Still, there are exceptions, moments of queasiness embedded like knots of gristle within the general scrumptiousness. And, since culinary oddities are bound to be more fun to read (and write) about than ordinary comestibles, I present the aforementioned supposedly delicious things.
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Thai cuisine isn’t as industrious as Chinese when it comes to making use of every dubious anatomical scrap. I’ve had fish bladder soup and fried pig intestine (both terrific, incidentally), but I’ve actually been a little disappointed by the lack of esoterica on Thai menus.
Last week in Phuket, though, I partially sated my hunger for random body parts with a bowl of chicken feet stew. The stew’s presentation was impressive, in that gleaming and terrible way that weapons can impress: my bowl brimmed with fierce, denticled talons that looked still capable of scratching out the eyes of an incautious farmer. I fully expected a claw to spring to life, clutch me by the wrist, and plea that I spare it the acidic rigors of my digestive tract.
You can barely control your salivary glands right now, I'll bet.
Once I resolved to show the feet no mercy, I was confronted with the conundrum of how to consume them. Chicken feet are essentially skeins of rubber stretched over a lattice of fine, inedible bones – tarsals and metacarpals and phalanxes expressly designed to choke diners. I set about meticulously removing shreds of plasticine skin from the tiny bones, no doubt expending more calories in surgery than I stood to gain in consumption*. It was a task for scalpel and forceps – even knife and fork would have been inadequate – yet I undertook the operation with only plastic ladle and wooden chopsticks, a woefully indelicate arsenal; I might as well have tried to defuse a bomb with hammer and chisel. Five laborious minutes later, I’d picked pebbled skin fragments from about two toes; the cairn of bones perched on my plate seemed an unjustly miniscule monument to my tenacity.
“Come on, guy,” my dining companion, Take (my co-teacher at DSIL) sneered. (“Come on, guy” is Take’s standard expression of reproach whenever I’m particularly obtuse, which, in Thailand, is often.) “Whatchoo doing?” I looked up from my toils and across the table at her: a chicken foot dangled from her mouth, a tableau that conjured images of foxes and henhouses, and two more claws lay on her plate, as clean and intact as skeletons in an anatomy class.
“Like this,” explained my vulpine friend, and she sucked at the talon – apparently ladle and chopsticks didn’t figure in this procedure after all – and tossed the skinned foot aside with a velociraptorish grin.
“Oh,” I said, duly shamed.
Chicken feet, it turns out, aren’t especially delectable even once you’ve solved consumptive difficulties (or had the mystery cracked for you). They’re rubbery, of course, and have an almost neutral flavor; the myriad bones, I learned from accidental experimentation, aren’t big enough to choke you but still feel damn unpleasant when they’re rattling down your esophagus. Intrepid diners might enjoy feet for their novelty, but, speaking strictly gastronomically, you might as well peel the skin off a drumstick and dip it in beef bullion.
One of the few classic Thai foods I'm reluctant to try: dried squid, which typically smell like they were scraped from the cargo hold of a shrimp trawler after about three unrefrigerated weeks at sea.
***
Many Thai soups and curries come packed with lueh: suspicious cubes, the color of charcoal and the texture of tofu, that bob within the matrix of stew like bergs in a floe. The iceberg analogy doesn’t end there, either: lueh is as likely to scuttle the appetite of an unsuspecting consumer as a submerged glacial mass is a tanker. That’s because lueh’s composition is as unsavory as its appearance: the gray blocks are congealed pig’s blood**.
I’ve only tried lueh once, and that one taste test was less leonine chomp than rodentish nibble; but my sole sample was enough to convince me that I never need to try it again. Much as I try, I can’t come up with a more suitable adjective than rancid. Pig blood may be a taste I’m capable of acquiring – its ubiquity suggests that it must appeal to many palettes, and mine is as omnivorous as any – but I’m not willing to subject my taste buds to the pain of acquisition.
Even though lueh tasted, I’ll forever maintain, objectively disgusting, I do wonder how much of my revulsion had psychosomatic origins. There’s something about the phrase “congealed pig blood” – couple it with the word "gelatinous" to maximize nausea! – that gives me the willies. But it’s not like blood is inherently more disgusting than other nasty organs I’ve chowed on w/out compunction – bladder and intestines, brains and thyroid glands; all down the hatch with nary a hint of rising bile. Blood, rationally, is neither more nor less foul than any other part of the animal body; in fact one could argue that eating blood is more natural than consuming the mystery meats found on western buffet lines: any idiot knows what blood looks like, but could anyone besides a meat packer identify the bacon portion of a porcine corpse?
But my rationality loses out to whatever cultural proscription forbids blood from the American diet, and I can’t stomach a single lueh blob; even the sight of it wobbling on a soup spoon like an obscure flavor of Jell-O is enough to dampen my appetite. (Albeit only very temporarily; and my appetite is certifiably un-ruin-able.) Could it be a fear of turning vampiric? A latent respect for certain Kosher laws? A pathological aversion to any food that can be described as gelatinous? All possible. Regardless, I quickly learned two Thai words, words never heard on a Transylvanian moor nor on the set of a Quentin Tarantino movie: Mai lueh. Hold the blood.
***
*I’ve heard that if you kill a chipmunk in the wild and are in desperate need of food, you’re supposed to eat it whole, inc. fur, for that very reason. There: I just saved your life.
**Lueh, which is blood in cubed form, isn’t to be confused with the liquid blood (name unknown) sometimes poured into soup water, actually a not-half-bad addition to broth if lightly applied. The last thing you want is a blood bath in a bowl, though.
That sounds so gross, but great pictures!
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