Adventures of a Gleeful Gastronome

THE FEARLESS DINER: Travel Tips and Wisdom for Eating Around the World by Richard Sterling (Travelers’ Tales Inc., $7.95, paper).

For Richard Sterling, an American travel writer who sees himself as the Indiana Jones of food, exotic dining is adventure and art appreciation, cultural anthropology and sensory delight. This book is his apparently heartfelt effort to proselytize for his passion.

The author was delighted, for instance, when the European chef at a renowned hotel boasted that he had roasted a whole camel on a spit for a Saudi sheik’s wedding celebration in the Arabian desert. The alleged recipe? Stuff the camel with six sheep, stuff the sheep with chickens and the chickens with fish, then cook for 24 hours.

Sterling dishes up advice for eating such delicacies as well as less challenging fare--E. coli and other food-transmitted modes of death be damned.

The “holy trinity” of regional cuisines, Sterling says, are Chinese, Indian and European, and he offers tips for enjoying each.

“At a Chinese table, fish is often served head, tail and all. The eyes are highly regarded by many. After the meat is eaten, just pick up the head and suck the eyes out. Tasty. Very tasty.”

The father of French gastronomy, Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, is quoted here as saying, “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.” Sterling spreads his multifarious definition of the Fearless Diner before us like a multicourse feast:

Fearless Diners “do not pluck the Muse of Cuisine from the continuum of the life in which She resides.” A Fearless Diner “may camp in some remote area, and char freshly caught meat over the open fire, then eat it plain with a rough red wine.” A pair of Fearless Diners “in black tie and evening gown, may depart a fancy ball with their bellies full of caviar, then spend the rest of the night with sailors, off-duty cops or illegal aliens, drinking from a brown paper bag.”

Snakes, locusts, duck embryos--the Fearless Diner wolfs them down like so many McBurgers. Readers may be repulsed, but they will not be surprised to learn Sterling’s motto: “Wherever I go, whatever people I visit, I bow to their kings, respect their gods, and eat their viands no matter what. There is nothing I will not eat or drink at least once.”

WALKING SOFTLY IN THE WILDERNESS: The Sierra Club Guide to Backpacking by John Hart (Sierra Club Books, $16, paper).

Quiz: You are trekking with an infant, and a diaper change is in order. Do you a) fling the soiled disposable into the nearest creek, or b) pack it out along with the 12 beer bottles you emptied and ordinarily would smash on the rocks for amusement?

If you answered “a,” you are among the many Southern Californians who might benefit from this revised and updated version of a back-country classic. But even those of you who routinely pack out your piggish peers’ discarded garbage will find interest in the esoterica of wilderness etiquette discussed here.

Backpacking is a simple endeavor. But doing it well and without damaging the environment requires skill and knowledge, from how to use a lightweight stove to keeping provisions out of bears’ paws. This is a fine primer.

Quick trips

ZAGAT SURVEY, 1998-99: America’s Best Meal Deals (Zagat Survey, $12.95 paper).

No sheep-stuffed camel or duck embryos mentioned among these 1,411 restaurants in 35 cities. But Cossetta has the best pizza in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Kornblatt’s Deli in Portland, Ore., has great chicken sandwiches and Woofie’s Hot Dogs outside St. Louis is “worth the heartburn.”

NATIONAL AUDUBON SOCIETY FIELD GUIDE SERIES edited by Peter Alden and others (Alfred A. Knopf, $19.95, paper).

These top-quality 4-by-8-inch coated paper guides are indispensable for anyone who plans to set foot outside a mall or hotel room--and perhaps even for those who don’t (see American Cockroach, Periplaneta americana).

The California guide follows the series’ pattern: bright maps, drawings and hundreds of entries accompanied by small but entirely useful color photos of everything from glacial erratics (those improbably perched High Sierra boulders left behind by ice flows) to coyote brush, lodgepole chipmunks and California dodder (that orange, hairlike parasitic plant you see entangled in roadside chaparral). There are color charts showing cloud patterns and constellations, and irresistible diagrams of a dragonfly, mushroom, cricket and any number of other plants and creatures.

Other guides cover Florida, New England and the Pacific Northwest. (Don’t tell those snobby Seattle folks, but it’s not just Golden State computer geeks swarming over the Northwest. Masses of California beach fleas, Megalorchestia [Orchesoidea] californiana, can also be found on the region’s beaches, just above the wave line, eating rotting seaweed.)

Books to Go appears the second and fourth week of every month.