ramonmercado
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Mythopoeika said:
Puffer fish? :shock:
Strange Things As Food & Drink
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Puffer fish? :shock:
Mythopoeika
I am a meat popsicle
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ramonmercado said:
No...these...
Swifty said:
JamesWhitehead
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Nine choke to death on rice-cakes in Japan.
If these "mochi" rice-cakes are anything like the ones which clutter the gluten-free shelves of UK supermarkets, then there may be some less conspicuous death-toll here and elsewhere!
These squeaky, dry horrors resist every attempt to disguise them or render them palatable. They are more like impacted savoury sugar-puffs than anything. I now think they should come with a skull and crossbones on the pack!
If these "mochi" rice-cakes are anything like the ones which clutter the gluten-free shelves of UK supermarkets, then there may be some less conspicuous death-toll here and elsewhere!
These squeaky, dry horrors resist every attempt to disguise them or render them palatable. They are more like impacted savoury sugar-puffs than anything. I now think they should come with a skull and crossbones on the pack!
It's probably just as well we can only read about these, and look at pictures, as bringing the other senses into play could prove overwhelming!
The offal truth about French cuisine
Le Rosbif Writes: Anthony Peregrine doesn't want to attack their gastronomy, but he does suggest that the French have a larger spectrum of what constitutes food than we do
By Anthony Peregrine
10:11AM GMT 13 Mar 2014
My friend the restauratrice was re-doing her menu for the 2014 spring and summer season. She thought an English version might look pretty sophisticated. Meat and fish were easy. Then we tackled the starters. "How would you translate 'gésiers'?" she asked.
"I wouldn't," I said. "Not on a menu. 'Gizzards' don't invariably strike English-speakers as delicious. Or edible."
"They're wonderful in salads," she said. "They might be, if you've had a lifetime's exposure to the eating of birds' stomachs," I said. "But, sprung on the innocent from under a lettuce leaf, they cause untold distress."
I suggested she leave the word in the original French and, if asked, say they were "little bits of meat". "Leetle beets of mit?" she said. "I can hear the cries of delighted diners already," I said.
Or, to put it another way, you have to keep your wits about you in French restaurants. You think you're in for elegance - all mirrors, chandeliers and tottering desserts - and suddenly they're serving andouillette. This is a sausage of pigs' intestines. It looks, smells and tastes as if it should be in a lavatory, a gastronomic challenge to equal anything slimy offered by New Guinean street traders. I hate it with a hatred reserved otherwise only for bananas.
That said, my real, long-running bête-noire is manouls - bête-noire because it's an unspeakable sludge of sheep innards and disgusting bits of a calf, long-running because it's a speciality of my wife's home-county, Lozère.
I used to be polite, pushing the stuff around my plate until it looked half-eaten. I wanted to marry this woman. But that was then. Now, we're married, they suggest manouls, I order pizza and a truce is called. 8)
Obviously, I'm not attacking French gastronomy. That would be suicide. I'm doing the opposite, suggesting simply that the French have a larger spectrum of what constitutes food than we do. They might contemplate something squidgy and white, and salivate - while we're heads down in a bucket. It's our loss, I think, because we're out of touch with the origins of food. The British food chain begins, vacuum-packed, in the supermarket. The French one starts in the field or sea, with the animals in all their gory sloppiness.
Almost all French people - hairdressers, barristers, dentists - reckon they're basically still peasants. And peasants don't do squeamish. They've never had the money. Having sold off the good stuff, they ate anything, by season: ears, intestines, thrushes, titmice. Around Carcassonne, they used to put magpies in the cassoulet. Now life is richer and everyone can afford a Big Mac, but mainstream French cooking remains rooted. My in-laws go mushrooming every early autumn. Later, their farming neighbours kill the family pig. Lots of people do this. That's why France's continuum of cuisine - from farmhouse via bistro to three-star Michelin palace - is the most interesting in the world. Even so, you might like to avoid some of the continuum's more extreme manifestations.
Here's a brief summary of items which either I, or British visitors, have had trouble with:
* Andouillette: pigs' smelliest slithery bits in sausage form. (See above.)
