9) Sperm Wale Excrement, or “Ambergris”
You’d be forgiven for thinking that the intestinal slurry of a sperm whale might not easily catch on so easily as a food delicacy, especially given that a pound of the stuff currently sells for around $63,000. Indeed, as a beach-combing British boy recently found out to his great delight, perfume companies will pay top dollar for ambergris, which has unique properties in fixing scent to the skin. But we humans are a strange species. And as history would have it, being the balenic equivalent of a gallbladder stone has done nothing to dissuade us from its consumption.
Put simply, Ambergris is edible excrement, evacuated from a sperm whale and left to float the oceans. Slow cooked by the sun, the vomit-like substance eventually hardens to become the large waxy mass you see today. It so traumatised Herman Melville, the author of Moby Dick, that he dedicated an entire chapter to it, detailing everything from its etymology (the French for “grey amber”), its sensory uses (in perfumes and hair powders) and its culinary uses (in Turkish cooking and Mediterranean wine flavouring).
Nor was it just in Turkey. How did Dutch and English colonists like their eggs in the morning? Not with a kiss, but with a spot of ambergris. Another English recipe, found on an annotated edition of the John Milton’s English epic, “Paradise Lost”, contains a handwritten recommendation for melting ambergris onto roasted game before enclosing it in pastry. The Italians were in on it too: the famed Casanova reputed to have used ambergris as an aphrodisiac. (Followed, one would hope, by an equally potent mouthwash afterwards).
And if you think that’s bad enough, at a Chicago cocktail bar called Billy Sunday they serve up shavings of ambergris in a drink, which they say closely resembles an Old Fashioned. Only it’s not old-fashioned in the slightest. Because paying for the privilege of drinking wale intestinal matter from a glass is a pretention of the modern age.