Last night I was told I’d be taken to a “BBQ” restaurant (i.e., one that serves grilled meats; these bear no resemblance to American BBQ but are delicious in their own right). Sure enough, I was, and the food was tasty and COPIOUS.
First, with a Bulgarian beer, the appetizers. They included eggplant in what tasted like a sesame sauce, a Bulgarian salad with cheese, a fried version of cheese, and, at upper left, an eggplant spread to eat on bread or on its own.
Then, a dish listed on the menu as “THE MOUNTAIN OF MEAT”. It’s an accurate description: there was skewered chicken, steak, pork, lamb meatballs, sauages, other viands, and liver (which I eschewed). The meat was grilled and much of it was imbued with nice spices. Three of us consumed most of this dish. Plates of fried potatoes (like french fries, but in the form of thick, flat discs) were constantly replenished.
The red sauce is like Bulgarian catsup, but not as sweet as that we find in the U.S. It’s made from tomatoes, red peppers, and spices. There’s also a kind of cole slaw on the side.
Finally, dessert was an apple “cookie cake” and a spectacular dish that resembled a creme brulée, but which had the caramelized crust on all sides. I don’t know how they do that, but it was scrumptious. Anyone who has the ability to make this should; it’s one of the finest desserts I’ve ever had, like a burnt-sugar shell completely enclosing a creamy filling.
Oy, was I full!
Jerry, I am a practicing physician in Henderson Nevada.I have been following your website now for six months I enjoy your stories and following your travels although I am not crazy about cats.I do think your book is one of the best ever on evolution,and I show your YouTube lecture to my religious future ex friends. I must state my concern watching the food you are consuming when you take these trips
what is the approximate caloric intake?
and what is YOUR RECENT cholesterol including HDL and LDL
…are you on a Statin medication?
Oy, more leisure facism! Please, I can do without the tut-tutting. I have had my cholesterol checked recently and it is fine, thank you. As I’ve said recently, I eat like this only on trips, and at home I eat a healthy diet. But really, as I’ve said before, this kind of finger-wagging is inappropriate here (really, do you have any idea how you come off?).
How the hell do I know what the calories are? All I know is that I haven’t gained any weight on these trips; I eat only one large meal per day and do a lot of walking.
Thanks for also telling us that you are not crazy about cats. What does that add to the discussion?
I suggest you go out on the street and tell every overweight person you see that they are too fat, and also tell all the smokers about their health risks. Why don’t you do that?
The next time you feel compelled to tell me how to live, keep it to yourself, okay? I’m getting quite tired of this stuff coming from readers.
I enjoy seeing men eat. :)) Don’t why some people think they are superior and have that “bitch” attitude. Do they complain about food column on newspaper? I think Jerry’s food writing is better than food column, because I don’t read food column but I read Jerry’s trip. See, how he enjoys life! 🙂
Missing word ” know”
It is clear that Bulgaria is a kind of culinary paradise, mouthwatering indeed. Not to mention cats and human accommodating architecture.
You do not appear to be negatively affected by such food, you look splendid: lean and mean. (check your privilege :)!)
However, if a South African ‘Coloured’ (mainly descendants of Khoi-khoi and Bushmen) were put on this (admittedly succulent) diet they would grow gigantonormic, in fact they actually do (on a much less appealing diet of bread, chips and processed food), with high blood pressures and raging Diabetes type 2.
I think it has to do with ancestral exposure to starchy diets. Why would hunter gatherers only recently exposed to ‘modern’ diets be hit so hard by metabolic syndrome?
In a comment on your Weet-bix thread I asked about your opinion on this ‘paleo-diet’.
Now I know you are not a nutritionist, but you do have some serious credentials in evolutionary biology, if I may put it that mildly. In your opinion, do these starch-free diets have some proper evolutionary rationale, or is it just a ‘Just So’ story? I would love to read your opinion, if you have one of course, that is.
If you’re asking about the validity of the “paleo diet” it’s pseudoscience and just another fad diet. Our Palaeolithic ancestors were usually dead by 30, scavenged for whatever they could find (including insects), were often near starvation and ate non cultivated vegetables that didn’t taste as good or were as large as ones brought about by agriculture. It’s another “modernity sucks” fad.
Dear Diana, I beg to disagree with you there.
I do not contest it maybe pseudoscience, wether it is, is the question I’m actually asking.
Our paleolithic ancestors and extant hunter gatherers have indeed a life expectancy of about 30. But life expectancy is a different parameter from longevity.
What did or do they die of? Child mortality, infections, warfare (about 30% of male mortality!) and strife, not autoimmune diseases, metabolic syndrome and the like. A ‘modern’ hunter gatherer reaching 40 has a life excpwectancy of 30 more years.
I also agree that most of our genetically modified crops were selected to our benefit, less bitter and less toxic.
