(Ebury Press, $27.99)Despite having one of the world’s most famous surnames, Tom Parker Bowles is not best known as the son of Camilla, but as a food writer of extraordinary fortitude. Not for Tom a five-course meal served up by white-gloved butlers in some snooty London eatery. oh, no. If it doesn’t wink at him from his plate, smell like rotting compost, or try and jump off the table, Tom’s hardly going to bother.
You’ll find these meals and more in The Year of Eating Dangerously, Tom’s highly unusual food/travel book. I say highly unusual because most food/travel books make you want to eat the food the writer has eaten and travel to the places they’ve been to. In Tom’s case, I’m over the moon he’s done it all first but I sure as hell never ever want to follow in his footsteps.
Chilli so hot you can’t stand up afterwards? Crispy cockroaches? Dog soup? Tom has snacked on them all, yet such is his charm that even when what he is doing is truly disgusting, you feel nothing but sympathy for him – tinged perhaps with a little pride that a fairly privileged young man has so enthusiastically put himself in such a dreadful position.
It’s not all creepy-crawlies in far-flung Asian nations either. one of the most eye-popping stories for me was when Tom had to judge barbecued food at a competitive cook-off in Nashville. Famished to begin with, he hoes into the whole cooked pig entries, followed by the chicken, followed by the pork ribs, followed by the Boston Butt, followed by the brisket, followed by dessert. This, by the way, is too much food for even the greediest of souls.
But the book isn’t all about churning stomachs and perilous burps. In fact, Tom’s search for exotica is partly inspired by the lack of it, or loss of it, in his home country. And even when he’s baulking at the prospect of dog soup, he respects that in Korea, where it is a specialty, it’s part of that nation’s culture and as such who is a thin, white, posh bloke to diss it?
Ultimately, I can only thank Tom for recounting his experiences so vividly because it means the rest of us need not get any more adventurous than an extra dollop of Kaitaia Fire on our snarlers. I mean, we didn’t all climb Everest after Sir Edmund Hillary did it, did we? No, we simply named him a conqueror and basked in his glory. I recommend we do the same with Tom Parker Bowles.
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