* Bouillabaisse: Marseille's fish stew tests the toughest fish fan. If you can survive mountains of some of the ugliest fish in God's sea (weever and anglerfish, scorpion fish, conger eels), you can probably survive Marseille.
* Cervelle: brains, calf or lamb. No matter how prepared, they always look like brains, so you're hoovering up the animal's fondest memories.
* Cheval: horse. Much frothing during last year's "horsegate" - horse meat in lasagne! - though, as far as I know, no-one died, or even felt off-colour. Horse is perfectly edible, though fewer and fewer French people eat it at home (it's 0.3% of French meat consumption), horse butchers are disappearing at a gallop and horsemeat, because prone to contamination, rarely shows up in restaurants or other public catering. Le Taxi Jaune at 13 Rue Chapon in Paris' 3rd is apparently an exception. Try it, and you'll find it's a bit like beef but more marrowy. Steak-à-cheval, incidentally, isn't horse at all but a beef steak or beefburger with an egg on top.
* Cuisses-de-grenouille: frogs' legs. Well, not legs. Cuisses means thighs. It is a French attempt to make frogs seem sensual.
* Encornet: sounds like an ice-cream but is squid, which could be a surprise.
* Escargots: snails. According to some estimates, France eats 60% of world snail production. They produce hardly any themselves. To satisfy French appetites, snails wing in from Eastern Europe, Turkey and Indonesia. It's a hell of a way to come when you're more of a texture than a taste, entirely dependent on accompanying sauce or butter. If that's ok, so are snails, as long as you don't reflect that you're eating a hermaphroditic gastropod barely distinguishable from a slug.
* Fromage-de-tête: 'head-cheese' had me fooled for a bit. It's brawn.
* Grive: thrush. The French like songbirds. This usually comes in pâté form. Last jar I opened had a beak in it. :shock:
* Lamproie: lamprey. Perhaps only a Frenchman could stick his hand in a river, pull out this fabulously unphotogenic, eel-like beast with its sucker mouth, and conclude: "That looks tasty." It is significant that our Henry I died of his "surfeit of lampreys" in Normandy.
* Manouls: Please see above. I can't bear to go through all that again.
* Ortolan: a bunting-like songbird. Because endangered it may not legally be trapped or eaten. So, in south-west France, it's illegally trapped and eaten. Traditionally, the bird is drowned in armagnac, plucked, popped in the oven and then eaten whole, bones, organs and all, by diners with cloths over their heads. President Mitterrand had several, as his final blow-out, on New Year's Eve 1995. Then, apparently, he ate nothing else at all until his death eight days later.
* Pieds-de-cochon: pigs' trotters, often breaded, always slithery.
* Pieds-et-paquets: Lambs' feet and stomachs simmered together in white wine. Provence's key weapon in keeping international tourism at bay.
* Pouteille: another killer from Lozère. It's pigs' trotters, lard, dubious bits of beef and if you're truly unlucky, served at breakfast.
* Seiche: cuttlefish, though it sometimes also refers to squid. As does calmar. There's almost a name per tentacle.
*Tête-de-veau: fleshy bits of a calf's head, always squidgier than you would like. If this was, as claimed, Jacques Chirac's favourite dish, it kept him looking perky - though the effect has worn off of late.
* Tripoux: sheep's belly stuffed with, inter alia, calf intestines. I can imagine circumstances in which I would eat this, but they involve nuclear war and the disappearance of every other foodstuff from the planet. Except bananas.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/desti ... isine.html[/QUOTE]
Thank God I'm vegetarian!
The offal truth about French cuisine
Le Rosbif Writes: Anthony Peregrine doesn't want to attack their gastronomy, but he does suggest that the French have a larger spectrum of what constitutes food than we do
By Anthony Peregrine
10:11AM GMT 13 Mar 2014
My friend the restauratrice was re-doing her menu for the 2014 spring and summer season. She thought an English version might look pretty sophisticated. Meat and fish were easy. Then we tackled the starters. "How would you translate 'gésiers'?" she asked.
