Thanksgiving Abroad Can Leave a Strange Taste

Back home in Michigan, my neighbors were chowing down on turkey drumsticks and candied yams. It was the evening I stopped to have my Thanksgiving dinner at the Lim Tian Puan restaurant in Old Malacca.

Admittedly, this historic old port on the west coast of Malaysia was a strange place to celebrate Thanksgiving. I knew I would not find cranberry sauce or pumpkin pie on the menu--assuming I could even read it.

But the purpose of my trip that November, as in Novembers past, was to travel to the most exotic country in the world and eat the most extraordinary Thanksgiving dinner I could find.

For the last 10 years, this custom has taken me to such out-of-the-way places as Hobart, Australia, the Tasmanian stomping ground of swashbuckler Errol Flynn; Katmandu, Nepal, the Himalayan home of the Abominable Snowman, and Nairobi, Kenya, the last outpost of civilization in the heart of safari country.

I’ve even sailed up the Ganges and down the Amazon just to add an unusual twist to my annual celebration.

While all this may sound rather unconventional, for me--and for anyone who has an insatiable craving for adventure--Thanksgiving can be an excuse to escape from the bland world of turkey stuffing and strike out in search of exotic sights, sounds and tastes.

No real planning is necessary. Many times I have simply picked a spot, purchased an airline ticket and boarded a plane bound for Asia, Australia or South America.

In most cases (but not all), the gastronomic rewards of my Thanksgiving Day forays have been well worth the effort, not to mention the considerable air fare.

Over time, I have been served such delicacies as pig’s-brain-and-chicken-leg soup, cusk eel in Margarita sauce, fried fish fingers and brazed pigeon brain.

Of course, it hasn’t always been easy trying to order Thanksgiving dinner in countries where people don’t know what Thanksgiving is.

The first year, I celebrated Thanksgiving on the island of Bali and found a small, open-air restaurant that seemed perfect for the occasion. However, when I asked the Balinese waiter if he had turkey on the menu, I hit a snag.

In response to his look of bewilderment, I tried to explain that a turkey was something like a big chicken and I demonstrated by flapping my arms and gobbling. Everyone else in the restaurant paused for a few seconds, their forks frozen in midair.

For a minute, there was a flicker of recognition in the waiter’s eyes and he soon returned carrying a very large platter . . . of grilled turtle .

A friend from New Zealand who was with me said she thought it tasted a bit like grilled goat, kind of chewy and well-spiced.

I didn’t argue the point. At least the meal was edible.

There have been times, however, when it wasn’t.

One Thanksgiving, I booked a jungle cruise down a 350-mile stretch of the Amazon, from Iquitos, Peru, to Tabatinga, Brazil.

The minute I stepped aboard the Rio Amazonas, a converted banana hauler that was to be our “Love Boat” for four days, I buttonholed the cook and requested he prepare something special, something very Amazonian, for my Thanksgiving dinner.

I specifically asked for piranha, thinking what an ironic twist it would be to end up eating man-eating fish for Thanksgiving instead of the other way around.

But luck was against me. One of the crew members told me when I sat down at the table on Thanksgiving Day that we would not be entering piranha waters until the next morning. That meant that my plate of pan-fried piranha would end up becoming a belated Thanksgiving dinner, which it was the following day.

But the crew did not disappoint me that Thanksgiving night.

They brought out a covered dish and set it in front of me with great fanfare. Off came the lid, revealing half of a grilled anteater that had been captured by a local Indian tribe.

More precisely, it was half of a very old anteater that had been burned to a crisp. It was shoe-leather tough, and I found I couldn’t cut it, chop it, tear it apart, bite it or chew it. Even dousing it with the locally made hot sauce, which is guaranteed to burn a hole in your stomach lining, didn’t help.

Selecting just the right restaurant, one that reflects the history and culture of the country and serves indigenous foods, has always been important to me in my Thanksgiving Day quests.

In 1982, I headed to Tasmania, that strange, apple-shaped island off the southeastern shore of Australia.

Since Tasmania was originally settled as a penal colony for notorious criminals, I thought the logical choice of dining spots would be the Ball and Chain Restaurant in Hobart, the birthplace of actor Errol Flynn.

