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Are you seriously going to eat that……..

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We are on a short trip up to Penang, which is an island off the west coast of Malaysia (only an hour and a bit flight from home in Singapore).

It just happens to be peak Durian season in Malaysia and Penang is famous for Durians (a lot from Singapore come just for that). For those that don’t know a Durian is spiky husked fruit that is indigenous to SE Asia that contains seeds with a yellowish / white pulp – that is what is eaten. It’s known as the king of fruits here, but is characterised by is very ‘distinct’ smell – some say turpentine, some say raw sewage, some actually like. Added to that it’s a fairly strong tasting fruit. I actually don’t mind – the flesh is creamy, almost custardy – the only problem is the aftertaste lingers for hours……

So what disgusting / unique / strange / obnoxious foods have you eaten ? Why and what were you overall impressions ?

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Comments

  1. I was feeding mealworms to the wife’s chickens a few days ago and just had to know.
    They taste almost exactly the same as cheap icecream wafer.
    A bit gritty though…the wife refused to partake.

  3. Last time I visited Singapore while serving in the Royal Navy, I tried the Durian fruit out of curiosity, my mate & I just had to see what the fuss was about.

    We quickly realised that we should not have bothered. I found the consistency & odour similar to rotting flesh.

    Horrible, just horrible.

    Never again.

    • I don’t get it. While in indonesia I munched some fresh Durian fruit together with my wife and we didn’t find more taste than a very mild pasteurized cheese. I can recognize the smell of rotten flesh with ease, I even got a point in microbiology course for identifiying it. Is it possible that, as with cilantro the perception differs from a person to the other?

  4. We went to this restaurant in Garda, Italy, a few years ago that is very well known in that region. There’s no menu, you basically get asked whether you want meat or fish and then they just keep bringing out whatever they have that day. We chose fish and I ate some things that day that I don’t think I’ll ever eat again. One was a raw prawn that had us all wondering whether it was safe to eat, but we surmised that as the waiter had just served it to 20-30 people (not all in our party) it must be safe.

    And then we got a sea snail. I’ve eaten snails before and, providing they are small, cooked and smothered in garlic butter (we had some in Cape Town once that hadn’t any garlic butter on and I’ve never seen my wife turn as green) they’re okay. These ones weren’t given any flavouring and they were big, very big. I don’t know how I managed to get it down, but I was determined to do so. It was just like chewing on a great big piece of rubbery gristle. Horrible.

    There were some other things that were pretty gruesome too, but we weren’t quite sure what they were. We ate them anyway. We don’t like to offend. It was an experience, but I don’t think I’d do it again.

  5. Took an off-season cheap flight to the Costa de la Luz, down in the SW corner of Spain where you can see Africa across the water from Tarifa, if the wind lets up long enough for you to stand upright.

    Stayed in a little coastal resort that had one highly recommended sea-food restaurant to its name, along with a few hotel bars and little else. After three days we figured out where the restaurant was hiding – in a back street on the dge of town. Turned up at 9, having started to shift into the Spanish timetable, only to find the place still empty – the locals started showing up at 10 and were still arriving, kids and all, when we sloped off close to midnight.

    I looked at the menu, decided to play safe and selected a pasta dish with a meaty tomato sauce. Her indoors, being emboldened by half a litre of the not-half-bad white wine, went for a seafood platter that turned out to be every small crustacean, mollusc, coelenterate and otherwise indeterminate invertebrate you’ve ever seen minding its own business in a rock pool, dipped in batter and fried alive.

    Little quality sleep was had that night due to wifely nightmares caused by her interminable indigestion. We both had scampi and chips for the rest of the visit.

    • I’m by no means a fussy eater. As a child I hated swedes, parsnips, turnips, cabbage and cauliflower. After I became an adult I discovered that my dislike of these was more to do with how my mum and the cooks at my schools ruined them. Any of these are fine by me these days.
      Even things I’m not particularly fond of will get scoffed if they’re on a plate in front of me and I’m hungry. But I’ve never tried anything particularly exotic. Just never been offered snails or grubs or suchlike.
      As for those stupid lists of things that crop up periodically on FB, inviting you to say what you wouldn’t eat, I’ve yet to find a single item on any of them that I’d point blank refuse.

      Rum-flavoured toffee, however, is out of the question. Disgusting stuff that doesn’t taste anything like rum in any case.