"I wouldn't," I said. "Not on a menu. 'Gizzards' don't invariably strike English-speakers as delicious. Or edible."
"They're wonderful in salads," she said. "They might be, if you've had a lifetime's exposure to the eating of birds' stomachs," I said. "But, sprung on the innocent from under a lettuce leaf, they cause untold distress."
I suggested she leave the word in the original French and, if asked, say they were "little bits of meat". "Leetle beets of mit?" she said. "I can hear the cries of delighted diners already," I said.
Or, to put it another way, you have to keep your wits about you in French restaurants. You think you're in for elegance - all mirrors, chandeliers and tottering desserts - and suddenly they're serving andouillette. This is a sausage of pigs' intestines. It looks, smells and tastes as if it should be in a lavatory, a gastronomic challenge to equal anything slimy offered by New Guinean street traders. I hate it with a hatred reserved otherwise only for bananas.
That said, my real, long-running bête-noire is manouls - bête-noire because it's an unspeakable sludge of sheep innards and disgusting bits of a calf, long-running because it's a speciality of my wife's home-county, Lozère.
I used to be polite, pushing the stuff around my plate until it looked half-eaten. I wanted to marry this woman. But that was then. Now, we're married, they suggest manouls, I order pizza and a truce is called. 8)
Obviously, I'm not attacking French gastronomy. That would be suicide. I'm doing the opposite, suggesting simply that the French have a larger spectrum of what constitutes food than we do. They might contemplate something squidgy and white, and salivate - while we're heads down in a bucket. It's our loss, I think, because we're out of touch with the origins of food. The British food chain begins, vacuum-packed, in the supermarket. The French one starts in the field or sea, with the animals in all their gory sloppiness.
Almost all French people - hairdressers, barristers, dentists - reckon they're basically still peasants. And peasants don't do squeamish. They've never had the money. Having sold off the good stuff, they ate anything, by season: ears, intestines, thrushes, titmice. Around Carcassonne, they used to put magpies in the cassoulet. Now life is richer and everyone can afford a Big Mac, but mainstream French cooking remains rooted. My in-laws go mushrooming every early autumn. Later, their farming neighbours kill the family pig. Lots of people do this. That's why France's continuum of cuisine - from farmhouse via bistro to three-star Michelin palace - is the most interesting in the world. Even so, you might like to avoid some of the continuum's more extreme manifestations.
Here's a brief summary of items which either I, or British visitors, have had trouble with:
* Andouillette: pigs' smelliest slithery bits in sausage form. (See above.)
* Bouillabaisse: Marseille's fish stew tests the toughest fish fan. If you can survive mountains of some of the ugliest fish in God's sea (weever and anglerfish, scorpion fish, conger eels), you can probably survive Marseille.
* Cervelle: brains, calf or lamb. No matter how prepared, they always look like brains, so you're hoovering up the animal's fondest memories.
* Cheval: horse. Much frothing during last year's "horsegate" - horse meat in lasagne! - though, as far as I know, no-one died, or even felt off-colour. Horse is perfectly edible, though fewer and fewer French people eat it at home (it's 0.3% of French meat consumption), horse butchers are disappearing at a gallop and horsemeat, because prone to contamination, rarely shows up in restaurants or other public catering. Le Taxi Jaune at 13 Rue Chapon in Paris' 3rd is apparently an exception. Try it, and you'll find it's a bit like beef but more marrowy. Steak-à-cheval, incidentally, isn't horse at all but a beef steak or beefburger with an egg on top.
* Cuisses-de-grenouille: frogs' legs. Well, not legs. Cuisses means thighs. It is a French attempt to make frogs seem sensual.
* Encornet: sounds like an ice-cream but is squid, which could be a surprise.
* Escargots: snails. According to some estimates, France eats 60% of world snail production. They produce hardly any themselves. To satisfy French appetites, snails wing in from Eastern Europe, Turkey and Indonesia. It's a hell of a way to come when you're more of a texture than a taste, entirely dependent on accompanying sauce or butter. If that's ok, so are snails, as long as you don't reflect that you're eating a hermaphroditic gastropod barely distinguishable from a slug.
