the colors: bright red chilies; the more subdued, richer-red toasted-chili paste; bright green vegetables; white sprouts. Pinkish-red raw meat, turning slowly gray as it cooks in your bowl, the deep brown colors of the cooked meat, white noodles, light amber broth. Nearly all God’s colors in one bowl.

This is a sophisticated and deceptively subtle thing, Hanoi pho. I do not pretend to fully understand and appreciate its timeless beauty. Here, describing pho as more like love than sex would be more accurate—as there is simply not enough time on this planet, I think, to ever truly know it. It is an unconditional kind of love, in that it doesn’t matter where you enjoy it—elevated only a few feet off a dirty street corner or at the sleekly designed counter of an overdecorated lounge. It contains, like the man said, “multitudes.”

Sometimes I think I should feel a little guilty about writing stuff like the above.

It’s porn. Albeit food and travel porn.

I had it, I lived it—and, chances are, most of the people reading this have not.

It seems ungracious to share some experiences. Though I’m sure it’s difficult to accept, my parents brought me up to believe that showing off was a bad thing, a sign of generally bad manners. (I’m not saying those values took hold, just that I might have heard them mentioned.)

Some things I’ve seen, some experiences at tables and counters around the world, I feel a little bad telling people about. I may not hesitate to put them on TV at every opportunity—but that’s…different somehow, in that it’s somebody else, the evil camera people, the editors, doing the telling. This conveniently lets me off the hook.

But writing about sights and sounds and flavors that might otherwise be described as orgiastic—and doing it in a way that is calculated to inspire prurient interest, lust, and envy in others…that raises more questions in my mind as to…I don’t know…the moral dimension.

Sitting here, choosing words, letter by letter, on the keyboard with the explicit intention of telling you about something I did or something I ate and making you as hungry and miserable as I can—surely that’s wrong.

But fuck it.

Who doesn’t like a good wank now and then?

Imagine…

There’s a roast goose in Hong Kong—Mongkok, near the outskirts of the city, the place looks like any other. But you sink your teeth into the quickly hacked pieces and you know you’re experiencing something special. Layers of what can only be described as enlightenment, one extraordinary sensation after another as the popils of the tongue encounter first the crispy, caramelized skin, then air, then fat—the juicy, sweet yet savory, ever so slightly gamey meat, the fat just barely managing to retain its corporeal form before quickly dematerializing into liquid. These are the kinds of tastes and textures that come with year after year of the same man making the same dish. That man—the one there, behind the counter with the cleaver—hacking roast pork, and roast duck, and roast goose as he’s done since he was a child and as his father did before him. He’s got it right now for sure—and, sitting there at one of the white Formica tables, Cantonese pop songs oozing and occasionally distorting from an undersized speaker, you know it, too. In fact, you’re pretty goddamn sure this is the best roast goose on the whole planet. Nobody is eating goose better than you at this precise moment. Maybe in the whole history of the world there has never been a better goose. Ordinarily, you don’t know if you’d go that far describing a dish—but now, with that ethereal goose fat dribbling down your chin, the sound of perfectly crackling skin playing inside your head to an audience of one, hyperbole seems entirely appropriate.

It’s nighttime in Puebla and there are a taco lady and her husband standing behind a cart, one naked lightbulb dangling overhead, serving tacos de lengua, strips of beef tongue, seared with onions on a griddle. When the edges of the tongue are browned and the air fills with deliciousness, she scrapes them off the hot metal with a spatula, drops them into soft, still-warm corn tortillas, double layered—and quickly drags a spoon of salsa verde across them. She sprinkles them with fresh cilantro and a little raw, chopped onion and hands them over on a paper plate so thin it barely supports their weight without buckling. You quickly shove one of the tacos into your mouth, wash it down with a big pull from a can of cold Tecate—which you’ve previously rubbed with lime and jammed into a plate of salt, encrusting the top—and you can feel your eyes roll up into your head.

Standing there in the dark, stray dogs cowering expectantly just outside the corona of light from the one bulb, you’ve got all sorts of scary, blissed-out expressions flashing across your face. A father, mother, and two kids sit on kitchen chairs that the couple has dragged out into the street for their customers—and you hope that the kids, catching a look at you in the weird light, aren’t frightened by what they see.

