Loot

Pleasant birthday lunch with friends – a bit quiet for some reason (which is odd for our bunch, we usually all chatter like magpies), but everyone seemed in a good mood, just less talkative than usual.

Much loot. Felt pretty much like a twelve-year-old on Christmas morning – ooh look chocolates from A., Lush bath stuff from V. and P., classy (and cheesy) cards (several of which have great big FIFTYs on the front). A lovely book from Spurious – Blanchot's Friendship – left me trying to explain to P. on the way home what I understand of Blanchot, which is still extremely limited/unclear, but give me time.

The dim sum lunch took a slightly alarming turn – at first my fault; I'd remembered the 'Honeycomb' as having something to do with actual bees and such, but it is actually a kind of pork stomach that had a honeycombed surface (that's a mistake I remember making before); and then I marked the wrong check box, and ended up ordering cold chicken feet instead of something anyone had wanted.

Then the restaurant owner, David, who was very friendly (partly because he knew C., who was wearing a sort of Academy-Awards-cum-country-girl dress) ordered two more dishes for us – spicy hot chicken feet, and baby pork on the bone, both not the sorts of things I would not normally allow to get near my plate. We did eat some of everything – some of the guys did the macho I-Can-Eat-This kind of thing – but not by any means all of it....

The Germans have some useful words that translate as our 'ick': ekelig, ekelhaft – I swear that they're really just extended forms of 'ick', if some philologist ever works it out. (The ultimate literary spin on the concept of 'ick' is in Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49, at the end of the fake Jacobean play – go look it up, it's one of the funniest moments in modern fiction).

All of which makes this entry, written before I get back to work on the article, devolve into a List Of Things I Hope Never To Face At The Table Again:

* Chicken feet (slimy and gristly, even when hot)
* Tripe (unless chopped up in haggis, which isn't all that bad)
* Pig's feet
* Chewy jellyfish (not as bad as some of the others, but fairly unpleasant)
* Duck's feet (see first entry)
* Fugu (a sort of sticky mustard-brown paste that tastes much as it looks)
* Sjøstrøming (Swedish rotted herring – once was more than enough, even with plenty of akvavit to wash it down)
* Unidentifiable pig parts or unspecified 'mixed meats'
* Sea cucumber (nothing like cucumber – since they're really giant slugs – a nerve-wrackingly authentic Vietnamese restaurant in Irvine, California, proved to me that I should never go near them again. You can slice them like you would a jelly roll, but...)

On the other hand, deep-fried shrimp heads aren't so bad. Go ahead: try one....

Comments

[Daniel]

As much as I love homestyle Chinese cooking, people in that part of the world, I think, will eat almost anything if you just fry it enough.
Happy Birthday to you..