by Bart King
Pop Quiz!
Match the gross-sounding food with its definition! (Answers below.[16])
1. Bladderwrack a. Pork cut into cubes and fried
2. Spotted Dick b. English pudding
3. Skum saus c. Germs are good for you!
4. Wheat germ d. A scummy sauce from Norway
5. Bloater e. Dried fish
6. Scrunchion f. An Austrian doughnut
7. Wiener Krapfen g. A fried egg in a piece of toast
8. Toad-in-the-hole h. Edible seaweed
9. Bratklops i. A cold Polish soup
10. Chlodnik j. German fried meatballs
The durian stinks so much, it is illegal to have in Singapore. If you break open the twelve-pound fruit and survive the aroma, you’re ready to eat its pudding-like pulp. And apparently it tastes pretty good! But the horrible smell means that eating the durian is like what one person called “eating ice cream in an outhouse.”
Good Eating in the Rocky Mountains
Cheese and seaweed aside, there are plenty of other gross foods that people eat on purpose. So let’s continue our discussion with a look at oysters without shells. This cowboy delicacy is known as Rocky Mountain Oysters, cowboy caviar, swinging sirloin, and lamb or calf fries, but whatever you call them, they do NOT taste like chicken. (Or oysters!)
Yes, I’m referring to testicles.
Sorry, but there was no other way to write that. As you probably know, male pigs, lambs, and calves usually get gelded at an early age. “Gelded” means the same thing as neutered, fixed, or castrated. And that means that someone cuts their testicles off. Why do something so horrible to an innocent animal? It supposedly makes the animal’s meat more appetizing.
Okay, but what happens to a gelded animal’s testicles? Some of them find their way to the kitchen. This custom was imported by Basques into the western United States in the late 1800s. (Basques hail from a territory between France and Spain.) The Basques were not shy about castration; if a knife were not around, they would obtain the testicles using their teeth. (Really.) Of course, the testicles were cooked, and today, the classic recipe is to dip them in cornmeal and fry them.
There are plenty of cultures that eat animal testicles. And in almost every case, it’s men who want to eat animal testicles because these men think this will make them feel more “manly.” Of course, this is idiotic. The idea that eating an animal’s private parts would make a man more manly is as logical as thinking that eating a hairy animal would help a bald man grow hair!
Drink
Okay, maybe you’re getting a little dehydrated and you’d like to take a beverage break. Fair enough. How about some coffee? After all, there’s nothing gross about coffee (except its taste!). Unless you’re enjoying a hot cup of kopi luwak, that is.
Here’s how it works. If you look up in a coffee tree growing in parts of Southeast Asia and Indonesia, you might see an animal known as the common palm civet, or luwak. (The luwak is a cat that looks like a weasel and is actually a marsupial, but never mind that now.) This interesting animal eats the ripest coffee beans. Coffee beans actually have a fruity outer covering, and while the luwak digests this, the coffee bean itself passes entirely through the animal’s digestive system, and it shows up again in its poop.
Now it gets weird. Humans then go around and collect the luwak poop, separating the beans out and roasting them to sell for a VERY high price. What’s so special about luwak-poop coffee? Apparently, the enzymes in the luwak’s stomach give the coffee beans a special flavor. The flavor of luwak poop coffee is so good, it retails from $120 to $600 a pound! (You can get it cheaper in Indonesia. But wherever you drink it, it’s good to the last dropping.)
I Knew That Tasted Funny!
British Admiral Horatio Nelson died in 1805 off the Spanish coast. To keep his body preserved for the trip home, sailors put it into a barrel full of brandy. Mistake! Sailors love brandy, and it turned out that they were secretly siphoning off the drink during the homeward trip. By the time the admiral got home, the barrel was nearly empty.
I guess the grossest thing that humans drink is blood. Animal blood has shown up in a number of recipes throughout history, many of which are still around. For instance, in Scandinavia, people still enjoy the time-honored recipe of svartsoppa, a soup made with goose blood. And in Vietnam, it’s a big deal to go to a restaurant and have a live cobra brought to your table. The snake’s heart is cut out right there and placed into a cup, still pumping blood. The diner then throws the cup back and swallows. The heart and cobra blood go down the hatch, and as it goes, the heart’s still beating: ba-bump, ba-bump . . . Blech!
Germans Love Meat!
In German, the phrase “Wie eine Made im Speck leben” means that someone is “living a life of luxury.” But translated literally, it means, “to live like a maggot in bacon.”
As your scabs have taught you, liquid blood will turn into a solid. And so there are a number of dishes using blood as a solid or semi-solid ingredient. In Portugal, animal blood is simmered until it turns into sort of a scabby cake. Then it’s thrown into soup or stew as flavoring! In the United Kingdom, there’s blood pudding, and in Germany, you can slice up some blutwurst (blood sausage). Many of these recipes combine blood with lots of fat. For example, one blutwurst recipe combines pig blood with chopped pig’s lung and diced bacon. If you eat it, the blood sausage will clog your arteries.
Call it the pig’s revenge!