It’s a fucking Everest of shellfish, an intimidating, multilevel tower of crushed ice and seaweed, piled, heaped—festooned with oysters from nearby Belon, and slightly farther away Cancale. There are periwinkles, whelks, palourdes, two types of gargantuan crabs—their claws reaching angrily for the sky over the carcasses of many lobsters, a tangle of meaty claws—their large bodies surrounded by the smaller ones, beady-eyed prawns and langoustines scattered about like the victims of a bus crash. What’s striking is that everyone in this small café has an identical mountain range of seafood in front of them: the older couple at the table next to you, tiny figures at the next table, silently cracking and slurping their way through an ungodly amount of seafood—they look too feeble for the kind of damage they’re doing, but mais non, the waiters scurry to keep up with the ever-filling discard bowls of empty shells. The elegant-looking woman eating by herself, the large table of Parisians—down for the weekend—they’ve ordered more. Everyone is drinking wine—whites and rosés—and, with incongruous delicacy, smearing local butter on little slices of the thin but dense brown bread before returning to the carnage that ensues when they grab a hold of a lobster tail and yank, with one jerking movement, tailmeat from the shell—one brutal movement—or gnash and suck their way through the broken carapace of a spider crab, dripping eggs and back fat onto their hands without care. This, too, is a good place to be. You will be in need of a nap after this. A small hotel by the port, perhaps. Pillows a little too hard, a redundant bolster, and sheets that smell slightly of bleach. The people around you, however, will be going out for dinner.

First thing in the morning in Kuching, Borneo: a hangover so bad you don’t and can’t even look anyone in the eye so certain are you that you said or did something truly awful after a night of langkau—the local rice whiskey—and (to the best of your recollection) fucking tequila. (And whose great idea was that, anyway?) You’re oblivious to the view of the river, and the sights and smells of morning, focusing only on the chipped white bowl of steaming laksa coming your way—the promise of relief. The smell hits you first as the waiter deposits it in front of you with a clunk you feel in your pineal gland: a rich, fiery, hearty, spicy steam of fish and coconut gravy. You dig in with chopsticks and spoon, slurp your first mouthful of noodles—a powerful hit of sambal grabbing hold of you, exorcising the Evil. Ensuing mouthfuls bring shrimp, cockles, and fish cake…more spicy-sweet gravy…more noodles. It burns. It burns so good. You’re sweating now, the poison leaving your pores, brain kick-starting…something that might just be hope secreting from somewhere in your shriveled, sun-dried, terribly abused cortex.

It’s another one of those agriturismos. They’re all over Italy, little mom-and-pop joints, for the most part thrown up quickly in farmhouses, private homes, on picnic tables under the trees—serving out of hearths, field kitchens. This one’s in Sardinia, and what’s on your plate is the simplest thing in the world: spaghetti alla bottarga—pasta, tossed quickly with local olive oil (through which a clove of garlic and a hot pepper have briefly been dragged) and the local salt-cured mullet eggs, which are the specialty of the region. There’s no explaining why this is so good. It just…is. The salty and frankly fishy flavor of the eggs cuddles up to more subtle taste of the durum pasta—the tiniest notes of heat from the pepper—and the sharp yet lush tang of freshly pressed extra-virgin olive oil. You wash this down with a sneakily compelling Cannonau—the local red whose rough charms have lately got a serious hold on you. You don’t care about the big Bordeauxs anymore. The high-maintenance Burgundies with their complex personalities. The Baron Rothschild could back his car up to the door, trunk full of monster vintages, he’s drunk and offering them for free—and you would decline. Here? Now? Mopping olive oil and a few errant fish eggs from the bottom of your plate, swilling this young and proudly no-name wine, there is nothing you would rather be drinking.

When you ask the proprietor where the wine comes from, he points to an old man sitting in the corner reading a soccer magazine, a cigarette dangling from his lips.

“It came from him,” he says.

The salarymen are getting boisterous in Shinjuku district, their workaday personalities filed away till tomorrow, rapidly being replaced—with every beer, every reciprocally poured sake—with their real personalities. Drunk—they’re loud, friendly, angry, maudlin, horny. Over yakitori—lovingly grilled bits of artisanal chicken bits—you are particularly well placed to observe Japan’s uniquely kooky national schizophrenia. A man with a headband carefully turns skewers of sizzling poultry over glowing charcoal in a metal trough. Someone gives you another beer—an oversized bottle of Sapporo in an undersized glass. The room is filled with smoke from the dripping chicken fat flaring up on the coals, from many cigarettes. You can barely see the men at the tables, sitting or leaning cross-legged in their stocking feet, some of them slumped over, falling to the side, red-faced and sweating. The thick smoke hanging in the air obscures their upper halves. Now and again, one group or another, sitting by a window, will open it for a few minutes and try to air the place out.

