Cooking The Books

Snake

Some point last year Fergus Henderson - of St John/Nose to Tail Eating fame - and another chef - whose name evades me - had a show on TV called Hot to Eat an Elephant.  From the adverts it promised to be smorgasbord of weird eating with this view strengthened by Fergus's penchant for the less desirable bits of an animal.  As a fully paid up member of the weird eating brigade I tuned in but ended up pretty disappointed.  Dog was seemingly dismissed prior to tasting and post-eating described as fatty and chewy (I thought it was very good), rat never made it down their gullets due to cleanliness concerns and elephant failed due to moral concerns, even though the tribe they visited ate it regularly and had already slaughtered one in their honour.  I got left with the feeling Fergus was a bit more fussy than some of his recipes (a nice bit of spleen anyone?) would suggest.  One thing they did crack on with was snake though - in Vietnam and in the form of a multi-course snake meal.  At the start of this trip the gf and I made a list each of 10 things we wanted to do over the course of it and this segment had such an effect that 'Eat snake in Vietnam' made it onto mine.

It was only after I was thousands of kilometres south of Hanoi that I found out these multi-course meals were a very northern thing and I thought I'd missed my opportunity.  Chatting to a moto driver in Saigon reignited my hopes but the 1,500,000 dong price tag quashed them soon afterward.  Two days before leaving the country though a chance encounter with a Vietnamese/American citizen (emigrated after the war now back to his home town for a wealthy retirement) on a local bus in the Mekong Delta found us sitting in his friend's restaurant eyeballing 1.5kg of snake, decidedly still alive, with the prospect of a 470,000 dong bill.

The full 6 courses of the north weren't to be sampled but we would get a couple, along with the rather dubious sounding drinking of the blood and eating of the heart - still beating of course - and the gall bladder.  With these organs in short supply we agreed I could have the heart and the gf the honour of the gall bladder.  Normally I like a little alcohol (well a lot actually) down me when eating weird stuff but before I'd had a chance to even sip my beer the blood turned up.  I swear when I've seen this on TV a shot of hard liquor has been produced and a small quantity of blood drizzled in, the red swirling to pink before the lucky diner necks it in one.  No such luck for us as we were presented with a half pint glass with maybe 3cm - 4cm of blood sat in the bottom.  We were told to drink quickly - I can only assume before it clotted - and as the gf's list item specifically mentioned eating a snake and drinking its blood she went first.  Before my turn she said it just tasted salty and I concur, I'd add that it had an irony taste too.  I was very pleasantly surprised that it was cool, a pleasant side effect of the animal’s cold blooded status.  Pleasant surprise or not though it was still pretty heavy going and I was glad of the cold beer waiting in front of me.

It was a good few minutes before the organs came out but the heart was still happily beating away, no idea how long it would have carried on for – or it did for that matter but inside me - if I hadn't swallowed it.  We were told not to burst them, swallowing them whole instead, but there was little possibility we'd have given them a chew.  This time around some alcohol was present but just in the form of an inch of beer in the shot glass with them to help them down.  They tasted of nothing but the beer.  They were definitely for bravado over pleasure.

The snake itself was served some time later after a good simmering in the hope of tenderising.  First course was boiled snake - on a bed of onion and banana flower - served with rice porridge.  The snake was far from tender with the skin, in my mind, as edible as any other materials used in the making of handbags, shoes and belts - I've heard locals eat it though.  The meat itself, whilst a work out for the jaw, was very tasty.  A thick muscle ran down each side of the spine with smaller ones over the ribs and some intercostals too along with a surprising amount of fat.  Clichéd or not it tasted like chicken more than any other meat I've eaten, just with a lot of bite.  It chewed up okay though and I was more than happy to eat it.

Whilst waiting we asked how many people a 1.5kg snake would normally feed and were told 6.  With this in mind it was no surprise that come the final course we were absolutely stuffed.  Luckily the second course was a relatively light snake and straw mushroom soup/hotpot, sat simmering over a hot plate with greens and some crinkle cut starches of some description to go in.  The snake was much the same as the first course (they'd both been simmered the same way then unceremoniously portioned with scissors) just maybe a bit more tender with the extra cooking.  I may well have imagined that though.  Not wanting to waste food - especially expensive food - we ate as much of the main event as possible but didn't really put a dent in the other bits in the stock.

Overall I'd recommend snake meat to anyone wanting to try something different, if you don’t mind chewing a bit it’s very tasty - you'll know yourself if you're open minded enough for the preliminary titbits though.

The Street Food of Hoi An - Chao Xuong and Long Tron

Whilst very different dishes I've grouped these together as they were the same meal and from the same stall.

Name:  Chao Xuong

Time of Day:  Breakfast.  I think the stall stays there through till the evening though.

