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!'

Comments

[Sakkarin]

I am afraid any eating experience which requires either the word "shaft" or the word "helmet" to describe it I would give a very wide berth!

[marko]

Do bulls have helmets

[Joshua Armstrong]

I think that's my favourite blog comment yet.

I'd just assumed every animal's member had a helmet but now I think about it I'm not so sure. Don't really want to use the company Google to find out either.