* Fromage-de-tête: 'head-cheese' had me fooled for a bit. It's brawn.
* Grive: thrush. The French like songbirds. This usually comes in pâté form. Last jar I opened had a beak in it. :shock:
* Lamproie: lamprey. Perhaps only a Frenchman could stick his hand in a river, pull out this fabulously unphotogenic, eel-like beast with its sucker mouth, and conclude: "That looks tasty." It is significant that our Henry I died of his "surfeit of lampreys" in Normandy.
* Manouls: Please see above. I can't bear to go through all that again.
* Ortolan: a bunting-like songbird. Because endangered it may not legally be trapped or eaten. So, in south-west France, it's illegally trapped and eaten. Traditionally, the bird is drowned in armagnac, plucked, popped in the oven and then eaten whole, bones, organs and all, by diners with cloths over their heads. President Mitterrand had several, as his final blow-out, on New Year's Eve 1995. Then, apparently, he ate nothing else at all until his death eight days later.
* Pieds-de-cochon: pigs' trotters, often breaded, always slithery.
* Pieds-et-paquets: Lambs' feet and stomachs simmered together in white wine. Provence's key weapon in keeping international tourism at bay.
* Pouteille: another killer from Lozère. It's pigs' trotters, lard, dubious bits of beef and if you're truly unlucky, served at breakfast.
* Seiche: cuttlefish, though it sometimes also refers to squid. As does calmar. There's almost a name per tentacle.
*Tête-de-veau: fleshy bits of a calf's head, always squidgier than you would like. If this was, as claimed, Jacques Chirac's favourite dish, it kept him looking perky - though the effect has worn off of late.
* Tripoux: sheep's belly stuffed with, inter alia, calf intestines. I can imagine circumstances in which I would eat this, but they involve nuclear war and the disappearance of every other foodstuff from the planet. Except bananas.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/desti ... isine.html[/QUOTE]
Thank God I'm vegetarian!
escargot
Disciple of Marduk
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I think this article has been brought up before. 
This bit in particular leaves a nasty taste -
Of andouillette - This is a sausage of pigs' intestines. It looks, smells and tastes as if it should be in a lavatory, a gastronomic challenge to equal anything slimy offered by New Guinean street traders.
Also served battered and deep-fried in a dish known in Staffordshire as 'chicks'n'chips'.
A plate was generously shared with my brother on a visit to a colleague's home one day. He found out just as he started swallowing a 'chick' what they actually are and reckons it came up again about 50 times as his gag reflex took over.
This bit in particular leaves a nasty taste -
Of andouillette - This is a sausage of pigs' intestines. It looks, smells and tastes as if it should be in a lavatory, a gastronomic challenge to equal anything slimy offered by New Guinean street traders.
Also served battered and deep-fried in a dish known in Staffordshire as 'chicks'n'chips'.
A plate was generously shared with my brother on a visit to a colleague's home one day. He found out just as he started swallowing a 'chick' what they actually are and reckons it came up again about 50 times as his gag reflex took over.
David Plankton
I AM HIM.
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In the second series of Hannibal, Mads Mikkelson prepares this dish, beginning with the unfortunate bird's drowning in a jar slowly filled with armagnac.
I once found a recipe online for vincisgrassi, a kind of Italian lasagne dish which included in the ingredients "unborn eggs".
Swifty
doesn't negotiate with terriers
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I was able to cook and eat a lamb's brain a few years ago that I'd bought from a supermarket in Limoges, it was quite nice and a bit like pate in texture. I can't remember the exact method a chef told me to use but it involved washing it (obviously), rolling it in flour, gently frying it then baking at low temperature. It didn't look anything like a brain afterwards and was very tasty on toast
...
CarlosTheDJ
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Bit harsh eh Scargy?
ramonmercado
CyberPunk
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escargot
Disciple of Marduk
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They'll eat anything. Anything.
