To the innocent eye, the rightly named death cap mushroom, host to nearly a dozen potent toxins and the leading cause of mushroom poisonings around the world, is a ringer for some of its more benign counterparts. To express bafflement over fugu is to ignore the fact that, for much of history, any given mouthful of food could wreak bodily harm. And the Japanese of that far-off era had little choice when food was scarce: Fugu was necessity before it was ever luxury. For those who wonder why those early cooks persisted despite presumed fatalities, Hiroya Kawasaki, a sensory scientist and member of the board of the Kyoto-based Japanese Culinary Academy, points out that the first people to taste blue cheese, with its veins of mold and alarming funk, took a gamble, too. The jawbones of the fish have been unearthed from sites in Japan dating back more than 4,000 years. Without any equivalent on Western menus, diners outside of Japan (and China, where fugu is called hetun and also treasured) tend to assume that the whole point of eating fugu is the risk, latching on to the notion, likely apocryphal, that some chefs will intentionally leave a trace of the toxin in the flesh, just enough to bring a tingling to the lips, a cautionary reminder of our transience on earth.įUGU IS PREHISTORIC. Rarely is it mentioned that the chrysanthemum is also a symbol of long life and the signature of the emperor. Even the lovely chrysanthemum that the chef painstakingly builds on the plate is read as a morbid omen, since, in Japan, the flower traditionally appears in funeral wreaths. While historically the Western attitude toward Eastern delicacies has often been one of suspicion and disgust, fugu is treated as a special case, not necessarily unpalatable - since it’s not widely available beyond Asia, few in the West have actually tasted it - but a literal threat. ![]() You don’t just toddle home afterward with a full belly you survive. To enter a fugu restaurant is cast as a daredevil feat akin to skydiving, with each bite a roll of the dice. “Trust the Russians to use something no one’s ever heard of.”) As recounted in Tom Parker Bowles’s 2006 travelogue, “ The Year of Eating Dangerously: A Global Adventure in Search of Culinary Extremes,” the real-life British explorer Captain James Cook had a more direct encounter with the fish in 1774 while trawling the South Pacific, sampling the liver and roe of a recent catch and then waking in the middle of the night to a violent prickling and sense of disembodiment in which “a quart pot full of water and a feather was the same in my hand,” for which only “a vomit and after that a sweat” offered reprieve.Īlmost everything written about fugu in the West, including the previous two paragraphs, revolves around the potential for death. No,” published the following year, it’s determined that the mysterious substance was “fugu poison.” (“Taken us three months,” the doctor reports. James Bond nearly dies of it at the end of Ian Fleming’s 1957 novel “ From Russia With Love,” when it’s administered by a kick from a boot with a hidden blade and he crumples to the floor in “ Dr. Just two or three milligrams of TTX may be lethal to a human - “more potent than arsenic, cyanide or even anthrax,” the American science writer Christie Wilcox notes in “ Venomous: How Earth’s Deadliest Creatures Mastered Biochemistry” (2016). ![]() In high enough doses, this can shut down a diner’s nerve impulses and cause, within hours, nausea, paralysis and the stalling of the heart, which only knows to beat because our body’s electrical system tells it to. Among those who think of fugu as merely a distant delicacy, knowledge rarely goes beyond the fish’s infamous trait: In the most delicious species, the innards are suffused with the neurotoxin called tetrodotoxin (TTX). A sluggish swimmer, fugu has stunted fins and often flat-lying spikes instead of scales, and when confronted by predators it compensates for its lack of speed by swallowing enough water to swell up until its spikes stand on end, so it looks like an angry armored balloon. ![]() Westerners have never quite understood the reverence in Japan for fugu, alternately known in English as puffer fish, globefish or blowfish, of the family Tetraodontidae. To one diner, this is a promise of pleasure to another, a teetering on the abyss. HERE IS A PLATE of fish cut so thin you can half see through it, the pale panels arrayed in rings that ripple outward, like the small, concentrically packed florets of a chrysanthemum.
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