International Hangover Cures, from Tripe Soup to Leche de Tigre
Step one to hangover recovery: standing up (Luilekkerland, 1567; Credit: Peter Bruegel the Elder/Wikimedia Commons)**
If New Year's Eve is an international party, New Year's Day is the inevitable international hangover, a worldwide groan and scramble for any kind of cure. And if each country has a different way of describing a hangover, you know that they all have different tried-and-possibly-true methods of getting back into fighting shape. Many of them are ridiculous, and some of the world's "cures" are more vile-sounding than the hangover itself, but here's a collection of hangover food you might actually want to eat (and that might actually make you feel better):
Pasta Carbonara: Bacon, eggs, and a whole bunch of carbs make this dish an Italian hangover staple, and it's so easy to make well that you can do it in a dark kitchen, with all the shades drawn, with one hand busy holding up the blanket toga you're wearing for warmth. Our recipe calls for guanciale, but in a pinch, you can make this with any salty cured meat--bacon, pancetta, or (if you think your stomach can handle some spice) chorizo all work fine.
French Onion Soup: Known simply as "onion soup" in France, this cure's a little harder to make than the carbonara, but chaud damn if it isn't a great idea. That soggy slice of bread, those sweet onions, and all that cheese seem like born hangover slayers. And our recipe even has a splash of apple brandy in it, if you want just a snippet of the hair of the dog to get you going.
Shakshouka: Literally "mish-mash," this is the hangover dish of choice in most of North Africa and Israel. You take some eggs, poach them in a peppery, onion-y tomato sauce, and chow down, sopping up the eggy slop with some kind of flatbread, and hopefully feeling better soon.
Congee: This soupy rice gruel is China's go-to hangover food, an approach that treats the hangover more like an illness to be gently nursed away than an enemy to be crushed under the weight of bacon and potatoes. It's often topped with eggs, pickles, and other little tidbits, so some vitamins get in the mix, too. Ginger tea, tea made from kudzu roots, and the fermented black pu-erh tea also all help with hangovers, and get some water into your system at the same time.
Pickles: Russians, who one imagines know something about hangovers, start the recovery process with pickles, pickle brine, and occasionally some kvass--some might argue that drinking the fizzy fermented rye drink is, at about 1% alcohol, technically a hair of the dog situation, but if the dog that bit you is vodka, kvass might as well be water.
Along the same lines, Germans and their northern European brethren like to eat pickled fish and pickled veggies--the Germans roll them up into rollmops, with the pickled herring around the vegetables, but you can also just eat them straight out of the jar.
The traditional Japanese pickle cure is the face-puckeringly sour umeboshi (pickled plum), though those with slightly less masochistic tastes might like Watermelon Power--compressed pickled watermelon sold at mini-marts in the southern part of the country. There's actual scientific evidence for watermelon's curative powers (especially for your liver, which might not be doing so great in this situation), but good luck finding one in a pinch on New Year's Day.
Or, to finish the pickle tour, you can do like the Peruvians and pour a shot of leche de tigre--the citrusy, garlicky, and slightly briney liquid used to cure ceviche. Think of it as fishy Gatorade, chock full of maritime electrolytes!
Haejangguk: The name of this Korean soup translates literally to "soup for a hangover," and it seems like it would do some kind of trick, if not the trick, after a soju bender. There are regional variants, but most of them have a whole lot of cabbage, some other vegetables, and (the magic ingredient) congealed ox blood, all in a hearty beef broth. A similar recipe with a similar name is documented as far back as the 1300s, so it must be doing something right.
Tripe: OK, so maybe you don't actually want to eat this one, but tripe soup is a surprisingly popular cure (and really not bad, if it's done right). In Mexico, they stew sliced-up cow stomach up with other beef bits, garlic, and onions to make menudo, and serve with a side of tortillas or bread (presumably to sop up any booze still floating around in your stomach). In Turkey and Greece, the soup either has a garlic-vinegar tang or a creamy yellow egg yolk and lemon juice broth--Istanbul restaurants start serving bowls of iskembe corbasi right after midnight strikes on New Year's, and you can usually find a Greek patsas joint that specializes in the dish open anywhere convenient to drinkers and night shift workers.
Hair of the Globetrotting Dog: The idea that "like cures like" is a kind of sympathetic magic that dates back to antiquity, and people have been trying to kill hangovers with just a little more booze since the days of Dionysius. The Finnish call it a "leveler," Costa Ricans call it "hair of the pig," and all over Europe, people wisely say that "a nail dislodges a nail." Despite that worldwide fame, it's actually a bad idea, assuming you want to sober up and rejoin the world as a hangover-free citizen. If, however, you just want to get a little drunk to ease the pain of having been drunk, by all means. A warning, though: It's even less likely to help if you're feeling nauseous, since alcohol will pretty quickly irritate whatever's already irritated, but a few big 'ol bloody marys will definitely help with that headache and lingering feelings of self-loathing, at least through the end of brunch.
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