Location: Thai Phien - a couple of blocks north of the main tourist area

Cost: 15,000 dong (c.50p)

The Rest: Rice porridge is common all over South East Asia and China.  In China it can be a very bland affair, frequently cooked just in water.  I've read of some folk going without salt in it too.  I can, and do eat it like that, but tend to load it full of other stuff (spring onion, ginger, pepper, chili etc.) to get away from the blandness. 

Here it Vietnam though the rice porridge is full of flavour.  I picked up a cook book over here and looking at the recipes they're all cooked in stock - normally from made from simmered meat that gets served with it - and this really shows through in the taste.  To add to the meatiness of the stock chili is another must have addition leaving each mouthful loaded with taste.  This particular chao was a pork chao (xuong means bone but it is a bone from a pig), floating in the vat of porridge were many big bony chops, looking like they'd been cut from the shoulder blade.  Each portion got one so you could scrape and chew at the bone, removing the not insubstantial amount of melt in the mouth meat.



Name:  Long Tron

Time of Day:  Breakfast

Location: as above

Cost: 15,000 dong (c.50p)

The Rest: This was pretty challenging stuff for first thing in the morning.  The racks of offal were what had drawn me to this stall and when I ordered my aforementioned chao I was expecting to get rice porridge full of pipes and what have you.  It was only after I'd been served my pork bone chao that I saw others order a salad covered in the offal and so I had to add a second course to my breakfast.

Said salad was the standard over here shredded green papaya and carrot.  Said offal consisted of liver, small and large intestine, stomach and tongue - all still warm and very juicy, fresh from a simmering.  They were all lined up on top, a perfect photo op, but then a helpful Vietnamese girl next to me decided to show me I had to toss the salad - to coat in the fish sauce, lime and chili dressing - before I'd had a chance to get my camera out.  A typically kind gesture by the non-tourist industry working Vietnamese (the tourist industry Vietnamese can be a nightmare) albeit it misguided in this instance.  At least I got a little story out of it.

The meal was very tasty but it did have some interesting texture.  Normally I'm not the biggest fan of boiled pig liver, finding it leathery and strong tasting, but here it was juicy and soft.  The stomach and tongue both with a meaty bite - pleasant experiences.  The boiled intestines were a tad on the chewy side though, like little rubbery bands with that familiar intestine taste, although the chili dressing did do well to cover it up. All in all definitely worth a go if you want something different though and I'd be more than happy to eat it again.

Since eating this meal I got talking to a girl in a tailors shop about the various names of the offal in the dish.  We spoke of tongue, liver, kidney and intestines then she started going on about a type of intestine that only female pigs have, not that I know of any different digestive system arrangement between the two sexes.  Her English wasn't perfect though and I'm wondering if it was a female only tube, the uterus maybe as I know folk eat that out here.  That would certainly be a first.

The Street Food of Hoi An - Banh Beo

Name:  Banh Beo

Time of Day:  Afternoon

Location: Everywhere, the stalls walk around.  This particular one was on the north end of Le Loi.

Cost: 2,000 dong each (c.7p), in Nha Trang I paid 1,000 dong each for a slightly less elaborate version

The Rest: Outside of the food itself the stall for these was seriously impressive.  A little Vietnamese lady managed to carry around everything, including about 10 seats for customers, on a pair of trays balanced between a bamboo shoulder board.  She'd set up somewhere for a while then pack up and move on to a new location.

As far as the food goes banh beo are little rice pancakes made by steaming a rice slurry (I guess made from either rice flour and water or soaked rice liquidised in water) in little dishes, not unlike those you'd put dipping sauce in in oriental restaurants.  You had a choice of either plain or sweet (white or brown respectively) and both were served by topping with a fishy tomato sauce and some deep fried noodles - cau lau I think - for crunch.  Alongside however many dishes you bought (5 was a nice snack) you got nuoc cham (fish sauce, vinegar, sugar, chili) to spoon on.  Scooping with a teaspoon left you with a good few little mouthfuls per banh beo - soft pancake with salty, spicy, sweet, fishy and sour sauce.  The whole gamut of tastes and then a little crunch from the noodle.  Superlative.

Eating with the Flower Hmong

My favourite thing when travelling is to get off the beaten track, trying to avoid organised tours & tourists (I know I'm one too).  Ideally we're the only Westerners, as interesting to the locals as they are to me.  With minimal tourism I know I'll probably struggle to read the menu but I know the food will be interesting & local and not something so watered down for tourists it's near unrecognisable from its true form.

This was easy to do in parts of China, namely the south west, but increasingly more difficult as we headed north and east there and damn near impossible in Vietnam (and Thailand for that matter).  Here the tourism scene is so well developed that all sights are touristy and one can feel that you're only viewed as something to extract money from.