      • Absolutely 100% agree with this Rigid. How people manage to tolerate their pure rancid disgustingness is completely beyond me. Especially on a fried breakfast where they look like slugs. Evil, just evil.

        • Mushrooms are my most used ingredient in cooking. I put them in whenever poss. Ratatouille, risotto, curry, omlette, whatever… shove some mushrooms in too. Brilliant taste they are.
          I remember when I was a student, having blown my grant on the pursuit of hedonistic pleasure, I’d pinch and eat raw mushrooms in the supermarket.

    • I can swerve most of the really disgusting foods (seafood, offal) by being veggie. Eggs* and goat cheese are the pretty much the only things which need to be actively avoided now. Oh, and beetroot, but that’s just obvious.

      * as a starring role I mean; boiled, fried or whatever. I have rarely met the piece of cake I didn’t like, though I use chickpea flour in place of egg if I’m making my own.

    • I once saw “duck feet with fish lips” on a Chinese menu. I passed.

      The late Mrs thep worked on a Chinese cookbook by one of the Kens, Lo or Hom, I forget which. A standout was “long-simmered tangerine-flavoured ox penis”. As a lifelong vegetarian she though that sounded no more disgusting than lamb chops.

  10. Goose Feet in Hong Kong, my brother got married there, I’m an adventurous eater but these didn’t get near my mouth, the size of you hand, complete with claws, webs and half a leg.

  11. Had a hot-pot meal with friends in Chengdu, one of the specialities was deep fried goose intestines which are seen as quite a delicacy in the area.

    To replicate both taste and texture, deep fry some knicker elastic.

  13. On a more mundane level, almost all of the unbranded or names ending “farm. house” etc from my local Heron, ( think Kwiksave without the pizazz) are for the most part inedible.

    They do a large pack of frozen sausages which when cooked look like Japanese penis….I passed and gave them to the cats….who passed.

    They also do a ready made microwavable kebab….add the pouch of garlic mayo and presto jingo……………

    Nope….I’m not saying it.

  14. On a recent visit to Chengdu, China we were directed to the local market where the speciality item at all food stalls and restaurants was Rabbit Head. Just the head. Boiled by the look of them. There were thousands of them, they are piled up in huge stacks. Despite the fact they actually are whole heads, there’s effectively no meat on them as they are tiny, and would pretty much fit in your mouth whole. I do wonder whether they are hollow or still full of brain material.
    I wasn’t brave enough to try one, and nor did I see a single person actually buy one.

    • I also had hotpot in Chengdu and it was disgusting made much worse because it was pretty impossible to determine what we were eating. However my most memorable attempt at eating exotic entities was eating Guinea pig is Cusco;Peru.
      It came out baked, on a plate with a sliced carrot skewered to its head as a hat. It still had the bloody fur on it We were in a party of about 6 people. We sliced it open and each took a share. Pretty disgusting and frankly inedible. One of our party was a rowdy Aussie airforce pilot whose training had been to be left stranded in the outback for 3 days and to live off the land. He ate everything that noone else would that included intestines and God knows what. Incredible.

      Nothing wrong with Beetroot by the way- food of the Gods.

  15. Mopani worms
    Termites
    Chicken feet

    Tried all of the above, which are regarded as virtual delicacies by many Southern African blacks. To me they were uninteresting, if not quite revolting. Not to be repeated, I think.

    I understand, however, that insects are projected as having a big culinary future. But maybe that will be forestalled by the development of meat ‘cultures’, or ‘lab-grown’ meat?

  16. On my first trip to mainland China for work, I was treated like a king. A five star hotel with gold-plated, hot and cold running everything and a local minder to see me from reception to… the waiting taxi outside.

    I spent my first few days being schmoozed by the big bosses in fancy-pants restaurants eating mainly bad Italian. How it is possible to make Spag Bol inedible? Well, the Chinese know how.

    So my next day at the factory I went down to the production line and said “Right, I want you lot to take me to your favourite restaurant. My treat.” We went to a Portakabin round the back of the factory with PVC table cloths, plastic patio furniture, no menus and no English-speaking staff. I don’t know what I ate, but it was mostly lovely.

    The only thing I got wrong was deep-fried chicken feet. I saw some go past on a trolley bound for another table. I said to my minder “let’s have those”. “But Mr Steven San, they are fried chicken feet.” “Well, I’ve never had them before.” I soon wished I hadn’t.

