An alleyway in the old city of Korčula, photographed by Tona & Yo

Maxence and I are about to leave for a vacation in Croatia; the plan is to drive down the Dalmatian coast from Split to Dubrovnik, and chill for a few days on the island of Korčula.

If you’ve been to Croatia before and have food or drink recommendations to share — specialties we should try, restaurants we must visit, ingredients we can bring back — I would very much like to hear them!

The Omnivore’s Hundred is an eclectic and entirely subjective list of 100 items that Andrew Wheeler, co-author of the British food blog Very Good Taste, thinks every omnivore should try at least once in his life.

He offered this list as the starting point for a game, along the following rules:
1. Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2. Bold all the items you’ve eaten (I’ve used icons instead, and added an asterisk for the items I’m particularly fond of).
3. Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.
4. Optional extra: post a comment on Very Good Taste, linking to your results.

[Update: In response to the numerous questions his list raised, Andrew published an FAQ explaining the how, the why, and the wherefore.]

My list is below; I am missing 37 items, most of which I’d be happy to try if given the opportunity. There are a few that I wouldn’t rush to eat, but none that I couldn’t swallow if someone’s life, honor, and/or feelings were at stake.

And of course, if you don’t have a blog, you can still play along, with a good old pencil and some paper — care to share your results? And/or items you think should be added to, or removed from that list?

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When Maxence and I lived in California at the turn of the century, we liked to visit a small shop in Mountain View called Hong Kong Bakery. The Chinese-style pastries all seemed very exotic to me and we ate our way through the full range over the first few months, but soon stopped when we found our gold-medalled champion: the chiffon cake.

If you’ve never had chiffon cake, perhaps you can start by imagining what it might feel like to eat a cloud — a fluffy, moderately sweet, and lightly eggy cloud that would deflate in your mouth with a moist sigh. It is not unlike angel food cake, if you think about it, except that the chiffon cake is not shy about egg yolks; it offers hence a richer mouthfeel, and does not threaten to block your airways.

If you’ve never had chiffon cake, you can start by imagining what it might feel like to eat a cloud — a fluffy, moderately sweet, and lightly eggy cloud that would deflate in your mouth with a moist sigh.

The classic chiffon cake is baked in an ungreased, not nonstick tube pan, in which such batters rise higher because they have more walls to climb. In Chinese bakeries, however, chiffon cake appears under the much more appealing guise of a paper-wrapped cake — a single-serving confection baked in a tall metal tumbler lined with a thin sheet of paper.

Naturally, this allows the lady behind the counter to unmold the cakes easily and two at a time, in symmetric flips of the wrists. But, more to the point, you get to peel the paper off the body of the cake as you eat — one of the more thrilling of earthly sensations, akin to the removal of the plastic sheet that protects the screen of a new cell phone.

I don’t own a tube pan (there is no such thing in the galaxy of French pans; the closest relative is the savarin mold, but it’s really a third cousin twice removed), nor a set of tall metal tumblers, but I had long ago read, on my friend Chika‘s blog, that chiffon cake could be baked in unwaxed paper cups.

Chika had then been kind enough to translate her recipe, which she herself had obtained from a Japanese site, and I finally — after, oh, a good four years — got around to trying it earlier this summer.

My chiffon cakes rose nicely (although, unlike Chika’s, they did not form a dome) and developed a delicate top crust, in welcome contrast to the sponge-like crumb. We enjoyed them so, and found them to be such ideal summer treats, that I am planning to bake an encore batch as soon as I get my kitchen back (believe it or not, our renovations are still not done), but this time I will line the paper cups with parchment paper — it seems less wasteful to at least reuse the cups, and did I mention how much I love stripper cakes?

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I blame it all on my nephew.

Around the time that he was born, earlier this year, something clicked and I decided to take the whole sustainable seafood thing seriously: if he and his unborn cousins are to enjoy a long life full of lobster tails and skate wings, it is up to me to make informed and responsible choices now.

I had heard of the depletion of the oceans before, but I don’t think I had quite realized how dire the situation is: fish populations the world over are threatened by overfishing, overconsumption, pollution, and fishing techniques that wreak havoc in local ecosystems. If we don’t change our ways fast, major fish species may become extinct as early as 2050.

Like all environmental problems, this is an abysmally complex one, with multitudinous causes, implications, side effects, and collateral damages. And if you factor in other, equally pressing concerns, such as levels of mercury, PCB, and other contaminants, as well as the need to favor locally sourced ingredients, it all becomes rather overwhelming, befuddling, discouraging, check all that apply. Not everyone aspires to become an expert in marine matters, and not everyone has the time or inclination to decode what the experts are saying.

We just want to eat fish and be merry.

It is perhaps tempting then to sit on one’s hands and say, well, I’m just the one consumer, I can’t change the world, and that slab of red tuna on the fish stall or on the menu is already out of the water anyway, so I might as well eat it.

But no; it is best to let that slab of red tuna sit there, uneaten, for it is very much a chicken-or-egg (or rather, a fish-or-roe) matter. As much as we would want them to, restaurants and fish markets aren’t in the business of saving the planet; they’re in the business of making their customers happy.

And if what makes you happy is to feel sure that the fish you buy has been fished or farmed sustainably — that is to say, in a way that ensures that the fish population will be maintained or increased, and that the ecosystem it belongs to is protected — then it will become financially profitable for fish vendors and restaurateurs to care.

So, what to do, what to do?

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