[Sca-cooks] Exotic but Tasty?

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

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

-- 

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