Eating Meat
Humans will eat any animal that isn’t poisonous. And some that are! The skin and guts of the blowfish (aka, puffer fish or fugu) has a deadly poison inside it that’s 150,000 times more powerful than strychnine. If this poison is eaten, the victim dies a horrible death.
So, of course, people eat it!
In Japan, blowfish is considered a great delicacy. Trained chefs carefully remove the poisonous parts of the fish, and then diners dig in. Of course, sometimes the chefs make mistakes, and every year, dozens of people eat blowfish and feel their lips start to get numb. Then they die.
You’d think that, with all the reasons NOT to eat blowfish, at least it would be delicious. You’d think wrong. Apparently it’s a bland fish that tastes almost like any other fish.
Man, people are SO weird!
As for eating non-toxic meat, humans play a lot of mind games there too. Most people won’t eat pure animal fat or drink animal blood. But if you take “meat juice” (blood) and mix it with melted fat, that’s how you make gravy! And I’m guessing you’ve had that before.
Another mind game we play is pretending there is some huge difference between eating, say, a dog and a pig. But it’s just a game of “pretend.” Don’t get me wrong, it’s strange for me to imagine people eating animals that I’ve always thought of as pets. But in places like Korea and Southeast Asia, dogs are being eaten right now. At the same time, more than a billion Jews and Muslims are going out of their way to avoid eating pigs.
Whether a pig or dog is eaten has less to do with the animal and more to do with human attitudes. For example, I was ordering take-out Chinese food for a group of people, and I asked if anyone would eat frogs’ legs.
“Nooo!” the entire group cried out.
“I’m not eating an amphibian!” protested one woman.
“Frogs live in swamps,” said another.
“And they’re slippery!” I yelled. (I was carried away by the protest.)
The group then asked me to order beef, seafood, pork, and chicken. And I secretly ordered the frogs’ legs just to see what would happen. After getting the food, I put all the different containers out on a table, with the frogs’ legs in the middle of the pack.
By the end of the meal, the frogs’ legs were all gone! People thought they were chicken wings, and they LOVED them. Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore. “Those were frogs’ legs!” I trumpeted. I foolishly believed everyone would be pleased to learn that it was silly to pretend one animal was better or worse to eat than another.
Horses are another example of an animal that people have certain beliefs about eating. Some people ride them. Some people drink and ride them. When Marco Polo visited Mongolia, he observed Mongol horse-riders drinking blood right from the necks of their horses! The horse-riders would just drain off a small amount for nutrition. If necessary, they would even stitch up the horse’s neck again.
No Jelly for Me
Among Inuit tribes, there is a legendary recipe for Moose Nose Jelly. It involves cooking and re-cooking the nose of a moose until it turns to jelly. (I guess you could see that coming.)
As for eating horses, it’s been legal in France since 1811, and horse meat is also eaten raw in Belgium, Sweden, and Japan. (They say that colts are best because they’re tender.) If you find the idea of eating a horse disgusting, let me ask: Would you eat a zebra? What about an antelope? A deer? A sheep? See what I mean? It’s all a game of pretend. If you think it’s disgusting to eat a horse, it’s really just as disgusting to eat ANY mammal.
In Peru, guinea pigs get cooked up every year by the tens of millions. But they reproduce so fast, there’s no danger of their going extinct. And there is probably a culture out there somewhere that eats hamsters, but I don’t have the heart to look in to that right now.[17]
Maybe part of what freaks us out isn’t the KIND of animal being eaten, but the PART of the animal that’s being eaten. Perhaps no domesticated animal can rival the sheep for how long humans have been eating it. If you go to the Iranian city of Tehran, you’ll find restaurants specializing in a breakfast soup named kaleh pache, which translates to “heads and hooves.” It’s seasoned with lemon and cinnamon and made with a sheep’s entire head (including tongue, eyes, and brain) and its hooves.
Who came up with the bright idea of combining these things? I don’t know! But based on reports, the eye of a sheep tastes oily. It can be plucked right out of the sheep’s skull. As for the sheep’s tongue, it tastes powdery. (How nasty is it to taste an animal’s taste buds? Ick!) There are also the sheep’s lips, gums, and snout, all ready for a hearty breakfast-eater.
I know I’m supposed to be grossing you out, but I suppose it shows a certain respect for an animal when its entire body is eaten and not wasted. Take pigs in Portugal. After being butchered, nearly every single part of the pig finds a home (usually in someone’s stomach). “But what about the pig’s urinary bladder? Surely no one wants that!” you say.
Wrong! In northern Portugal, the pig’s bladder is inflated, tied off, and given to the kids. Then they use it for a soccer ball. Goal!
Birds
Eating bird embryos is sort of nasty if you think about it. But people cook up chicken eggs so much, we sort of forget that’s what we’re doing. But what if you took a fertilized chicken egg and let it mature a little more? Would people still eat it?
Yep! Names like balut and hot vin lon are what these chicken or duck eggs are called. The baby fowl has developed to the point that it has a head, wings, veins, and feathers. So, yeah, it’s an almost-ready-to-hatch embryo until a person pops open the shell and pours the contents into his or her mouth. The embryo is apparently crunchy. (Maybe those crunches will drown out the sounds of my screaming.)