You’re sitting at the counter, the wooden cup in front of you bristling with naked, recently gnawed skewers—a hedgehog display of dead soldiers. You’ve had the soft bone (breast cartilage), knee bone, thigh, chicken meatballs dipped in raw quail egg. There have been many orders of chicken hearts; chicken livers; Kobe beef tongue—little, uniformly sized bits impaled neatly on bamboo and slowly turned until perfectly cooked, salty and slightly redolent of the handmade charcoal, garnished with sea salt—or red pepper. You’ve had many skewers of chicken skin—threaded and wrapped tightly around the slivers of bamboo, then slowly grilled until crispy, chewy, and yet still soft in the center. But now it’s all about ass. You got the last six of them and you’re pretty pleased with yourself about that. That fatty protuberance of rich skin, each one containing fatty nubbins of flavorful, buttery meat divided by a thin layer of cartilage—it’s the single best piece of meat and flesh on the chicken. And, of course, there’s only one of them per animal, so supply is limited. The man fighting a losing battle with verticality across from you, his head teetering on one elbow, then sliding down his forearm from time to time, recovering just before his head bounces off the counter—he’s looking at your chicken asses and he’s angry. You don’t know what he’s griping about to the chef—who’s heard it all before—but you suspect that he’s complaining that the lone gaijin in the room got the last pieces of ass. You buy him a sake.

At the deli on Houston Street, they haul the pastrami steaming out of a giant warmer and slice it thickly by hand. It’s moist and so tender you wonder how the guy gets his knife through without mashing it. He piles the dark pink meat between too-fresh rye bread smeared with the bright yellow mustard indigenous to these parts. Later, at the table, the bread gives way, crumbling beneath the weight and wetness of the pastrami. You push the salty, savory flesh around your plate with a wedge of dill pickle, wash it down with a Dr. Brown’s. The salty, peppery, savory, spicy, and sour cut just right by the sweetness of the soda.

Fifty miles out of Prague, the halved carcass of a freshly killed hog hangs, still steaming in the cold, from what looks like a child’s swing set. It’s a wet, drizzling morning and your feet are sopping and you’ve been warming yourself against the chill by huddling around the small fire over which a pot of pig parts boils. The butcher’s family and friends are drinking slivovitz and beer, and though noon is still a few hours off, you’ve had quite a few of both. Someone calls you inside to the tiled workspace, where the butcher has mixed the pig’s blood with cooked onions and spices and crumbs of country bread, and he’s ready to fill the casings. Usually, they slip the casing over a metal tube, turn on the grinding machine, cram in the forcemeat or filling, and the sausages fill like magic. This guy does it differently. He chops everything by hand. A wet mesa of black filling covers his cutting board, barely retaining its shape—yet he grabs the casing in one hand, puts two fingers in one open end, makes the “V” sign, stretching it disturbingly, and reaches with the other—then buries both his hands in the mix. A whirlwind of movement as he squeezes with his right hand, using his palm like a funnel, somehow squirting the bloody, barely containable stuff straight into the opening. He does this again and again with breathtaking speed, mowing his way across the wooden table, like a thresher cutting a row through a cornfield, a long, plump, rapidly growing, glistening, fully filled length of sausage engorging to his left as he moves. It’s a dark, purplish color through the translucent membrane. An assistant pinches off links, pins them with broken bits of wooden skewer. In moments, they are done.

Back in the cold backyard, you’re on your fifth slivovitz when the sausages arrive in a cloud of vapor, straight from the pot. Everybody’s damp and a little drunk; hard country people with rough hands and features for whom a mist of cold rain is apparently no obstacle to a meal. There is goulash, mopped with crusts of bread, and there are blood soup and many sausages. The whole of the pig is very well represented. But it’s the blood sausage that sings—or, more accurately, spurts. You cut into it with your knife and it explodes across the plate like a Hollywood bullet hitting a skull—and again you think of Zola, the greatest of food pornographers, that wonderful scene in the charcuterie, our tragically absurd hero starving in the midst of ridiculous bounty. His in-laws stirring blood and spices for boudin noir, filling their glass display case with enticingly described delights he is unwelcome to try. It smells here like that room must have: blood and onions, paprika and a touch of nutmeg, notes of sweetness, longing…and death. The woman at the end of the table with a face like a concrete pylon sees you close your eyes for a second, appreciating, and she smiles.

Six o’clock in the morning is when the pains raisins come out, and already the customers are lining up in the dark outside this tiny Parisian boulangerie waiting for the first batch. The baguettes are ready—piping-hot from the brick oven, fabulously, deliberately ugly and uneven in shape, slashed crudely across the top. They’re too hot to eat but you grab one anyway, tearing it open gingerly, then dropping two fingers full of butter inside. It instantly melts into liquid—running into the grooves and inner spaces of white interior. You grab it like a sandwich and bite, teeth making a cracking sound as you crunch through the crust. You haven’t eaten since yesterday lunch, your palate is asleep and just not ready for so much sensation. The reaction is violent. It hurts. Butter floods your head and you think for a second you’re going to black out.

