I was walking around a night market in Cali, Colombia in '98 when the most heavenly cooking meat smell pulled me to the curb. So I got my paper plateful and started chewing the first mouthful of what looked like brown elbow macaroni. And chewed, and chewed…first the wonderful flavor fled, and then I began to wonder if I would ever even be able to grind this now liver-tasting thing up. Finally I just swallowed and at the end of the block offered the plate to a homeless person, who took it and started shoveling, as if this was a ritual we had observed nightly for years.
The next day an acquaintance said “beef aorta”.
My least favorite notional dish? Liver smothered in Brussels sprouts. I’m working hard on learning to love the sprouts.
Old, old chicken (I mean the lifespan, not the freshness – it was almost certainly killed that day) in a Honduran village, then roasted.
Old chickens are tough as hell and should be stewed, long and low, to get tender enough to eat. This one was like trying to chew my shoe. Totally inedible.
Nope. I cut into it, saw the pink, and that was the end of that. I watched in horror as some other folks at the table attempted to eat it. I would imagine they had interesting nights.
Arrrrrgh - that just brought back a memory of the time my mother (who was generally a pretty good cook) somehow thought it was a good idea to cook a beef heart. I don’t know if there is a proper way to cook it, but cooking and serving it as a beef roast (including bringing the whole disgusting thing to the table and carving it) just wasn’t it. Just thinking back to the texture of the smooth muscle meat is making my skin crawl - and this had to be 50 years ago. Easily the worst thing ever served at home.
Then there was the time when my family went to China in 1985. My father was born and raised there, but he wasn’t too good with the simplified Chinese characters which came into use after he left. In a restaurant he ordered what he thought was chicken and winter melon soup. A big steaming tureen of soup came to the table, I hungrily went to fill the first bowl to pull up a ladle full of chicken feet.
I spent a couple months on a Russian fishing boat. I lost 10 lbs. A few memorable foods/drinks:
One of the crew fermented bread to make some sort of alcohol. It was nearly iridescent green and smelled like turpentine. I passed. Didn’t want to go blind.
Something I called “Chicken parts soup”. I don’t know where the meat of the chicken went as all I ever saw were bits of livers/gizzards and who knows what floating in broth. I seriously never saw any chicken meat. Just the innards.
“Liver Pockets” tasted like bad pate wrapped in dough and deep fried. One bite was all I could take.
The strangest thing to me was that we never had fish. The boat processed 300 tons of fish a day and we never had any to eat.
I’m going to Beijing for the first time in April, and I had planned to be adventurous and eat whatever came my way…but I see now how foolish I was. They have McDonalds, right?
This is an actual ‘thing’. Comedienne Phyllis Diller popularized it years ago, she called it ‘Garbage Soup’. You start out making soup with meat or a bone, add onion, bay leaf, salt and pepper, and vegetables, and you basically clean our your refrigerator of any leftovers. Including leftover spaghetti, and salad (with salad dressing) - all boiled together.
I wasn’t there, but my grandmother told us how grandpa wanted her to cook kidneys, and she refused. One day she was out, and came home to find he and a neighbor had bought and cooked kidneys. Without preparing them properly, I guess, she said the house reeked of urine! The neighbor and grandpa were violently ill following their kidney feast.
I’ve eaten iguana a few times in St Martin. It doesn’t taste bad, exactly, but they are free range iguanas that are lean, so there isn’t much meat on them.
I was offered cat on Dominica at a party. I politely declined, explaining that I had a pet cat at home. My host didn’t understand, as she had several pet cats, but occasionally she would eat one.
Yes, chicken feet look ugly, but they are quite nice in soup (or on their own in dim sum). They give that broth more body and richness because of their collagen/gelatin content. It’s been a long time since I’ve had chicken feet in my soup, but growing up it was not uncommon. I still occasionally see them for sale at my local supermarket, but they’re very hit-or-miss about carrying it. It doesn’t seem to be a seasonal item like pig’s head is (tends to come around holidays), but more of a random supply throughout the year.
The kidney stories actually do remind me of the one time – exactly one time – my father stewed some kidneys at home. I’ve always been an omnivore with pretty much zero food aversions, but I could only manage a couple bites of those kidneys. (And, even as a kid, I enjoyed liver, tripe, chicken hearts, all that kind of stuff. I just couldn’t stomach kidneys, or at least my dad’s preparation of them. I guess I’ve had steak & kidney pie in the intervening years, and I did quite like that.)
It wasn’t the chicken feet per se (seen them at dim sum, as well as duck feet which my dad preferred) - it was the shock of them showing up when expecting something completely different. Especially since this was the first meal out after a week of my aunt’s atrocious cooking. Almost none of the restaurant food we had on that trip was any good at all - this was 1985, everything was still very Communist. No incentive for food quality, service with a snarl personified. Fortunately we eventually reached my grandmother’s, where the food was much better.
That reminds me of my aunt’s story about kidneys. After slaughtering one of her goats, she decided to make use of every possible part. She called up her grandfather, a butcher, and asked him what to do with the kidneys. “Soak them overnight in cold water,” he said, “then take them outside and throw 'em into the woods for the coyotes.”
Pajaritos fritos, which translates as fried little birds. I’ve seen images online of some that are fried golden brown, and they actually look like good eating, but the ones I had looked more like those dead baby birds you sometimes see on the sidewalk, with their purplish hue, bald little heads, beaks, feet and even a feather or two. Served in a thin oily sauce, the idea was to eat them bones and all, crushing everything between your molars (yeah, the heads, beaks, feet and everything). Hunting and eating fried little birds has been illegal for some time now, so it was kind of a big deal for the people who had invited me. And that was a good thing, too, because it didn’t take them long to polish them off. Revolting!
