The Bizarre Truth (14 page)

One of the great experiences along those lines came the next day when we flew to Blue Fields, located on the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua. Blue Fields is a Creole community, where everyone speaks English with a heavy Creole lilt. And given the fact that there are no roads to the area, Blue Fields is cut off from the rest of the country. You can get there only by boat from another port or by taking the one plane a day that stops in the teeny town on its way to Corn Island, a tropical paradise popular with the beach freaks. We spent the night in a hotel above a casino and journeyed the next day to the home of Edna Cayasso, a local grandma who specializes in the traditional Atlantic coast cuisine developed by the first Africans in Blue Fields. Edna, her three sons, and their wives and kids all live in one building, with Edna still ruling the kitchen. During our visit, she made
rondon
, a traditional Creole dish called “rundown” in creole communities outside of Sapanish-speaking countries. Rondon is a melding of flavors and cultures—born in Africa, filtered through flavors of the Caribbean, and now treasured by small communities who have eaten it for generations. It’s a thick stew of meat, vegetables, and coconut milk, sturdy with
sweet potatoes, plantains, yucca, and starchy tubers called cocos, which remind me of a cross between a cassava and a potato. The ingredients are thrown into a bowl filled with water. As far as protein goes, Edna opted for a chopped, browned
wari
, which is essentially a wild jungle rat that resembles a peccary. The starches and meat absorb the liquid as it cooks, resulting in a dish as delicious as it is diverse. Rondon is the quintessential Nicaraguan Creole food, and it is something that people like Edna Cayasso revere as more of a tradition than a simple dish. It’s apparent that passing her passion for Creole cuisine on to the next generation is a high priority, as she insists her whole family make the dish together.

She served the rondon with coconut rice and beans, coconut bread, and two homemade beverages made from cassava and seaweed. These drinks are called seaweed pop and cassava pop. The seaweed pop was crafted from a puree of local seaweed, rehydrated with water, and seasoned with nutmeg. It’s more of a sludge than anything else. I politely accepted the nearly inedible beverage, but in my head I wanted to run screaming from the table.

Finally, on our last day, I had the ultimate uplifting food experience I was hoping for in this country of redemptive experiences. We traveled south to Granada, a city where everything comes together—the Pacific, North, Central, and Atlantic regions—both in their food and heritage. Granada is a colonial Spanish town that has remained unchanged for hundreds of years. You can climb to the top of the public church’s bell tower and look out over the rooftops. It’s a sea of gorgeous curved clay-tiled roofs, not an antenna or satellite in sight. The smell of cooking fires wafts through the streets. It’s an absolutely charming place, with artisanal chocolate shops, cozy city parks teeming with people and performance artists everywhere you look. The narrow cobblestone streets are a challenge to navigate, only because you spend the whole time craning your neck gazing at all the stunning Spanish Colonial architecture.

We were there the night of a big annual poetry and arts festival, where I had the pleasure of meeting the Nicaraguan vice president as well as a bunch of local dignitaries. I took a short break from the action to check out some Nicaraguan baseball T-shirts I felt I had to buy. As I sifted through the shirts, I noticed this Chinese guy running toward me. He immediately began screaming at me in Chinese. His interpreter eventually caught up, as did his security detail. Turns out this was the ambassador from Taiwan, berating me for not liking the stinky tofu I had eaten in his country. I’m just sort of holding my own, smiling and apologizing—I don’t want to get involved in some international kerfuffle in Nicaragua. All of a sudden, his wife appears and starts chewing him out because, as the translator told me later, he was tearing me a new one over a food he himself did not even care for! Imagine, an American in Nicaragua getting a tongue-lashing in Chinese, translated into English, over a meal I didn’t like from two years ago. It was pretty funny, and ended up morphing from an awkward altercation into a big lovefest. But I had to go, because dinner was at eight o’clock sharp and I couldn’t be late.

I ended my night at a sleepy little restaurant and hotel where, I admit, my expectations were low. At first glance, Casa San Francisco, a quaint, family-run hotel about three blocks off the main square, was nothing special. However, once I entered the ancient courtyard, I changed my tune. Quiet and beautiful with a plunge pool surrounded by bougainvillea, the place just had that old Spanish western feel. I half expected to bump into Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. And the surroundings were nothing compared to the food. Upon learning of my arrival, Chefs Octavio Gomez and Vernon Hodgeson went out of their way to up the ante a little in the kitchen. Vernon decided to reinvent a few rural dishes and raise them up on the altar, so to speak, exhibiting the kind of gastronomic and aesthetic flair that you expect from a New York City chef.

They kicked off dinner with historical local fruit flavors, serving a platter of
nispero, pera de agua
, green mangoes, and star fruit.
We washed that down with a
batido
, a sapote fruit milk shake. The main dish was quintessentially Nicaraguan with a modern twist—wild iguana, marinated sour orange, cumin, achiote, and garlic. They roasted the lizard whole, crisping the skin just like duck à l’orange—it was outstanding.

