reviewed by Leila May
Enough soggy salads and jelly sandwiches smashed at the bottom of lunch boxes: it’s time to revitalize our menu. While meals can become part of the usual trudge and routine of the day, Cecily Wong’s Gastro Obscura is all about becoming a food adventurer. The collection of over 800 entries explores food traditions, cultural cuisine, forgotten stories of familiar dishes, and obscure delights all compiled under the heading “edible wonders.” Along with her team at website Atlas Obscura, Wong scoured thousands of food blogs, submissions, and international freelance entries to find these culinary stories. I first heard of Gastro Obscura from Wong’s talk at Midtown Scholar Bookstore in Harrisburg, PA, where Wong spoke of sculpted butter busts of women in Minnesota, sourdough libraries in Belgium, and psychedelic Turkish honey used by ancient Roman warriors. Food stories that are forgotten, familiar, or just plain weird, speak through these pages.
Gastro Obscura takes us through the seven continents (yes, even Antarctica), homing in on the provinces, states, and cultures that create diverse food landscapes. Most countries have multiple submissions as well, reflecting the vastness of their people or traditions alongside innovations. As she and her team are US based, Wong walks through all 50 states with vibrant images and graphics. The experience also centers participation, with blurbs beside each entry showing how to try these restaurants, native foods, or recipes. This way, readers can travel through a sort-of interactive game, testing out new treats for themselves.
As we explore, food cycles and connections appear across cultures. For example, a Colonial American apple cider drink called switchel is now popular in craft cocktails. Other graphics explain the diverse uses of staple foods like honey and dumplings, or practices like fermenting and pickling. Our everyday menu items are reborn as well. Inuit ice cream (made from whipped animal fat and snow) versus a German specialty of spaghetti (noodle-like vanilla ice cream topped with strawberry sauce) present an interesting dichotomy of delicious difference.
Alongside a Benjamin Franklin recipe for milk punch, Pennsylvania entries feature a restaurant I had recently visited: Bube’s Brewery in Mount Joy. A historical restaurant in the catacombs with interactive murder mystery dinners and an array of locally brewed beers, I found myself more immersed in the Obscura experience. This feeling of immersion arose again in the entries on fruits slowly disappearing or unable to be shipped and commercialized. Imagine the salty cherry tomato-like bite of a Bastard Oleaster in India, or the more local banana-like paw-paw. I remember my dad and I hiking up my high school’s cross-country trail one summer to find paw-paws. What had felt like a dream, a taste only in the depths of my memory, was returned to me.
The legends of food culture speak through these pages: the recipes time forgot and the traditions that persist in the kneading and slicing and stirring of humanity’s kitchens. Whether deliciously enticing or daunting, the vast world of culinary culture is one to be explored in Cecily Wong’s Gastro Obscura.
Leila May is an English and creative writing major at Lebanon Valley College. She enjoys knitting and baking in her free time, as well as exploring questions of queer identity and the boundaries between the real and unreal. Their work has been published in Equinox Literary Magazine and she is currently poetry co-editor of Green Blotter.