On 59th Street, at a fancy Italian joint and fortified with Negronis, you’re ready for a good meal—but you’re not ready for the little cicchetti that arrive unexpectedly at the table: little pillows of sea urchin roe sitting atop tiny slices of toasted bread. Wonderful enough, one would think, but the chef has done something that goes beyond mischievous, possibly into the realm of the unholy: melting onto each plump orange egg-sac is a gossamer-thin shaving of lardo, the lightly cured and herbed pork fat made in marble caverns in the mountains of Tuscany, slowly curling around its prey, soon to dissolve. You hurry to put it in your mouth, knowing it’s surely a sin against God—and are all the happier for it. It’s too much. Way too much. Beyond rich…beyond briny-sweet. Beyond decency. You call the waiter over and ask for more.

This prawn comes from particularly deep waters, you are told by the man tending the coals. Special waters. He makes the charcoal himself—two different mixes. The grills are of his own design as well—gleaming, spotlessly clean metal squares, each raised and lowered to specifically selected heights by the turn of a wheel. He puts almost nothing on what he cooks. Sea salt. A spritz of Spanish olive oil from a pump bottle. He’s smiling as he places the prawn in front of you and you eat the tail first, stripping away the shell and taking it in two bites. But then comes the head, twisted free and waiting for you. You raise it to your mouth and suck out the soup of hot brains, squeezing it like a toothpaste tube. Silence for a moment, then, from outside, you hear the sheep bleating faintly in the hills. The man smiles, pleased you’ve properly appreciated his prawn. He has something else. He removes another small pile of burning coals from one of the wood-burning ovens and places it beneath one of his jury-rigged grills, lowers the grid all the way, fans the embers. He produces another device of his own making—a sauté pan that looks more like a strainer than any known cooking vessel—sprays it lightly with oil. He heats it for a few seconds over the glowing coal, then quickly—quickly, but delicately—drops in a handful of tiny, translucent baby eels, sprinkles them with a few granules of salt while he makes them leap once, twice in the pan. In seconds, they are off the fire and into a bowl. They are, you fully appreciate (at this time of year, anyway), the rarest of the rare of God’s edible creatures. Each linguine-thin eel has swum here all the way from the Sargasso Sea, upriver into northern Spain—to be caught live. The man has killed them only minutes ago, poisoning them with tobacco. During the two or three weeks you can get them (in the unlikely event you can get them at all), they sell for upwards of a thousand dollars a kilo. They are barely cooked. They don’t need to be—they shouldn’t be cooked more. Twirled on a fork and lifted to the mouth, they whisper secrets. This, you tell yourself, is a flavor one shouldn’t speak of.

Sichuan hotpot is where you find out some very dark things about yourself. You look around at the others in the crowded, painfully bright dining room in Chengdu, wiping the backs of their necks with cold napkins, their faces red and contorted with pain. Some of them hold their stomachs. But they plow on, as you do, dipping chopsticks loaded with organ meats, fish balls, and vegetables into the giant woks of dark, sinister-looking oil. It’s like that Victorian brothel in London you’ve read about, the one that had a spanking machine—could paddle forty customers at a time. There’s that kind of consensual perversion going on here. As if we are, all of us—though strangers to one another—bound by an awful compulsion we share. The liquid boils and bubbles like witch’s brew opaque, reddish brown distillate of the mind-blowingly excessive amounts of dried Sichuan chilies bobbing and roiling up throughout. The oil is cooking down, reducing by the minute and growing yet more powerful. You drag a hunk of tripe through the oil; it disappears below the surface, where it shrinks, then hardens like an aroused nipple; and then you remove it from the hell-broth and into your mouth. The heat from the dried peppers nearly lifts your head off—but there is something else. Tiny black flower peppers, floating discreetly alongside their more aggressive cousins, have an eerie numbing effect, first on your tongue—and then your entire head. There’s the by now familiar floral dimension: you smell it everywhere in this part of China—it’s in the air…But now it comes on strong, comes to the rescue; like an ice cube applied to abused flesh, it counteracts the pain and burn of way more hot pepper than any man can or should reasonably bear. Sweating through your shirt, resisting the urge to double over in pain, you begin to understand.

Pain—followed by relief.

Burn, followed by a pleasing, anesthetizing numbness. It’s like being spanked and licked at the same time. You were, after many years on this planet and what you thought had been a full and rich life, pretty sure you didn’t go for such things. The film 9½ Weeks left you unmoved. At no point in your youthful misadventures would the offer of even playful discomfort have appealed—even if the person offering was a German supermodel in ass-less latex chaps.

Pain, you were pretty sure, was always bad.

Pleasure was good.

Until now, that is. When everything started to get confused.