Aged Chontales cheese was the real star of the meal. It’s a small wheel of soft, Muenster-like cheese, served in the ancient style of the Caribbean coast. You allow the cheese to age in the heat of the day, just long enough to produce large maggots. When you open the cheese, these juicy cheese worms, as they call them, are then eaten right along with the cheese, just hundreds of these suckers wriggling on the end of your knife. It’s one of the most horrific and wonderful things I have ever seen on a plate.

The worm origin somehow remains a mystery, scientifically speaking. But I did manage to get the cultural story. One of the chefs explained that the cheese process originates from the time of the very first Sandinista Front. During that period, people near the front wouldn’t throw away old cheese because it was so difficult to obtain any food at all in that time of war. Instead, they let the cheese ferment, hanging it in a sack to eliminate the
suero
, or liquid, from the fresh cheese. Once the cheese lost its liquid, it began the process of decomposition. It’s at that time that the cheese develops and produces the worms, which continue to grow as long as you let the cheese ferment. Some people remove the worms and eat them fried; others eat them in their natural state. The whole idea of eating maggot-laden cheese is enough to boggle most anyone’s mind, but what I couldn’t shake is the idea that a traditional food like worm-filled Chontales cheese has been eradicated from this part of Nicaragua. Octavio admitted he’s been clueless on how to make it, consulting aged family members to resurrect the delicacy. The cheese wasn’t a dying breed—it was already dead and in the ground. When the chef learned I was coming to town, he saw the perfect opportunity to re-create this cheese for an audience that might actually enjoy eating it.

He started out with fresh country cheese,
caso cassero
or
caso creolo
. It’s important you use raw-milk products from rural areas, because dairy products in the city use too much homogenization and scientific methodology to kill the bacteria and avoid decomposition. He crafted a basket of plantain leaves, hanging the fresh cheese from it to remove the
suero
for three days. Next, he rolled the cheese in fresh plantain leaves to hold its shape. On the seventh day the cheese started to decompose and produce eggs, which resemble fine grains of rice. It takes an additional twenty-four hours to hatch the worms. Luis served it to me four days later, which allowed the worms to grow to quite a decent size. Although nature does much of the work for you, it takes a lot of patience to stick out the two-week-long decomposition period. That, in addition to the fact that the cheese tastes like a rotten foot bomb went off in your mouth, has a lot to do with its phasing out. The cheese flavor is strong and pungent, which I adore. It reminded me of the washed rind cheese, The Stinking Bishop, that I eat whenever I can find some, but this one has the bonus of the wriggling worms busting out of it. Suffice to say, there’s not a big market for Chontales cheese riddled with maggots. Despite the desirable protein in those worms, this process can goof up on you if the cheese doesn’t lose its liquid. If that happens, the flavor will be kept even more rotten and putrefied and you can’t eat it. So there is a very fine balance here. This isn’t
Fear Factor
food, this is good cooking.

I lit up when I heard this story. For Luis to spend fourteen days creating this dish made me want to cry. Who goes to that kind of trouble for a stranger? People who are proud of their culture and want to share it with you, that’s who. Octavio Gomez of Granada, Nicaragua, resurrected a regional, traditional dish that had died and gone to food heaven because no one was up to making it anymore. He breathed life back into a lost art form, and believe it or not, we devoured this cheese. It was fantastic; even the crew, who often forgo the bizarre fare for those faux-chocolate protein bars, liked it. The most disgusting-looking food is often the best-tasting.
As foul an idea as it is to shove a runny, smelly fromage, riddled with something you’d rather bait a fishing hook with, into your mouth, it was pretty darn tasty. Eating outside your comfort zone allows you to acknowledge the baggage that you carry into each meal, that evil corruptive contempt prior to investigation, which thankfully can disappear pretty quickly.

That’s why I love doing what I’m doing. When I have those moments and I realize there are people like Octavio Gomez who share the same food mission as me, it makes me glow. My hat is off to him for putting his money where his mouth is, so to speak, by not only acknowledging a culinary dead end but doing something about it. And the best news of all came several months later when we heard that now the chefs at the Casa San Francisco are making this wormy Chontales regularly. Like the phoenix, it is reborn, one mouth at a time.

Herve This gives Andrew an exclusive tour
of his chaotic Parisian kitchen
.

n the world of professional travel, as in life, some days are better than others. There are a lot of days that just don’t measure up, and I’ve discovered that timing oftentimes makes the difference between a movingly memorable and an infamous experience. Nothing is more disappointing than flying into a Canadian lodge and being met by your fishing guide, who gushes about how many fish they caught yesterday. “You’re going to be pulling them into the boat two at a time,” he tells you. Up in the morning, big breakfast, down to the dock, and out in the boat.