Please refer to my comment on the Weet-bix thread (please do that).
I know it is just anecdotal, but the diet cured my GORD (Gastro-Oesophagal Reflux Disease) within days, it lowered my cholesterol (it increased my HDL vehicle too),it plunged my high triglycerides, it normalised my ‘limit’ blood sugar. And I lost 12 kg. I’m sure if I would not abuse the good red wine -which I do- the effects might have been even more spectacular.
Of course this might be some kind of placebo effect, but then it might not.
Near starvation maybe indeed be the most important factor in the surprisingly good health of hunter gatherers, but I do not think so, most of them appear far from starvation.
The major cause of the metabolic syndrome is refined sweeteners. If your paleo diet had you cutting out sugar and refined foods that are loaded with sugars and other nasty shit, that’s pretty much the whole explanation.
The goal doesn’t necessarily have to be what people ate before the dawn of civilization. Simply eating what people did before the industrialization of food will do the trick. For most, just eating the way their grandparents or great-grandparents did in the old country will do the trick. Of course, it’s not hard to find exceptions to a guideline as loosely stated as that, but it should also be obvious what I mean: cook your own meals from fresh or minimally-processed ingredients. Lots of fresh veggies. If you eat bread, bake it yourself — it’s really quite easy — and use whole grains regularly and white flour and white rice only as an occasional luxury. That sort of thing.
Cheers,
b&
Ben, you might have a point there, but how does one know?
At any rate both your pre-industrial and the paleo diets avoid processed food (and the Bulgarian chow appears too).
If you read the list of ingredients in those processed foods you wonder what the effect on the gut microbiota may be…
I’m also kinda sceptic about the ‘goodness’ of starches, whether whole grain or not: for HLA B27+ Ankylosing Spondylitis and Acute Anterior Uveitis syndrome (with it’s cross reaction to Klebsiella pneumonie) short sugars don’t matter, it is the starches that have to be cut out.
Personally for my GORD I get punished with heartburn every time I eat some nice piece of crispy-crusted bread.
How do the antibiotics used in the industrial meat production affect our microbiota?
Thing is, we know little yet about the symbiosis with our gut fauna, I should think it is a worthy and vast subject for study. (And probably a very useful one in view of the nearly world-wide ‘epidemic’ of DM type 2.)
I also somehow *like* the evolutionary rationale behind the paleo diet. It allows me to talk evolution by natural selection as a matter of course, no dispute, while apparently only discussing diet. Here in deeply creationist South Africa that is a positive not to be neglected.
You may like the evolutionary rationale, but the rationale is flawed and misunderstands how evolution works in assuming organisms are at some point in time perfectly adapted to their environment. Marlene Zuk, who wrote Paleofantasy expands on this in this short video.
Marlene Zuk zucks, (no, not really, I just could’t resist that one).:)
In her book she shows to be well informed about evolutionary biology (as we damn well expected), but she appears totally ignorant about the rationale behind the pale-diet.
I can sub that video 100%, but I fail to see where it has any negative on that ‘paleo-diet’.
What significance the rationalization for a fad diet if it has no basis in either physiology nor (as you yourself agree) evolution?
As I wrote, the physiology and epidemiology both point to sugar as the worst culprit. If your paleo fad keeps you from eating sugar, fantastic. But there’s no reason whatsoever to shun whole grains or dairy or the like unless you have a specific personal allergy to them.
And that’s before we get to all the signs of disease, including malnutrition, we find in the hominid fossil record from the period whose diet you’re trying to emulate….
b&
Ben is correct here and many nutritionists would agree with him. As for starvation, believe me, I was once anorexic for years and I got sick all the time so no, starvation isn’t the secret to a long, healthy life.
For the pseudo-science part, many have written about this but this article nicely sums up what Ben and I both said.
Thanks for posting that link, Diana; excellent article, much better than I could ever have hoped to explain it, myself.
There’re definitely all sorts of things in the modern diet that are best avoided or at least limited to rare indulgences. (For example, I just finished eating a donut with breakfast…first donut I’ve eaten in ages. It was okay, but too sweet and the texture could definitely have been improved upon.)
But just because it’s easy to eat too much of new things that aren’t good for you doesn’t mean that everything old is good or everything new is bad.
And it’s certainly not the case that our stone-age ancestors were optimally healthy. Indeed, I can’t think of any examples of remains recovered that were what we’d consider healthy today — though, to be sure, I’m far from an expert in the field and only going off recollections of what’s been reported on in the popular press.
b&
Dear Diana,
Why is the rationale flawed?
I’d be very interested to hear/read it.
The rationale behind the paleo-diet does not propose any kind of ‘perfect adaptation’ at all, only a longer period of weak selective pressure (ie. after reproductive peak].
