People eat all sorts of weird ass shit here in Bulgaria, which I’m pretty sure is in Europe…the first time I saw chicken heart on a menu I thought it was a typo. (Nope!) Stomach soup is very popular, too.
Sadly (haha!), I am a vegetarian, so I can avoid these delicacies without giving offence.
Countdown to Americans mentioning steak & kidney pie…5…4…3…
I’d suggest that the separation of preparation & consumption has caused western (at least American & British) societies to lose some of the concept that you’re eating parts of animals. Burgers & nuggets, chicken breasts, sasuages, none resemble the creature(s) they’re made from. Eating recognisable anatomy has become alien, hence the squeamishness about ‘exotic’ cuisine (and about historic foodstuffs from our own culture, as noted already).
But nuggets and sausages are never advertised as being made of the bits we in the West would probably call yucky.
Is it something to do with the availability of processed foods in the West, we can have the tastiest bit of an animal all packaged up for us so we don’t worry about the rest?
[Big Fat Greek Wedding]
We’ll have lamb.
[/BFGW]
ISTR Pioneer Chicken in California offering fried chicken livers on its menu, at least in the 1980s. They’re closed now.
Robin
I’d agree with this. Most of my Vietnamese friends and colleagues eat Vietnamese food 98% of the time, with 1% being Chinese, and another 1% being the occasional trip to McDonald’s.
They tend to find such things as lamb and cheese (even milk sometimes) to be repulsive.
Even within their own cuisine, most Vietnamese and Chinese I know are not particularly adventurous. There is an old-fashioned macho element to their culture that means that things like dog meat or snake’s blood are generally only eaten by (usually working class) men of above a certain age. I tried snake’s blood in Vietnam just for the experience, and my Vietnamese friend told me it was his first time too, and I had to talk him into it. Most are repulsed by the idea of eating dog. Only a small number of them will eat fish eyes. There’s also not a lot of offal eaten apart from tripe - well, less than there was in my white family (my dad loves tripe, liver, kidneys, you name it).
Come on down to the South™, where you can find fried chicken livers and gizzards at the Wal-Mart deli! (Also, KFC has livers for sure, and I was pretty confident that they have gizzards too.)
Brown’s Chicken, a popular Chicago chain (probably the third largest here, behind KFC and Popeye’s), has both deep-fried chicken livers and gizzards on its menu. IIRC, so does Harold’s Chicken Shack, another popular chain here, and quite a few of the soul food places.
That’s my reaction, too, but I have heard a few people remark as that being weird, because of the whole tail thing. I don’t get it either, as ox-tail is pretty much the same as bony stew meat, and goes for quite a premium here at the local supermarket. I never make ox-tail soup because it’s just too expensive compared with making the same soup/stew with short ribs or chuck.
But oxtail is friggin delicious. It’s like beef concentrate!
The “exotic” parts aren’t thrown away here in america, they just go into the industrial part of the food chain to be processed into something unrecognizable, or eventually end up in dog food. Oxtail is just stew meat, for making stock. Any American who’s eaten prepared frozen/canned food that contain beef in gravy or sauce has eaten oxtail, they just didn’t know it.
Anyone for haggis?
Anecdote: I was traveling in Florence, considered by some to have originally inspired the fine cooking of French cuisine. I returned to talk to a Chinese colleague, telling her about my trip. She told me her sister had gone there and said “the food was yuck.” :smack:
Tony Bourdain often searches out “weird” food in his travels. Often in what we consider “exotic” countries: Asia or South America. Then, he went to Iceland.
“Offal” is a new trend at upscale restaurants. (Probably not at Applebee’s, though.) Offal on upscale menus.
In my neighborhood, we know the holidays are near when cow heads show up at the grocery store. Tamale time!
You can walk into any grocery store here and buy a bucket of chitlins, you know. Also turkey necks and chicken gizzards and all kinds of livers. It’s just regional - up North it seems to be everything’s tongue.
Asians cook the same way Americans cook-with the ingredients readily available where they live. Transplanted Asians will try to cook food as they are used to. What do they eat if they can’t get their familiar ingredients? They improvise using available products. :dubious:
French cooking is famous for the use of abats–most of the animal parts that have been mentioned so far. Just about any internal organ can be the basis of a recipe, as well as at least one semi-external one–animelles, or testicles.
Like most Americans I’ve had very little exposure to such meats, but given the opportunity I would be curious enough to try some of them. I wouldn’t trust my own culinary skills, though, to do them justice; I’d probably have to try them in a proper French restaurant.
Don’t forget Chinese thousand year eggs. What posses people to want to coat eggs in ash and lye, and then bury them in the ground for 100 days to see what happens and then taste the result?
I understand people from the south are into pica and have a taste for consuming flavored clay.
At a guess, it started as a way of preserving foods for desparate times. Maybe you start by burying eggs for a week or two at a time: If you live in a moderately cool area, they’ll still be close to “fresh” for that period. Then, you forget to dig some up, and decide it’s best not to disturb them, but just to leave them where they are. But then a year later, your crops fail and your chicken dies. Suddenly, those eggs you burried last year are going to start looking awfully appealing…
And I’ll second cheese as a disgusting food Westerners eat. Think about it: You start with milk, which will make most adult humans sick all by itself. Then you let it rot until it actually congeals into a solid. If you want to get fancy about it, you then let various molds grow in it. If you really think about it, is this any better than stinky tofu?
There’s a very good chance they’re lactose intolerant. Enough East Asians are lactose intolerant that it’s not surprising that milk isn’t a traditional part of their cuisine. It’s normal to find something that isn’t a traditional part of the cuisine you eat to be repulsive.
Because meat is cheap enough and we’re rich enough to kill an animal and only use the parts we like best. We have refrigeration, so no real need for traditional means of preserving foods, so we use the ones that we like and forget the rest. From the Slate article linked in this thread:
Yeah- when organ meats are on a restaurant menu or someone offers them to me, I’m glad I keep kosher and thus usually have an excuse to decline them.
Pity, chicken hearts prepared my favorite way are quite good -
1 pound chicken hearts, thawed and the veins removed as well as any excess fat. Plop them in salted water to ‘kosher’ them [remove the blood] You might want to play with them a bit in the water to make sure there arent any blood clots in the ventricles.
Remove, pat dry with paper towels. Place in a little stoneware bean pot/soup crock [just big enough to hold them all] and add about a quarter of a small onion, chopped finely, about a tablespoon or so of ‘italian seasoning’ and about 3 tbsp decent red wine. Cover, and bake in about 350 degree oven for about 1 hour, stir once or twice.
Koshering gets rid of almost all of the ‘organ’ taste