You Just Had to Pick That, Didn’t You?!

When it comes to food, I like to think I’m a fairly Catholic eater. Innards of all sorts hold no fear for me, though I have yet to visit a penis restaurant.

I’ve braved insects, including, yes, grubs (which appear in our local Chinese supermarket rather disconcertingly placed between the green leafy vegetables and the mushrooms).

I’ve eaten snake, crocodile, kangaroo, reindeer, goat, sea urchin, jellyfish, snails and rabbit, though not yet guinea pig, horse, donkey or dog, and forced Icelandic dried fish crispy snacks past my gag reflex (yes, they do taste as bad as they smell).

I’ve eaten in restaurants with pigs grunting in the dirt at my feet and bought and consumed meat in markets where the main concession to hygiene is waving a plastic bag on a stick when the flies cluster too closely.

I can’t pass a new green vegetable or fruit without trying it to see how it tastes, or a steaming vat cooking on the pavement without investigating further.

I like eating curry for breakfast, whether with roti canai or as a vegetarian dhal, actively appreciate the Vietnamese way with snails, can gorge on steak tartare, sashimi and oysters, and am rather a fan of various seaweeds.

AKA, I’m adaptable.

Yes, those are red beans. Yes, that is a dessert. And, yes, it was very nice, thank you.

So, China should really hold no fear for me when it comes to holding up my end at table on a social engagement.

Well, that’s unless I get invited to a banquet and they want me to eat bear paw (yes, it happens, and, no, she didn’t).

Further, I genuinely like almost all varieties of Chinese food. I can’t quite come to terms with cartilage, but I’ll eat it if I inadvertently order something with it (say a chicken kebab with cartilage sections where the onion slivers might sit).

I adore the spicy flavours of Sichuan, up to and including mouth-searing hotpot, the earthy yak, spuds and maize cuisine of northern Yunnan, I pig out on Shanghai dim sum, one of my favourite restaurants in Beijing is Anhui-style, and we are regulars, right now, at our local Chinese barbecue, where we feast on chicken hearts and kidneys.

I can even brave Chinese attempts at Western dishes. Like this one. Can you see what it is, yet?

So you would think that, when my landlord’s son and his girlfriend invited us out to dinner, and I said, “We eat everything! I’d love to try north-eastern food”, we’d have the restaurant covered.

Wrong.

Because, so far, there are three Chinese menu items up with which I cannot put.

1: Chicken feet, sold here in plastic wrappers as a lunchbox snack for little kids, a staple in supermarkets, and a vital ingredient on every train food cart, however posh the train. I find them an absolutely repellent blend of slimy skin, disgusting fat and cartilage, with bugger all by way of flavour to mitigate it.

2: Grubs. Again, I’ve tried these once — the big ones. They were vaguely bitter, with a texture like soggy cardboard, and quite hard to get past the gag reflex, not least because you had to chew them. They are quite possible very bearable when fried to a crisp, as these little ones are here (yes, it’s a snack, like a packet of crisps).

3: Sweet sausages. Now, the combination of sweet and meat is not anathema to me: cf duck à l’orange, Beijing duck, foie gras with Sauternes and pretty much every jus you can think of. And mincemeat originated in medieval England as a blend of dried fruit, meat and spices.

But sweet sausages? I don’t mean sausages with a hint of sweetness (pork and apple, honey and mustard…) – but sickly sweet sausages, a full-on blare of sugar sweetness. I can’t abide them.

In fact, in a choice between the two evils in the pic above (taken in a regular northern Chinese corner shop), I’d go with the grubs over the sausages, any day.

In fact, I’d go with chicken feet over sweet sausages. Provided they had chilli.

“Well,” says the girl, musingly. “There is a very, very delicious Dongbei dish…”

“Excellent!” I say.

“Yes,” she says. “It’s a type of sausage, a meat sausage. And it’s so sweet, so very, very sweet, and so delicious…”

“Ummmm…” I say. “We don’t actually like sweet sausages.”

We ended up, sadly enough, eating Korean in the mall. Because, Jesus, if these crazy laowai won’t eat sweet sausages, who knows what else they will not eat?