I can’t believe nobody has mentioned huitlacoche yet.
What Is Huitlacoche And How Do You Cook It?
I’ll pass.
It’s the tinned corned beef eaten by British soldiers during WWII in particular. A lot is imported from places like Brazil and Australia. I always keep a tin or two in my pantry for when I want to make corned beef hash.
It’s not at all like the sliced corned beef you get in a good deli. I use that and pastrami to make Reuben sandwiches.
There’s a guy on YouTube who makes sausages with all kinds of odd, unusual and sometimes downright inedible ingredients, and rates the flavor, texture and overall quality of the resulting sausage afterward.
He had a Huitlacoche sausage episode. His rating? Spoilered for those who wish to watch the video: Looks absolutely disgusting, tastes pretty good! 4 out of 5 sausages.
So I wanted some kumiss. We were in California at the time, but I knew some Mongolians! So I asked one, “Where can I buy some kumis?” She replied, “Any supermarket in Mongolia.”
“Milk arkhi”, or whatever it may be called.
The lack of temperature control given by the simple equipment results in a concentration of only about 10% aocohol, rather compareable with wine than with most other liquors. The end product has a somewhat caseous taste, with a slightly rancid note.
I think someone know actually knows what they are doing can do better than that, though. They can get a lot higher than 10%, too.
(Bolding mine)
Learned a new word, thanks!
caseous
/ˈkāsēəs/
Caseous refers to substances or tissues that have a cheese-like appearance, consistency, or smell.
Way back in the '70s, my family was in Japan visiting relatives. It was the first time being in Japan for my brother and me (12 & 11 respectively), and our dad hadn’t seen his relatives for about 20 years, so they pulled out all the stops for us when it came to food. Nearly everything was a treat for us, because we grew up considering sashimi and sushi as special occasion fare at home, perhaps every six months or so, and we ate heartily. The only thing that gave us pause was the first time we were asked, in very heavily accented English: “Do you like Calpis?” To our American ears, it sounded like we were being offered cow piss. We demurred, and our dad explained to the rest of the family our reaction. Everybody had a great laugh about it, we drank it, and enjoyed it.
Calpis, known in the US and English-speaking markets as Calpico, is a fermented milk beverage.
Look at the bottle in the link. It’s labeled in Russian.
That’s probably because most of Mongolia is a former Soviet puppet state and Russian is still the primary language in many areas.
A few years back, I was intrigued to hear TV chef Paula Dean say she was going to make corned beef and cabbage. I stayed tuned because I wanted to see how she did it. I was amazed when she started to open a tin of bully beef instead of using a nice brisket from a butcher. 
Not at all appropriate for St Patrick’s Day dinner, to my way of thinking! (As an aside, CB&C is a purely American thing. In Ireland, they traditionally use pork instead of beef.)
It certainly is in Moscow. I saw kumis there all the time.
Just saying that Mongolia has long had close ties to Russia. They also use the cyrillic alphabet in Mongolia.
Ironically, Ireland produced a great deal of corned beef in the period leading up to the Famine and the Flight. But it was all for export, so the only affordable meat was “boiling bacon”, an unsmoked lighly cured pork back or shoulder.
She did not say one could not get kumis in Moscow, Siberia, Kazakhstan, etc. Apparently it was not available in just any supermarket in California, however.
PS I have heard stories about how, way back when, kumis did not necessarily come in the form of glass bottles. People would have this leather bag hanging at home, which was agitated from time to time.
Having smelled it once, I can understand why. 
To all those interested in consuming insects, fungus, rats, intentionally rotten foods, and all sorts of other “interesting” cuisine, I would say, go for it, and enjoy your adventurous foods. Except for one thing – the recent global pandemic.
I’m influenced not only by having had to live through COVID like all of us, but by recently seeing the excellent film Varila Vera, about the outbreak of smallpox in Belgrade in the former Yugoslavia in 1972. Truly a horrible disease caused by a virus that’s thought to have originated from rodents. Enjoy your rat!
Yes, I’ve read that CB&C became a thing for Irish immigrants in the 1800s because corned beef was more available than pork in Boston, New York, and other places along the Eastern seaboard.
Then you should probably stop consuming chicken and eggs before you throw any stones because the expert consensus is that the risk of an avian flu pandemic far exceeds any of the factors you just mentioned.
Yeah, since it seems you’re the first person to mention eating rats in the thread, I think we’re probably safe. I’ll happily continue to consume my cooked fungus (and probably huitlacoche) without consuming say, amanita muscaria or amanita phalloides.
Not the first …
I actually quite like Thai food – at least, the more conventional variety generally served in North America.
Yeah, my list was perhaps overly broad, since I love mushrooms, too. 
While there might be a kernel of truth in there somewhere, that’s certainly not why we age beef. Aging serves to tenderize beef by breaking down muscle fibers and tough connective tissue, and is carried out in carefully controlled conditions that would not have been found when our ancestors scoured the African savanna.