The ultimate off the beaten track experience for me is seeing minorities going about the usual everyday lives.  We'd seen loads of different minorities in Yunnan and had been seeking to replicate the experience since with little success.  Sapa in north-west Vietnam is famed for them but we'd been warned it was very touristy (having been since I can confirm it is, it may have them but they speak English) so we headed to nearby Bak Ha instead.  Bak Ha is said to offer the same rice terraces and minority villages as Sapa without the pizza restaurants and tourists in general.  An added bonus was a big Sunday wet market where the local Flower Hmong, in their colourful outfits, were said to appear en masse.  It promised to be a phenomenal experience.

There are a few different Hmong tribes about this region and what separates the Flower Hmong are their large and colourful outfits.  When first arriving at the market one thinks it can't be what they dress like.  With skirt, belts, blouse, collar and headdress the outfits seem to elaborate for a day's shopping.  Then again if all the villages are getting together one day a week then I guess you'd want to look your best.  I found it hard to believe this was their daily wear though.

As we'd just got off a night train I was starving and as with all decent markets their was a restaurant section, all seeming to serve boiled pork and noodles.  I found one that had shunned the noodles for these yellow fingers (not unlike the local tofu in Yunnan, somewhere bordering Vietnam as it happens) and decided to give it a go.  The most striking thing was the taste of the pork, it was just so porky even though it had been

nothing more than boiled.  We're so used to over bred, over lean, over farmed meat in the UK that it's easy to forget how good a simple piece of boiled meat can taste.  Here the pigs run wild (literally, they're in the road when you turn a corner on your moped), eating everything and growing really fat and tasty.  One of the butchers stalls here had the thickest bit of fat I've ever seen in fact.  Whilst I'm more then happy to see the back of the 5mm thick fat we get in UK supermarkets maybe this is pushing it for my tastes a bit too?

After breakfast 1 we had a little look around.  With their outfits it was just fun to watch folk shopping for meat and veg, you don't really need much more for a great day out.  After a while of people watching and trying to be discreet people photographing I was ready for more food though so we headed back to the restaurant section where we found a peddler of a local black pudding.  If ever I see a blood sausage - they're very widespread - I give it a go and this was the first time I'd had it in noodle soup. 
It worked a treat.  The sausage was soft but had enough body not to disintegrate in the broth, the lumps of fat so creamy white and almost mozzarella cheese like in texture, just not quite a stringy.  Overall it was a winner and our eating it drew a good few stares from the locals surrounding us.

After the market we remained in Bak Ha for a few days, just hiring mopeds and driving out into the countryside to see villages and rice terraces.  It was here that I was proved incorrect.  The Flower Hmong dress like that all the time, whether they're at market or in the village and even when they're working the rice terraces or threshing the rice.  It was fantastic to come around a corner to see a group of them working away, and happy to pose for a snap or two as well.

A Cock and Bull Story

...Or something along those lines anyway.

A while back Paul Merton did a series travelling through China and one place he stopped at was a Beijing restaurant specialising in animal penises.  If I remember currently they had all kinds, from the small (dog) to the large (donkey), believing that as well as tasting good they also help the libido.  I also thought he'd said it was a fairly pricey establishment.  When back in China in made a few inquiries but my suspicions were confirmed and it was way above my unemployed-for-the-last-6-month budget.

As luck would have it though I went out for a meal in Hanoi and nestled amongst the various noodles, spring rolls and stir-fries was the delectable sounding 'Bull's Penis in Herbal Soup'.  Luckily my companions shared my open mindedness to food and we cracked on.

The soup wasn't the nicest looking dish, all brown and lumpy, but it did smell pleasant.  We'd eaten lots of herb rich Chinese broths in Malaysia and although they don't seem to have travelled to the UK much they're very good.  Here we had their familiar odour with a good dose of cow flesh too, albeit it a specific part of flesh.

A root around in the soup showed there was two very distinct types of meat in there.  The first was very soft, offal like in texture as it lacked the striations of muscle.  The second was seemingly just big lumps of gristle.  I'll be the first to admit I'm not an expert on the male genitalia, cow or otherwise, but there is one I know pretty well and I just can't find any big gristly lumps on him anywhere.  My guess is that when harvesting these fellows a good portion of their support framework is taken too.

The soft stuff, which I can only assume is the shaft and helmet, was very tasty.  Meaty in taste and with the aforementioned soft texture of an organ.  The gristly stuff was some of the most challenging things I've ever eaten, they were literally 1cm by 3cm cylinders of what tasted like pure gristle, each taking a good couple of minutes chewing to get down.  Why folk would eat them for pleasure I do not know, a view shared by the rest of the party.

Whilst it was good to knock it off the list I'm not sure I'd be rushing back for more penis but, as Gordon Ramsay would say, 'Bull's penis - done!'