March 2021: UNCANNY ENCOUNTERS WITH NICHE MEAT, POULTRY, AND SEAFOOD
To date, my experience in food and cooking has spanned more than ten years, yet I still consider myself as an eternal student of the field and a protégé of the experts even after all those years. Neither self-deprecation nor humor is the basis of my “inferiority complex” but rather it is a joint consequence of my personal acceptance of a greater realm outside my ivory tower and conventional ingredients and my culinary and eating output being confined by the continuum of space and time. Nevertheless, there are certain occasions over the past decade when I do venture out of my comfort zone and dabble into cookery and gastronomic unorthodoxy.
The thought and practice of bringing uncommon animals into the dining table courts controversy particularly during the Lenten season at a time of the ongoing global pandemic and given the zoonotic characteristic of coronavirus infections. The Kitchen Scholar will NOT head into that direction although I must unscrupulously confess to having previously dined on the exotic and the taboo according to Westernized, PETA, or even “civilized” standards. Examples of such include soups of shark’s fin and shark bones, stews of braised monitor lizards, raw slices of deadly blowfish, and fritters of moray eels. These dishes were part of my life, memories, travels, and identity, and my feelings towards them remain ambivalent to this day. That is, I do not mind savoring them with delight when they are served to me, but I do not harbor any bouts of constant cravings even in their prolonged absences in the kitchen and table.
At the same time, I have nitpicked on certain animals that my taste buds will never cross in a million years. Nobody will find me happily feasting on fuzzy lovable creatures like cats and dogs, wild critters like bats, muskrats, and skunks, majestic beasts like elephants, lions, primates, bears, birds of prey, dolphins, and whales, and allergy-triggering monstrosities like spider crabs. In this list of exceptional cases, abstinence will suffice and a one-time experience is sinfully excessive.
To execute this avant garde monthly theme, I dug through my archives of food photos and retrieved their corresponding recipes from classical, cultural, and modern outlooks. These home-cooked dishes only comprise a negligible minority of what I have been studying and churning out of the kitchen for the past ten years. Due to the consumer accessibility of their main ingredients being highly niche, my featured recipes for this month are an exercise of personal curiosity brought by serendipitous discoveries in wet markets, specialty stores, delicatessens, butcheries, and gifts of family friends and distant relatives and are in no way a singular definition of their sole preparation in the kitchen. What these entries do is to provide a temporary escapist yet educational glimpse of their gustatory potential whenever conventional meats, poultry, and seafood have become mundane and predictable.