Things like the Grandmother effect and the observation that in traditional H-G societies, as well as traditional agricultural societies, older men tend to have some offspring with young nubile females. Those maybe weak selective pressures, but they are not zero. (in fact, those 2 maybe the main cause we do not drop dead at 50, the age at which most females have reached their menopause).
I cannot at present give you the references, because I’m on a Wifi that breaks off any 5 minutes or so (please refer to the Weet-bix post)
Oh, the Jabr article.
It is deeply flawed.
That nice graph is purportedly showing there is no real hunter gatherer diet. But it clearly shows the commonalities: what hunter gatherers do not eat.
No starches, more precisely no acellular, energy dense, carbohydrates, little or no dairy, and particularly no processed foods.
2 of the 4 in the graph are outliers, the Inuit, which have little plant food available and the !Kung, who -only seasonally ,btw- get most of their food from Ngongo-ngnongo nuts.
These nuts are mainly saturated fats.
Now let us be honest, as a fertile female, who would you go for to impregnate you, 20+ scroungy Jabr, or 60+ Sisson?
Just google,the images.
My point is that there is no stagnation with evolution because no species is ever 100% adapted to its environment. The article is not deeply flawed and the chart was only an example. You seem determined to believe what you want regardless of facts so please don’t bother others to go to the trouble of explaining those facts.
Diana, I haven’t a clue where this strange idea of ‘perfect adaptation’ or ‘evolutionary stagnation’ comes from. The rationale of the paleodiet does not hinge on that at all.
It merely proposes that weak selective pressures may, in course of history, allow for some ‘diseases of civilisation’, which hit us after reproductive peak.
What is your explanation for the fact that populations with recent H-G ancestors appear to be so hard hit by metabolic syndrome as compared to populations with longer ‘agricultural’ ancestry? This is not a rhetorical question, e.g., alcoholism bay be an alternative answer.
Ben, refined sugars maybe the most important factor, but the few studies (cf the weet-bix thread) comparing ‘paleo’ to ‘Mediterranean’ do not appear to support the notion that they are the whole story.
Our paleolithic ancestor were healthier than our mesolithic one and again the neolithic ones if measured by size (‘tallness’) or pelvic index.
Indeed, even with our total absence of starvation we have not caught up with them yet.
There is also some collateral evidence.
Why do humans have a small large bowel and large small intestine compared to other apes? It appeared about 2 million years ago with the barrel-chested H erectus, as opposed to the conical chest of the Australopithecines and extant apes.
That misunderstanding of the paleontology diet is exactly what it is about. If you are advocating otherwise, you haven’t understood the rational behind the pale diet. But ad I said before, you aren’t really interested in facts.
Diana, what are these facts I’m not interested in? (I think you are doing some projection there). I’m very much interested in facts.
No, Ben, I do not think at all it has no basis in physiology. I think we do not know exactly why it can have such spectacular results in e.g. DM 2.
Placebo? Change in intestinal microbiota? Why have DM 2 patients elevated hs-CRP? (highly sensitive c-reactive protein, a cytokine considered to be an inflammatory marker).
Why is gastric bypass surgery (aka bariatric surgery) so effective in healing DM2? I mean, they normalise their blood sugar within 48 to 72 hours after surgery in about 80% of cases. Those are impressive facts. Their microbiota substantially chances too within a day or so.
There are few studies, but a low simple sugar and low starch diet is bound to alter the intestinal microbiota too, albeit not shown (yet?) to be an identical or comparable change.
My point is that to dismiss the paleo diet as a ‘fad’ is premature.
This is enough. No more comments on a thread that has been derailed, okay?
I think I’m the main culprit for derailing. My apologies for that.
Oh, goodness, take a course in bedside manners.
If you’ve been following for a while you would know the following.
As Jerry says, he doesn’t usually eat like this, and besides, it looks healthier than Western food.
Cats. He has no free will so he can’t help himself. 🙂
The cat has got his tongue?
“The cat has got his tongue?”
When I was a kid I saw a cartoon strip in which cats ruled a world and humans were their slaves.
One cat says to another: “you’re very quiet tonight. Has the human got your tongue?”
Y’know, I haven’t seen a new volume of “Man-Kzin wars” stories for a while … Amazon, incoming!
Also NB: the appetizers and Mountain were split three ways, excluding the liver.
OMG why don’t you ask him how much he pees too. Who goes around asking people about caloric intake?
Jesus Christ.
Of course Jerry doesn’t eat like this all the time — and who would want to?
But what the hell is the point of living in a wealthy society if you never indulge in any of its luxuries?
