I was watching, and don’t laugh, a kid show, of all things and the kid host was in Alaska, willing to try traditional Eskimo foods. I’ve read all about Eskimos, especially in some old books written by people who lived with them years past and learned about things like saving urine to rinse their hair in for parties to make it shiny, but it stank to high heavens, the real aroma inside an igloo crowded with bare, long unwashed bodies and little favorite foods like rotted seal flipper.
I was not prepared for what was prepared as dinner. A very dead raw seal head, along with very raw seal parts to be eaten raw. I always thought the Eskimos had fire made from oil or whatever they could find, like Elk dung. They scraped a chunk of bloody meat to get a pile of bloody scrapings which they dumped into a dish, added shreds of raw seal liver and mixed it with whale oil. No seasonings, not even salt.
It is eaten as is, with the fingers. The ‘cook’ ripped out a seal eyeball and offered it to the kid and I thought she was going to hurl when she politely turned it down. The table looked like a slaughter house when done and I must hand it to the girl, who must have been all of 16 or 17, she actually ate a little bit of the raw mess, Eskimo style, with her fingers, blood and oil dripping down her wrists.
It changed my whole outlook on Eskimo past culture! I knew they ate raw blubber and dried meats, raw fish and stuff, but I never realized that most of their food was consumed uncooked! After all, they smoked fish, bear meat, and other forms of meat when the short spring hit and I knew that their diet consisted mostly of meat, but that table full of butchered, bloody hunks was something I’d never have had the nerve to try. Think of the stink without spices because blood, raw fat and raw meat stinks!
in Hawaii, we love, kids eat it by the truckloads. Here’s the ingrediants: plum, licorice, salt, sugar aspartame, water and some food coloring. basically what it is is a dried plum (no pit) which has absorbed this other stuff. I was talking about it to my cousin, telling him you got to try this, he comes from GA. So I give him and his girlfriend a piece. We were still in the store, they put a bit in their mouth, turn a funny color, get a wierd face and RUN across the store, outside and spit it out. All that happened in a couple of seconds. Oh man I couldn’t stop laughing. They said it was litteraly THE single worst thing they had ever put in their mouth and thought I had pulled a joke on them. chuckles I still like it
AlrtSilver, it’s called ‘kwak’ in Inuvialuit. That won’t be the right spelling. Raw, frozen meat. It’s disgusting to me but I have consumed it to be polite. (I have lived in the Canadian North for about eight years, until just recently, and had several Inuit clients and colleagues).
Muktuk - whale blubber - is not ‘just’ raw whale blubber. It is whale blubber that has been let sit for awhile. Surprisingly enough, deep-fried muktuk isn’t all that bad.
There are some foods, however, that I just would NOT eat.
I had a client who lived in one of the high arctic communities in Nunavut for years, he detailed for me what they do to seal - at least in one specific instance. The seal is hunted, left in the house, and you take off chunks whenever you want a little snackie. It goes off, then bugs make it their home, and you still eat chunks. The next time he said chunks it was in reference to blowing them.
Further to the post before of gross Icelandic foods:
Þorláksmessa is the day of St. Þorlákur (Thorlakur) in Iceland. There are two days for this guy, who was a 12th century bishop in Iceland. July 20, the date his bones were removed from his coffin and put into a shrine, and December 23rd, the date of his death.
What they eat is Skata (forgive the spelling errors). It’s basically skate (ray), which has been sitting around for awhile. A web page explains it as - you get a skate. Cut off the flippers and bury them for six months. If you can find it, you eat it. [shudder] In the West Fjords, the best time to catch it is late autumn, and it is then dug up for the December 23 feast date. The Skata is served with mör, (melted sheep’s tallow with burned bits of membrane), and hnoðmör (the same, just kneaded and allowed to go stale before eating).
Another one is called hangikjöt, a sign that Christmas is coming. Sheep’s head. Steini wouldn’t go into details for that one.
I thank God whenever I hear mention of these foods that we are not particularly traditional.
I was watching “Lonely Planet” a couple of years ago and Justine was in Chile (I think) and was trying a local delicacy. They brought out a whole fried guinea pig. It looked just like a fried guinea pig. Justine said “I thought I could do this, but I can’t.” So, she gave her dish to the next table and they went nuts for it. One lady took great pleasure in eating the head.
Still gives me the willies just thinking about it.
I haven’t eaten this dish (thank all that is good and holy) but my sister has:
She was in the Peace Corps in Turkmenistan, which is not a country known for its cuisine. Meat is very expensive and therefore a delicacy. My sister was once forced, out of politeness, to try a dish that horrified her. An entire goat leg, complete with hoof and hair, was placed on the table. As if that’s not bad enough, the thing was cooked and then chilled so that it was covered with gelatinous fat. That alone would have driven me out of the country…
Hey, now,Tommy, guinea pig is actually quite tasty.
