Trekking for Tibetan potatoes

"I have to get the recipe for that dish," I said after a while, when I had calmed down a little and Matt had begun to act as if I might be her spouse.

"Well," she said, "why don't you just go back to the store and ask them for it?"

If you think this is a sensible reply, you are probably a woman. Setting aside the question as to whether I would be allowed back into the shop, for a guy, a suggestion like this is the verbal equivalent of a bucket of cold water. It is the sort of exchange that most often occurs on the highway, when the driver (male) has lost his way and the passenger (female) suggests, in that same reasonable voice, that they stop the first pedestrian they see and ask for directions.

It's not that this is an obviously bad idea. It just misses the point. For men, getting lost isn't a mistake -- it's an opportunity to exercise those basic survival skills hard-wired in their brains. These skills may be rusty and unreliable, but they're there, and once released from the kennel, they don't want to go back inside. They want to run until they drop. And if that means going miles out of the way -- or, more likely, driving around in a big circle, saying all the while, "I know what I'm doing" -- well, that's the way it goes.

Even so, after searching through our cookbook collection, I was beginning to worry that she might be right. Although we are professional food writers and own enough of those tomes to sink the average garbage scow, we didn't have a single book, or even a portion of a single book, on the cooking of Tibet.

There's a simple reason for this: It had never occurred to me in my whole life that I might want one. The only Tibetan recipe I knew was hot buttered tea -- and somehow, until now, that had seemed more than enough. I can't be alone in this feeling, since a thorough search of all likely Internet sites turned up only a single title: "Lhasa Moon Tibetan Cookbook" by Tsering Wangmo and Zara Houshmand, published by Snow Lion, a tiny house in Ithaca, N.Y., that specializes in titles on Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism. (For those who might wish to combine the mystical and the mundane, it offers a special gift pack containing a copy of "The Tibetan Book of the Dead" and a jar of Tibetan Dead hot sauce. The pack sports the catchy slogan "Soul food to die for and the book that will bring you back.")

I went to Amazon.com to check out reader comments on the "Lhasa Moon Tibetan Cookbook" and came across this rave from a reader in Lancaster, Ohio: "I was delighted to find recipes for such things as butter tea, tsampa (parched barley flour), dried cheese and even chang (barley beer)."

Hmm. All of a sudden, my interest in Tibetan curried potatoes started to wane. Doubts besieged me. Was I on a recipe hunt or merely the victim of some twisted karma that came from eating too many highly spiced cashews? After all, what were potatoes doing in Tibet at all? Wasn't this a country that had refused entry to foreigners for centuries? Did the rule not apply to any edible tubers the foreigners might be carrying? This seemed highly unlikely. Was this all some sort of hoax?

I decided to give the effort one last toss of the dice. I went to my current search engine of choice, typed in the three words "Tibetan curried potatoes," and pushed the search button.

Here it became evident that some sort of karma, twisted or otherwise, was guiding my actions, because I forgot to select "exact phrase" for this search -- which would have resulted in no hits and thus ended the whole project. Instead, my search turned up 43 matches, the first of which was a link to an article that appeared in Vegetarian Journal in 1996, called "Trekking in Nepal."

As it happened, the author, Cheyne Keith, a practicing vegetarian, would have starved to death in Nepal if it weren't for potatoes, since Nepalese, like Tibetans, although Buddhist, are out of necessity meat eaters. (Since Buddhists believe that all lives are equal, they prefer to eat larger animals, thus eating more and sinning less. The Dalai Lama has expressed personal dismay at the number of lives lost to produce even a single serving of shrimp -- although this seems an unlikely temptation to come the way of most Tibetans.)

Next Page: The difference between recipe hunting and recipe gathering

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