[Sca-cooks] Exotic but Tasty?
Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius
adamantius.magister at verizon.net
Sun Nov 7 07:04:02 PST 2004
Also sprach Daniel Phelps:
>Was written:
>>
>> I'd rather eat a rat than NutraSweet.
>>
>I had a Captain once who claimed to have a great recipe for rice fed bamboo
>rat.
I probably have several, scattered around. Recipes, that is,
primarily in Andre Simon's Concise Encyclopedia of Gastronomy, and
Schwabe's Unmentionable Cuisine. Interesting: my Chinese cookbook
collection contains a recipe for camel hump, but none for bamboo rat.
Yesterday, we had an early dinner at a small Chinese restaurant on
the expanding edge of New York City's Chinatown, about a block from
what is now our first-choice of a high school for our son, and the
menu did feature live turtle soup with herbs (I assume the turtle
dies somewhere along the way), rice porridge with fresh frog, and
rice porridge with pork blood. Also yellow eels in rice casserole. I
asked my wife about the pork blood porridge, and whether she thought
they just stirred in the blood or if they used the pre-cooked blocks
of blood I sometimes see in the markets, looking like reddish-brown
tofu. She appeared a little shocked at my question, and said she
assumed it was the cooked product, diced. When I asked her why she
thought that, she made a face like, "Isn't that a silly question?"
and said, "doing it with uncooked blood would be [I think the word
she used was] unwholesome, wouldn't it?" She was not able to clearly
explain why stirring uncooked blood into a pot of simmering porridge
was inherently less sanitary than stirring blood that had been
simmered, cooled, and then diced, into a pot of simmering porridge,
but she seemed to feel it should be obvious even to someone of the
meanest intelligence. I called her an inscrutable Oriental and got a
kick in the shin for my trouble.
Being the boring and unadventurous type, we settled for, among other
things, Crispy Pig Intestine (which was a lot like French-style fried
tripe, but seasoned differently and served with a brownish
sweet-and-sour sauce) and the rice casserole with salted fish, minced
pork, and the optional preserved duck ($1 extra -- woo hoo!).
The rice casserole was sublime, and a little surprising, not so much
because we expected it to be bad, but because we frequently eat food
steamed over, or mixed into, a pot of rice, and it can be a
convenient, quick, one-pot meal. It's excellent, but extremely...
homey? It's almost like one of those things you'd cook and love, but
be embarrassed to admit to another food-person that you do this, and
then you go to a good restaurant, and there it is, on the menu, but
the waiter says the best way to enjoy the dish is to eat it out of
the pan over the kitchen sink?
Anyway, when our humble and home-style rice casserole arrived, in the
little clay pot in which it had been cooked, the waiter made a big
show of removing the steamed patty of pork and salt fish, and the
slices of duck, to a separate plate, then carefully dislodging the
rice from the sides and bottom of the pot, fluffing it up, and mixing
in just a touch of the reduced soy sauce they keep on hand for such
purposes (it's a surprisingly tasty, naturally low-salt by-product of
all the soy-sauce chickens and other red-cooked dishes they serve in
such places). He then dished it all into little rice bowls not much
bigger than the standard little Chinese-restaurant teacups. I don't
know if he would have been thrilled or horrified if we'd asked him to
boil a little water in the pot to get at the browned rice crust,
which is alleged by some to be the best part of such a dish.
It reminded me a little of the slightly ceremonial manner in which
paella is sometimes served in Spain, and that's actually what the
dish rather resembled, in a way.
We also had a dish of lamb with dried bean curd, which turned out to
be a little different from what I'd expected. Instead of being
stir-fried, shredded lamb with that pressed, firm bean curd that
looks like laundry soap, it was a stew of chunked lamb (probably
shoulder, on the bone) with pitted jujube dates, black mushrooms,
dried bean curd sheets (you boil soy milk, which gets a skin on it,
just like cow's milk, then you skim off that skin and dry it, and
that's your dried bean curd sheets), and several extremely large
chunks of what looked at first like pieces of turnip or radish, but
which proved to be ginger. Luckily, the mild, pink-skinned baby
ginger is in season, and that's what it turned out to be.
No rat on the menu, though...
Adamantius
--
"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
-- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry
Holt, 07/29/04
"Who cares what you think?"
-- The President of the United States, 07/04/01
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