The culinary oddity post

It's me, so you knew this was coming.

Town has a great market. Score. Deep fried on a stick, barbecued in a bag, and seafood from the port across the street.

Generally, seafood in a port town, especially when fresh-caught and just-fried, is pretty amazing. I'll confess to going out of my way for it. And the shrimp cakes didn't disappoint: shrimp with lemongrass and chili in a thick egg batter fried into fritters most comparable in size and texture—although about antithetical in flavor—to my grandmother's potato pancakes, with a bit of extra crunch from the shell.

Fresh baby shrimp, lemongrass, chili, some leafy greens (maybe mustard?) a dash of Waugh's curry powder, and enough egg to hold it together until the protein sets up in a bath of nearly-smoking oil.

But then there were the fish: most of the fish on sale is not quite dead. I figured I'd be safe with whole fried skates, a big side fillet of white meat and some little, cooked looking jobbies in a reddish sauce.

Well, the little jobbies were sundried, bone-in sardines with the sweet barbecue that goes on Chinese pork ribs. And the hank of whitefish was, well, hard to describe: I can't really call it a spitter because it would've been easier to gnaw off a mouthful of steel-belted radial. By the time I did finally get a mouthful, all the flavor had been leeched and I found myself sucking on a hunk of proteinish resilience.

Based on the skin, I thought it was a big mackerel. But it might've been a shark, as one end was solid and crunchy with cartilaginous resilience.

I joke that I'm the human garbage disposal, but it really has been a long time since I've thrown away much food. Usually, I'd rather suffer through eating something I've botched than give up on it.

But I couldn't find any redeeming aspects of the whatever it was. It wasn't crispy fried, it didn't have great dried-beef flavor, it wasn't even horribly alluring and pungent. It was a bland, rubbery, jaw-aching challenge to gnaw into a mouthful, and by then it was a lump of flavorless.

Call the skates a victory, although even that was mixed: they fry up with a texture similar to, say, turkey jerky. But there's a catch. Of course. The skin: they have one-way teeth on their skin, and nasty little nubbins run down their tails. If they are either mature enough to be growing the tail spikes, or the processing didn't quite get the bigger nubbins on the skin, it's kind of like biting into turkey jerky through a nice layer of sandpaper.

Here's where the Thais nail it as well as French cooking: tap the local flora for anything that could reduce or counteract the negative characteristics of the local fauna, marinade the hell out of it in spicy sweet acidic something, then throw it either on extreme heat to kill any undesireables without compromising flavor, or slow-cook it until any of the originally undesirable characteristics have been reduced to tender morsels of flavor.

Chicken intestines (which is my best guess of what exactly they were) are succulent and have a creamy finish. Pig lung has the texture of organ meat but the flavor of a shoulder roast. Heart and tongue are just good, dark meat. And jellied blood is as expected: not the inherent flavor nearly so much as the culmination of what went into it; would be great with camembert cheese, in the edition I tried.

What's odd is that chicken whatnots are more expensive than trimmed-up strips of chicken breast: flavor-wise, there's no comparison. But it's odd to come from the Americophobic world and see boneless, skinless (flavorless) breast for less than the weirdo whatnots that usually get thrown away.