    The whole evening for 10 or 12 people cost me less than one portion of bad spaghetti.

    • Spag Bol isn’t Italian. (True dat.) Why were you forced to eat little but white rice for years, Mr. Steve? (I’m thinking some health diet – but left behind as a POW in some Vietnam hellhole would be a lot cooler.)

      • I have Crohn’s disease (ulcerated intestines) and have to follow a LOFFLEX diet.

        Low fibre, low-fat, exclusion (and low-flavour). White rice, white pasta, white bread, skinless roast chicken, steamed veg & seedless fruit. “Beige diet” as Mrs F says. Dull, but it beats being ill.

  18. Rat, in Cambodia. It’s okay, tastes a bit like guinea pig.
    Locust, in Thailand: The Whitebait of The Fields! Is how it’s never been advertised.
    Wot and Injera, Ethiopia; like someone shat on carpet underlay
    Prawn fondue, China; quite tasty actually but nothing gives you a sorrowful look of reproach like the seafood you’re about to boil alive.
    Beans and rice, Kenya; nothing wrong with the food but the plate turned out on further inspection to be a 1950’s Morris Minor hubcap.

  19. Can’t recommend either the fried duck’s bill I sampled in China or the Vietnamese fried spider – don’t eat that bit, it’s where all the eggs are…….oh.

  20. I ate sheep’s brain as a nine year old.

    My parents and I were staying at a small family run hotel in France, and we were on our way south for our long summer hols. camping. The restaurant had a set menu and there were only two options for the main course. One choice was Les Petites Oiseaux; the second option we couldn’t translate. Well, I didn’t fancy little birds (I envisaged concentric circles of sparrows and goldfinches), so I plumped for the mystery thing.

    The brain arrived on a white plate, a gray, tepid sauce clinging to it’s crevices. At first I didn’t realise what it was. The texture was extraordinary. The weight of the knife alone was enough to slice through it. Only after a few bites of this bitter mousse did it become obvious what I was eating. That night I went to bed hungry, dreaming of small birds.

    • As a teenager, I used to do the gardening for my elderly great aunt.

      “Come in and have some lunch. I’ll do you a sandwich. Tongue or brain?”

      “Um, do you have any cheese?”

    • Ah yes, tete de veau. I had it in Millau in the Massif Central on an Interrail holiday. I usually go for the item on the menu that I am least likely to prepare for myself, and that certainly met that criterion. I remain unlikely to prepare it for myself – quite appalling – and I am not a man given to leaving things on my plate.

  21. Dried meat from indonesian, the muscle fibers are so dry that it looks like a bunch of cat’s hair freshly caughed. “Durian proot” as the local called it, tasty fruit as the others. Dried fish snacks from Taïwan tastes like crunchy goodies. I am french, so you can guess what I ate. Now that I am living in sweden, I enjoy Surströmming minimum once a year, It’s hard to export to France as the tin can, can explode and the sanitizing of the plane would be mine to pay. Haggish is good, no discussions. Oh , there is this yellow pear-like fruit that I trained to eat while in egypt, I like/ dislike that.

  23. Mine is andouillette. Had it in a restaurant in Paris. Absolutely disgusting. Never again. Like all the rubbery bits you didn’t want to eat in school dinner stuffed into a vile chewy skin. Bleaugh.

    I find veal disgusting too – a friend cooked it for a dinner party and I tried, gagged and had to confess I couldn’t eat it. Much embarrassment all round.

    • I like andouillette and usually have it when I am in France. It’s a strongly flavoured, loosely constructed sausage. But you need lots of (Dijon) mustard, a hearty red wine and – ideally – a dining companion who won’t turn their nose up at what you are eating and won’t remind you of what it’s made from (pig chitterlings – from the pig’s rear end, I’m afraid).

      I love trying the more challenging dishes, with the rationale that people wouldn’t eat them if they didn’t have to or want to.

      • With you there, Rufus: I usually make a point of choosing something I ought to have tried at least once, especially when abroad. Having defaulted on 2 earlier occasions, this is the year I will eat/drink Beyin Çorbası, turkish brain soup.
        O, and I love Andouillette; I am assured they rinse most of the shit out of the intestines before making them.

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