To distract myself from these horrors, I’ll tell you that kiwi birds lay some pretty amazing eggs. Kiwis are small black birds found only in New Zealand, but even though they’re small, they lay some of the biggest eggs in the world. A five-pound kiwi can lay a one-pound egg! That’s sort of like a hundred-pound kid busting a grumpy that weighs twenty pounds.
While kiwis are pretty uncommon, you’ve definitely seen pigeons before. Some people find these common city birds disgusting, but pigeons are very popular food birds. They’re usually called “squab,” and they come in a variety of colors. A squab weighs about one pound, which makes the bird ideal for a single-person meal.
Birds can taste a lot like whatever they eat, and so city pigeons aren’t nearly as good as squabs fed yummier diets than, say, trash.
Since doves are smaller than pigeons, and since they’re the symbol of peace, you’d think people would leave them alone. No such luck; the birds still end up on dinner plates worldwide. There are a lot of unlikely birds that get eaten. The ancient Romans used to dine on flamingos, and even parakeets and parrots are not safe from hungry humans.
Invertebrates
While I like to think I have an open mind, I can’t understand how humans started eating an animal that leaves a trail of slime behind it. Sure, snails are easy to catch, but so are rocks, and we don’t eat those!
The ancient Romans grilled snails in oil, and people today dip their escargots in hot butter. What’s odd is that while snails get eaten by the millions, slugs get left alone. I have no idea why this is. Are slugs a little too naked to be popping into one’s mouth? Because there’s not much of a difference between the two!
How to Eat Fried Worms
Ingredients
mealworms or earthworms
olive oil
bread crumbs
Supplies
colander
paper towels or wax paper on a plate
frying pan
Mealworms are eaten in many cultures. I can’t think of any right now, but take my word for it. What you want to do is get some live mealworms. Check your phone book, look on the Internet, or go to a big pet shop; they usually have them there. (If you’re using earthworms for this recipe, just start digging for them.)
To prepare your worms, put them into a colander and rinse them off. Make sure that you get all the gunk off them; you just want to eat the worm. (Right?) Lay the worms out on some paper towels (to dry them out) or wax paper. They may be squirming a bit, so shove them into the fridge to chill them out.
While the worms are chilling, pour enough olive oil into the frying pan to cover the bottom. Then break up a couple of pieces of bread into breadcrumbs and you’re almost ready. Get the frying pan hot and get the worms out of the fridge. They should be “knocked out” enough at this point that they won’t feel you roll them in the breadcrumbs and then put them into the frying pan. You want to stir-fry the worms in the oil until they are crispy, then take them out of the pan, let them cool, and enjoy!
But while land slugs don’t get eaten much, sea slugs (which can weigh two pounds!) do have their fans. If you’d like to eat one, just capture a sea slug and boil it for two days. It’ll still be as crunchy as a bamboo shoot, but at least you’ll be able to swallow it down!
If having a sea slug work its way through your guts isn’t your idea of a good time, consider eating another invertebrate of the sea. For some reason, I’ve always been suspicious of shellfish. Maybe it’s because my parents used to take the family “clamming.” We’d wade out in the surf and plunge our hands deep into the sand to pull up razorback clams. (After cutting my hand a few times, I realized where the name came from.)
After filling pail after pail, we kids would try to warm our shivering, cut bodies while the clams were prepared. Then, mealtime! I’ll never forget the horrible disappointment I had the first time I ate a clam. First, it looks disgusting. Second, it tastes exactly like Gristle of the Sea.
“And tomorrow we can have clam chowder!” my mom enthused. Mmmm! Chunks of gristle in milk! If the chowder is too hot, you can blow on it. And if you eat more than a small bowl of the stuff, you will blow chowder.
Humans eat plenty of other shellfish, but I think they only do it on bets and double dares. Why eat abalone? After you pound on it for a few days with a giant wooden hammer, it’ll taste just like a baseball mitt. Oysters? I don’t eat any animal that changes from female to male to female and then back again every year! (They do that, you know.)
To get out of eating shellfish, I’m even willing to cook up the animal that Socrates called the “intestines of the soil”: earthworms!
/> Insects like grasshoppers, ants, and termites are commonly eaten. (If you think these might be too small to eat, an African queen termite is the size of a potato!) And beetles like giant water bugs and cockroaches are totally edible. It turns out that almost every beetle on the planet can be eaten by humans. But if you think I’m putting a dung beetle in my mouth, there are two problems: the dung and the beetle!
A Bogong moth is a huge Australian moth that migrates in the spring. Aborigines sometimes roast and mash the moths to make something called “moth meat,” which is said to have a nutty taste.
If a Bogong moth gets caught in a web, it can lead us to our next dinner guest: the spider. All spiders are venomous meat-eaters. Yet you’ll find people happily dining on arachnids from tarantulas to, uh, other spiders all over the tropics. Has the heat driven these people insane?
