Rare or medium rare Fantastic foods from far flung places

by Nicola Shepherd

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IT IS�still generally true that you won't find your fellow Brits munching on some unmentionable part of a monkey, or chewing on anything with more than four legs. But we are becoming a little more adventurous, thanks to some intrepid countryside foragers and cooks such as Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.

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Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

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It was he who, through his River Cottage�TV series, introduced us to the tastes of squirrel and rook, and showed us just how much of a pig you can eat; 'everything by the oink,' apparently.

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While this hasn't exactly opened the floodgates of� passion for killing for food, it has opened our eyes and perhaps made us a little more tolerant of those who eat things we'd rather not even�stroke.

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Bird's nest soup does appear on Chinese restaurant menus in this country, but we have yet to see some sea swallow spit, rat or snake as�a cooking ingredient or even the highly-prized fish flotation bladder.

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There are plenty of sources of weird foods and recipes on the net. Ray's List (www.andreas.com/foodhtml) reminds us not only that in Africa they eat grasshopppers (well, we've all seen David Attenborough do it), crickets eaten in Japan, bull penis is cooked in South East Asia and monkey brains�are on the menu in Hong Kong. And, we have some strange tastes nearer home, too.

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In Italy songbirds are regarded as�a delicacy; in Sardinia they eat maggot cheese; in Canada Seal Flipper Pie, and some Australians go mad for the wichety grub.

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Ray also lists items from our own larder; namely, oysters, black pudding, tripe, eel and, oddly, flavoured crisps.

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In the seriously weird category, there are Chinese drunken shrimps that are plucked from a tank of rice wine to have their heads bitten off live, just like a jelly baby; and, from the Phillippines a fertilised egg, which has to be buried for a few weeks before tasting. This is apparently known as the 'treat with feet' or the 'egg with legs.'