Why you shouldn't eat exotic food overseas

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This was published 7 years ago

Why you shouldn't eat exotic food overseas

By Lee Tulloch
Food for thought.

Food for thought.Credit: Getty Images

Recently I was standing on a side street in Porto, Portugal, my attention caught by a man in a restaurant window, who was stirring a big vat of dark porridge. Inside, diners were lined up at benches, eagerly digging into the steaming bowls of gruel the cook dished out.

To be frank, it looked about as delicious as boiled socks.

As I usually do when I'm in a new city, I had contracted a guide to show me around the markets, cafes and local restaurants. Experience has taught me that I'll learn more about a place from the food the locals eat and the way they share it than from looking at monuments.

When I asked the guide what they were eating she told me it was a Portuguese speciality, pig's blood soup, known as papas de sarrabulho. The cook was stirring maize into coagulated pig's blood. Would I like to try some?

I'd like to be able to say that I was game enough. But I was quick to suggest we move on – to that great little cake shop down the street.

It's probably true that you never really know if you like something until you try it. But you can have a pretty good idea. National differences in taste always amaze me. One man's lutefisk is another man's roasted tarantula. The Japanese are mad about eel, the Iraqis boiled sheep's head, the southern Chinese dried cane rat. Australians (except me) are mad about Vegemite, which gives everyone else the horrors.

I'm not the most enlightened foodie in the world. The list of things I don't like to eat is embarrassingly long – poached eggs, mushrooms, avocado toast, oysters, and on it goes. When asked, I always say I'll eat anything that is served up, even though it's not exactly true. (As I'm not allergic to anything or a strict vegetarian, I always feel it's rude to give your hosts a list.) In any case, my husband pretty much likes everything I don't, so I can subtly move the mushrooms across to his plate.

I appreciate the extreme food of the world – but from a distance. I've tried plenty of things others would baulk at – such as camel meat in Oman (tender and delicious), haggis in Scotland (essentially a too-rich pate) and crickets on a stick in Beijing (crunchy but fine).

In New York's Harlem, dining with Tren'ness Woods-Black, the granddaughter of Sylvia Woods of Sylvia's soul food restaurant, I forced down some chitterlings (stewed pork intestines because I was too embarrassed to decline the dish. (Note to self: don't go anywhere near them ever again.)

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I would probably draw the line at trying the following regional dishes: fermented mare's milk in Mongolia; balut, boiled duck fetus in the Philippines; hakarl, the famous marinated shark of Iceland; tuna eyeballs and cod sperm in Japan; casu marzu, the maggot-ridden sheep's milk cheese of Sardinia; escamoles, the eggs of giant black ants, in Mexico; baby mice wine in Korea; blood pancakes in Sweden, head cheese in Bulgaria and 1000-year-old eggs in China.

I find it fascinating how different nations developed tastes for certain food (rotting fish in Scandinavia, for instance). Much of it was to do with availability and sheer survival, of course. But taste is a fierce sense, bringing with it a nostalgia for what we ate in our childhoods. I devoured a pack of Honey jumbles recently, for that reason. When you've been fed rotten fish or squirming, live octopus as a child, it's comfort food.

It's also amazing to note that consuming baby mice, maggot-filled cheese and fried insects apparently has no negative effect on one's health. So much of what we eat in the west is from supermarket shelves, packaged and sanitised, that it's liberating to be a bit more adventurous.

Sometimes, though, even the most innocuous looking things on a menu can be regrettable. In Porto, it was suggested we try the francesinha, described as "the local version of a croque-monsieur". We did.

It is, in fact, a toasted sandwich stuffed with melted cheese and three kinds of greasy pork, including sausage, smothered with a sickening spicy sauce, topped with a fried egg and served on soggy fried chips. It was invented at Restaurante Regaleira in Porto and is worse than anything the US can conjure up.

Compared with this abomination, the fruit bat soup of Palau is starting to look appetising.

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