I wasn’t disappointed. The dank-as-a-dungeon dining room was done up in 19th-Century penal colony decor, complete with iron bars, rough-hewn wooden tables and even a pillory for customers who didn’t pay their bills.

The waiters and waitresses were dressed in period prison garb, and the background music was a motley collection of Australian beer-drinking songs.

I passed up the “Penitentiary Chicken” and the “Condemned Man’s Reprieve” and decided to go with a gigantic Tasmanian crayfish served up mornay style with a cheese and wine sauce. It more than lived up to its billing that night.

Although I had originally planned to celebrate Thanksgiving the next year in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia (for some reason, the idea struck my fancy even though Liberia’s only real claim to culinary fame is baked barracuda), the timing turned out wrong.

Instead, I ended up in Nairobi, searching for a restaurant that served native African food. There were virtually none except for the African Heritage Cafe on Kenyatta Avenue. I later learned why when I persuaded the chef, a tiny lady with thick glasses named Mamatin, to prepare a sampling of indigenous dishes specially for me.

In the end, the names of the dishes-- viesi, boga, gatheru, irio and skuma wiki-- turned out to be much more interesting than the ingredients.

In Jerusalem in 1984, I was tempted to forgo my Thanksgiving tradition and hunker down with a big juicy burger, French fries and shake at a McDavid’s fast-food restaurant.

Fortunately, my better sense prevailed and I decided to go to the Hahoma, the only kosher restaurant at that time in the old Jewish Quarter of the city.

In this case, selecting the main course was simple: St. Peter’s fish, which is found only in the Sea of Galilee.

There is a legend behind that particular fish, I discovered. In Biblical times, the people of Capernaum were heavily taxed by the Romans and on one occasion when there was no money, St. Peter directed the villagers to lower their nets into the sea.

The fish they caught turned out to have a gold coin in its mouth, which saved them from the ravages of the Roman tax collectors. This legend also explains why St. Peter’s fish is always served with its still head on.

As luck would have it, my fish was short on gold coins that night, so I paid for the dinner by myself.

Finding a suitable restaurant in Old Malacca proved to be much more difficult.

The driver of my trishaw (a three-wheel bike with a passenger seat in front) was panting by the time he finally dropped me off in front of the Lim Tian Puan, a Chinese restaurant, one rainy Thanksgiving night in 1985.

I was ushered into the dining room by a Chinese woman and seated at a small table draped in a red cloth. No one around me, including my waitress, spoke anything but fluent Chinese. However, the menu items had English translations, so I was able to make my choices without wild guesswork.

I passed up the shark’s fin with scrambled eggs in favor of spiced teochow duck, the restaurant’s specialty, plus bean curd with crabmeat and fried rice.

After a moment’s hesitation, I added steamed-pig’s-brain-with-chicken-leg soup to my order. In Asia, just about any plant or animal part is considered fair game for the dinner table, and I was curious to see how the cook would handle that combination.

Half an hour later, my food arrived and the waitress smiled as she ladled my gray soup broth, with whole chicken feet floating in it, out of the pot and into my bowl.

I decided to start with a spoonful of the bean curd with crabmeat. It looked and tasted a little like tiny pillows of soggy foam rubber.

The spiced teochow duck was excellent and reminded me of the pressed duck I had enjoyed in Chinese restaurants back home. The fried rice, flavored with bits of egg and scallion, also was good.

But the soup stopped me cold. I asked the Chinese woman who had seated me how I was supposed to eat it. She gestured for me to nibble the skin off the chicken feet but not to eat the bones.

I fished out a chicken foot and pulled off a piece of tough yellow skin with my teeth. That first bite convinced me that I didn’t want a second.

When the waitress wasn’t looking, I deftly tossed all the chicken feet from my bowl back into the pot on the table and continued spooning up my soup broth, hoping I wouldn’t encounter any recognizable pieces of pig’s brain.

A few minutes later, the waitress came by, spotted my bowl sans chicken feet and dutifully scooped a few more out of the pot and into the bowl. As soon as she wasn’t looking, I threw them back into the pot.

By the time the meal was over, the chicken feet had made at least 10 trips back and forth, leaving the waitress somewhat mystified about the remarkable qualities of my soup pot and its bountiful contents.

That was one Thanksgiving--probably the first and hopefully the last--where I didn’t bother to ask for a doggie bag.