In my garden many years ago I lifted something up to move it and found underneath dozens of HUGE slugs, really massive, which I wasn't sure what to do with.
Soon afterwards I was chatting with some teachers from my kids' school and I mentioned this - what do you do with a load of enormous fat slugs?
People suggested slinging them in the bin, chucking them over the fence to next door's garden, stamping on them and leaving them for the birds, the usual ideas.
Except for the young French assistant, who suggested frying them up with butter and garlic...
Yes, really. She wasn't joking. I could tell that she'd seen this done or even cooked it herself.
Lovely.
Swifty
doesn't negotiate with terriers
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In this country yes but you can still buy them pre-packed off the shelf in French supermarkets. I can't remember which comedian wrote "... and on the 6th day, God made all the little creatures on the earth ... and on the 7th day, the French made them into soup"
Schwadevivre
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Meal worms are supposed to be pleasant.
Though I have never got over the sight of Amazonian natives catching, cooking and eating Giant Goliath Tarantulas
Though I have never got over the sight of Amazonian natives catching, cooking and eating Giant Goliath Tarantulas
Last edited:
OneWingedBird
Beloved of Ra
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Orlando says they're delicious.... Mmmmnnnnnn.
At the weekend I was chatting with the guy at a local health food shop who told me he'd once tried silkworm cocoons. He said the're like eating a little bag filled with scrambled egg.
At the weekend I was chatting with the guy at a local health food shop who told me he'd once tried silkworm cocoons. He said the're like eating a little bag filled with scrambled egg.
Loquaciousness
The misuse of the word "fact" annoys me
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On buying a kilo of stilton cheese in the sales and happily experimenting, I can happily confirm that a multi grain cracker topped with nutella and stilton is DELICIOUS!
Loquaciousness
The misuse of the word "fact" annoys me
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My husband loves those too - weirdo.
Loquaciousness
The misuse of the word "fact" annoys me
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We ordered andouillette in France as had been recommended. We didn't know what it was, but after each eating a piece that tasted of shit and piss, I can confirm this is the most awful thing I have EVER eaten, and even thinking about it makes me gag.I think this article has been brought up before.
This bit in particular leaves a nasty taste -
Of andouillette - This is a sausage of pigs' intestines. It looks, smells and tastes as if it should be in a lavatory, a gastronomic challenge to equal anything slimy offered by New Guinean street traders.
Also served battered and deep-fried in a dish known in Staffordshire as 'chicks'n'chips'.
A plate was generously shared with my brother on a visit to a colleague's home one day. He found out just as he started swallowing a 'chick' what they actually are and reckons it came up again about 50 times as his gag reflex took over.
OneWingedBird
Beloved of Ra
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That sounds a lot like my experiment with the pigs uterus, which is very like intestine.
There's something about that kind of internal organ that just smalls like stale pee.
There's something about that kind of internal organ that just smalls like stale pee.
JamesWhitehead
Piffle Prospector
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I submit, your honour, that this man takes refuge in vegetarianism as a means of exorcising his pronounced taste for intestines and tarantulas!
Of course he can resist a steak!
Of course he can resist a steak!
ramonmercado
CyberPunk
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Vegetables have rights as well!
Cabbage is Carnage!
Cabbage is Carnage!
Loquaciousness
The misuse of the word "fact" annoys me
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Well to be fair our house is a very unpleasant place to be after cabbage has been consumed.
GNC
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I submit, your honour, that this man takes refuge in vegetarianism as a means of exorcising his pronounced taste for intestines and tarantulas!
Of course he can resist a steak!
No, no, I was referring to the steak, I've never tasted tarantula! OK, not very often. Do you know how much it costs to import those delicious eight-legged bastards?
Loquaciousness
The misuse of the word "fact" annoys me
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Well to be fair our house is a very unpleasant place to be after cabbage has been consumed.
Swifty
doesn't negotiate with terriers
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Loquaciousness
The misuse of the word "fact" annoys me
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Some people may find these a strange food, but I love them. A spanish speciality of WHOLE baby squid deep fried ; innards, eyes and all.