The fried one describes above is sort of a “city-style” preparation, and would probably be quite tasty, especially with hot sauce. How I’ve had it in South America is just thrown over a fire, first to singe the hair off, then to roast. If you’re lucky, they gut it and stuff it with leaves first.
Just remembered something else I had in Oaxaca one time: fried beetle larvae. Sort of like a gooshy Corn-Nut.
And then there was the time in Barcelona-I had the Catalan menu, my wife had the English. I ordered for both of us, and what I thought I was getting was “Octopus in its own ink”.
The nuances of Catalan apparently escaped me, so what I was served was a plate of perfectly formed BABY octopi in their own ink, on a lovely plate of rice. She made me move the bread basket in front of my plate so she could eat.
Don’t knock it if you haven’t tried it. The housewives in my adult conversation class in Seoul brought some in one day as part of a birthday celebration, and it was YUMMY!
Try eating san nakji, in which the chef takes a LIVE octopus out of the tank, chops off a couple of tentacles, slices them into bite-sized pieces, and slaps them on a plate in front of you, curling and writhing. That took a lot of soju for me to chow down. The sensation of the tentacle still moving in my mouth was Lovecraftian.
Jellyfish really isn’t that bad. It’s fairly tasteless and has the consistency of slightly rotted rubber bands. There are several foods here in Japan that are a lot worse. One is natto (fermented soy beans) which I find disgusting in terms of looks, smell, taste and texture. The smell and taste are like an advanced case of terminal athlete’s foot. It looks like anemic rat turds in septic mucus, and when you pick up a bit slimey stringy bits hang off it.
When I was a kid (early 70s), my mom went on a big health food kick and things like candy, soda, chips, and ice cream were forbidden. If that wasn’t bad enough, one day she served us a breakfast shake. Here’s the ingredients:
orange juice
cereal (grape nuts)
milk
toast
raw eggs
wheat germ
cod liver oil
yogurt
Put it in a blender and whip it up.
The result was a greyish, runny mixture with long snot like strands (the raw eggs). In addition, the acid in the orange juice curdled the milk and the lumps floated to the top while the cereal, toast, and wheat germ settled on the bottom. It had the flavor of vomit.
My brother and I had one sip, retched, and refused to drink the rest. My mother said we weren’t allowed to leave the table until we were finished. We spent the better part of the morning at that table. My mom finally ordered us out of her sight and said we could starve if we didn’t want to eat what she made. I was never more happy to go hungry in my life.
My mom used to make this fish all the time. I think it was orange roughie. The fish itself was okay, but it had this layer of gray fat, which my sister and I affectionately called “slime”, and we called the fish slime-fish. My mother found this terminology endearing. It seemed to strenghten her resolve to serve the stuff over and over again. If so much as a milligram of this slime hit my tongue, I could hardly keep my dinner down. Taking another bite was out of the question.
It wasn’t just the taste of it, which was sort of fishy, but I’ve eaten stuff that tasted more strongly fishy without qualms. It must have been the texture of it, too–but I eat the fat from other fish (like salmon) without retching. It must have contained some mysterious trace chemical, absorbed through the mucous membranes, that triggered reverse peristalsis. My mom and dad slurped it down without batting an eyelash, though.
This thread seems to be the best place for this, but under “People actually eat this?” also falls “But that’s the best part!”
It seems to me that any food that has distinct sections, especially animals, there is always one section that nearly everyone says is horrible or is generally discarded that someone will say about it “Oh, but it’s the best part”
Fish heads
Chicken necks
Tripe
It even applies to vegetables. I saw a show where Jacques Pepin said that the base of an asparagus stalk was the best part, you just had to peel it off. And those little green things that grow out of garlic cloves when they get old. He said those were the best parts.
Count me as another fan of guinea pig. It is better than chicken, but the high bones to meat ratio makes it a pain. Plus have you seen the price of guinea pigs in pet stores?
My sheep-testicle-eating friend also told me about the wedding he attended at a home in Iceland. He went out to the back yard and the father of the bride was searing the flesh of a sheep’s head with a blowtorch.
This was the only preparation. Guests were then expected to peel off bits of the sheep’s face, etc., with their fingers and eat it.
See, it’s stories like this you should tell your children when they complain about being served orange roughy or something…
At one point I lived in a household of volunteers where we were given $50/month per person for food. Needless to say pickins were slim and frugal. The worst concoction we were served was an aspic molded in a bundt cake mold, with bits of turkey and vegetables like celery suspended in it. I just couldn’t do it, not even to be polite; would it have been so hard to just make turkey salad?
Breaded-and-fried swiss char was another volunteer house low.
These probably don’t sound too bad, but I’m the one who can’t stand water.
