Being born and raised in hillbilly country meant eating things a lot of people might find strange, without thinking they were out of the ordinary. Squirrels, for instance – during the legal hunting season they were quite a treat; you make ’ em into stew and roast the heads separately because the brains are a true delicacy (use a nutcracker).Raccoons are tasty eatin’ critters too; groundhogs can be if they’re cooked right, and possums – well, you* really *have to know what you’re doing to make one of those ugly animals fit to eat. And when hogs got butchered, weate everything but the eyeballs and bristles, seemingly. Pigfeet, yeah (too bony and not flavorful enough for me). Hog’s-head cheese, what we called souse – ooooh baby that’s scrumptious!
Poke greens were big in the spring – it’s a wild plant with poisonous berries and roots but leaves some people think highly of for pot-greens. And ramps, a kind of wild onions. Butternuts, Paw paws, which I think are just nasty. Mayapple fruits the one day I found some ripe ones.
Bugs? When I was 12 or 13, I read somewhere that ants taste sour and had to know if it was true, so I tried a handful fresh off the anthill in our backyard. Yep, sour! And chapulines, fried grasshoppers, in Oaxaca. Meh – tasteless. Are crawdads bugs?
Pig snoot tacos, also in Oaxaca – delish! Wolf said he wouldn’t have ate one on a bet, but I loved them.
Coral fungus. New Zealand spinach. Mmmm! Durian – smells like shit, tastes ambrosial!
A friend of ours from Florida brought us some alligator when he visited, but try as I might I couldn’t render that stuff edible.
As you might’ve twigged by now, I have a very open-minded approach to food in general… I’d gleefully sample horsemeat, snake, frog legs or Rocky Mountain oysters if I ever got a chance. And dog, too, but if you tell any of my dog friends I said that I’ll deny it. Rat? It’d probably be good, if it had fed on clean feed, like most rodents. Weird invertebrate seafood like sea urchins and cucumbers, jellyfish or those weird green critters they harvest in Fiji? Bring it on! I’d try the roasted grubs some Australians supposedly sup on too. I want a balut, a heaping helping of turducken, and a bear steak on my dinner plate before I die. And that pre-turducken item from an Arabian Nights’ tae’s feast (stuff a camel with a lamb, the lamb with whole chickens, the chickens with whole fish, and the fish with eggs, and roast the whole shebang slowly to perfection), too!
Haggis? Who knows, I might like it! I like scrapple, after all.
I’d try human flesh under the right circumstances, just to know how it tastes.
What I wouldn’t eat is a much shorter list mainly based on either my ethics and whether or not the item in question sounds disgusting. The former precludes dining on endangered species, nonhuman primates, any kind of cetacean, or (because the making of them sounds incredibly cruel) ortolans. The latter category is, mainly sheep’s eyeballs, casa marzu cheese that has live maggots in it, and that weasel shit coffee.
And fugu – that shit can kill you!