Besides, cholesterol levels are but a single risk factor in cardiovascular disease. If they’re your only factor, you’ve got nothing to worry about. It’s when you start adding on other risk factors — especially a sedentary lifestyle, obesity, a diet of highly-processed foods and few fresh veggies, and most especially observations of arterial blockage (such as with a coronary calcium scan) — that cholesterol levels become significant. But if you’re otherwise in great condition but happen to have high cholesterol, statins aren’t going to do you any good.
b&
Well, for one, I’d want to…
Look at the serving plates! Lovely oldfashioned Meissen-like porcelain.
I love your mouth-watering food posts! Hmmm, Bulgaria isn’t that far away from Germany, lovely landscape, interesting food, not a bad place for a great vacation!
Still researching, but at this stage I suspect the dish in which the ‘brulée’ was baked had its sides and bottom sugared. When done, the top was torched.
That’s clear, but not how they get it out of the pan with the bottom coating intact.
It’s a turkish desert called “kazan dibi” – I’ve never attempted making it myself, but if I recall it was baked in a low heat oven and didn’t have an issue with sticking.
Ransom is correct–the Bulgarian desert is a dead ringer for kazandibi, which is Turkish for “bottom of the pan”–which is where the burnt part of the pudding arises. It’s another culinary legacy of the Ottomans. You can several recipes online.
Kazandibi is a very common dessert at Turkish restaurants, so if Jerry wants more he can visit one in Chicago. While he’s there he should also try a related pudding, “Tavuk göğsü,” which is made from shredded chicken breast and tastes far more delicious than it sounds.
OMG those desserts! I want them for breakfast!
Could it be possible that the doctor from Nevada was indulging in a little teasing?
Thanks so much, Jerry, for all your posts of food and especially cats! Bulgaria! I never would have thought that I would want to go there, but you have opened my eyes!
These Bulgarian food posts never fail to make my mouth water!
I am feeling awfully sorry for this doctor from Nevada. You guys can be pretty rough! Anyhow, I wanted to thank Jerry for the wonderful travel log and especially the food pix.
My experience with Bulgaria was a quick stay during the last years of Soviet rule, and the impression of Sophia was one of corruption, scarcity, and a general feeling of grey horror. (The only way I can describe it.) I am so glad to see a country that is actually incredibly beautiful, and seemingly bountiful when allowed to fend for itself!
At the risk of being attacked,I’d wanted to remark on the “fried flies”,but they’ve already become “fried fries”. I get a big kick out of typos (especially my own!)(Maybe I just misread it; bad eyesight.)
There are places in the world where one can enjoy tasty insects, such as fried, crunchy grasshoppers in Mexico. And, during the last big Cicada swarm on the US east coast, there were many recipes on the internet for cooking Cicadas (They are in the same family as Lobsters we were informed.)
I want also to thank you for the travelogs with
the beautiful photos of the countryside,with
an emphasis on local foods and cats.It all looks wonderful and I will have to try to find a recipe for the Kazan Dibi.
Those crunchy grasshoppers I tasted in Thailand, and juicy water bugs and grilled spiders, really good food IMMO. ‘Lekker’ as they say here.
Are fried grasshoppers -from Mexico to Thailand- a kind of worldwide phenomenon that excludes the ‘West”?
Is there a universe escaping us?
I’m less fond of the Zairian (now Congolese again) caterpillars, not bad, but a bit oily, not really a culinary apex if you ask me, same for the ‘Mopane worms’ here in South Africa.
Seriously, do you expect someone to say yummy? :)))
well, yes. Yummy!
Mopane worms are good with lots of garlic and chillies, but then, lots of things are. The dried ones taste like nutshells even when rehydrated 🙁 Even so, if you’re hungry mopane worm stew and pap is good stuff.
Well, it has been looked at funny by European folk for a long time. The British in Australia thought the aborigines were starving ebcause they were eating insects all the time. Little did they know that these are actually highly nutritious and easier to catch than sparse rodents and such.
I found the recipe, and made it. Just took it out of the iron pan where it is supposed to chill. I would send a pix, but I don’t know how to do it on this blog. There was a LOT lost in this translation, as the dish is now at the bottom of my trash can. I am sure that whatever Jerry had, it was far, FAR better than what I made. It is similar to an Italian Panna Cotta. I am not a big fan of starch based puddings, so that may be one reason I didn’t like it. It is Rice flour and corn starch. My gelatinous mess was pretty awful, but the caramelized sugar in butter was good! Guess I will have to go to Bulgaria to get the real thing.
Perhaps the good doctor marvels at Jerry’s ability to remain slim while partaking in such delights as he shows here. Goodness knows I do. But more power to him. Then again, I’ve been reading the blog for a lot longer, so I know how Jerry handles this thing. At least the doctor didn’t criticize cowboy boots!
What fabulous food, I am putting Bulgaria on my list of desirable holiday destinations. I has everything, food, scenery, cats and shopping.
I LOVED Bulgaria. If I had infinite time and money, I’d spend a lot of them there.
I’m not up for the “mountain of meat”, but the appetizers look great.