Horse Penis and Testicles with a Chilli Dip
For beginners, Miss Zhu recommended the hotpot, which offers a sampling of what the restaurant has to offer - six types of penis, and four of testicle, boiled in chicken stock by the waitress, Liu Yunyang, 22.
The Russian dog was first. It was julienned, and rather gamey.
The ox was, of all six, the most recognisable for what it was, even though it had been diced. In texture seemed identical to gristle.
The deer and the Mongolian goat were surprisingly similar: a little stringy, they had the appearance and feel of overcooked squid tentacles. The Xinjiang horse and the donkey, on the other hand, were quite different. Though both came sliced lengthwise, and looked like bacon, the horse was light and fatty, while the donkey had a firm colour and taste. The testicles were slightly crumbly, and tasted better with lashings of the sesame, soy and chilli dips thoughtfully provided.
i think i just threw up a little
It's important to learn to suppress your gag reflex.
MMMM, bucket of COCK.
Your music choice has been...noted.
I have the nagging feeling that there is something wrong with Asian people.
well, they only have another understanding of food:
if it's moving - you can eat it
what you eat has pretty much to do with conventions.
many chinese people i came across throw up when you give them cheese or quark.
for them it's foul milk and they think that somethings must be wrong with YOU.
Quark? What's quark? Is that a euphemism for something dirty :)?
know curd? - it's exactly the same. ;)
i wouldn't bring up subatomic gastronomy, would i? (there is molecular, though)
Yah, you're right. But the thing with the Chinese is that they'll eat anything, not just what's moving. 100 day old eggs, swallow nests and other assorted weirdness.
Man, this is from a purely Western cultural view, but dude, you gotta draw the line somewhere.
A high proportion of far-easterners don't have the genes for lactose tolerence in adulthood that we westerners take for granted. So milk and cheese makes them actually sick, it's nothing to do with convention.
you are partially right... really, i know asian people
without lactose intolerance, who think that cheese is
gross! what you describe is a phylogeny issue... if you
don't drink milk - you don't need to digest it - therefor
you will not process a necessary enzyme - add darwin - stir!
you will not use milk and you become enstranged from
it. i don't need to be yoda to tell you where that leeds
to... ;) so it is somehow convention. you eat what your
social environment indoctrinates. xenophobia will do
the rest.
would you eat frogs? bugs? haggis? tarantulas?
I can understand eating whatever part of the animal they want to. Less waste and all. I still don't understand the unwavering belief that eating a dick will make you more virile.
Well of course not, it's eating testicles and bear galls that make you more virile. Of course that's obvious. ;)
(BTW, nice pokey icon)
It's interesting that making someone pay for the priviledge would make them willing to do things they would probably find objectionable if offerd compensation for doing so. Surely, with a nice Chateau Lafitte 1974 and snooty waitors, this restaurant could be a big hit someplace by the MOMA.
That would rock! The best thing about going to MOMA was listening to the tour guide's belabored rationalizations. You know, a gal with oh-so-hip librarian glasses, black turtleneck and an oh-so-serious emo expresion giving a half-hour lecture on how a certain piece of "art" (actually a beaten-up Motel6 ashtray) was somehow the metaphysical manifestation of man's struggle with theology, or maybe the ashtray symbolized the oppression of the Chinese peasants, I forget. Anyway, I'd pay to hear their spin on these animal bits.
Ever since i found out that they replaced Duchamp's urinal with an identical copy, since the first one was lost in WW2, I have wondered how any "serious" art critic has not been eliminated as obsolete technology.
To get this back on topic, I have to admit, people do all sorts of things , motivated by misguided drives for sex and food that I can only view as amusing performance art.
Of course, the copy is even more artistically valid and better states the point that Duchamp was trying to make: that a random, used, urinal would be considered art if he said it was supposed to be art. Now we have an identical copy of a used, random urinal and we're calling it art.
I greatly enjoy Brian Eno's story of how he filled a rubber tube with his own piss and dribbled it into the urinal through a gap in the glass protecting it.
I had never heard the Eno story before. That's brilliant. Thanks.
The story was mentioned in Boing Boing a while back. Do a search for Fountain and Brian Eno and you should get it.
Interesting that you would suggest that the issue was the result of misguided lust and gluttony. I had my bets on pride and envy.
As for critics, I think they've become far more important now that the primary value of an artwork isn't its physical manifestation, but the spin used to make it seem "important". Any fool can look at a urinal. But only a specially-trained expert can turn it into a valuable and socially-acceptable artwork in people's minds.
If you don't think these "art critics" matter, try to imagine how long the power hierarchies of the world would last without their PR gurus.
My particular favourite was the completely white canvas, that the artist demanded was repainted white every few years. With a roller.
I think the artist is dead now, but I can fully imagine him in the afterlife every time he's drunk telling his mates the story that starts "Yeah, you think that's something? Listen to what *I* got those idiots to do..."
Don't kill all artists. Kill the critics.
I hadn't heard the bit about it being repainted. That's a nice twist.
I spent nearly an hour in front of that white canvas listening to the various tour guides provide various explanations to the slack-faced philistines. One touching speech described it as an expression of the ultimate ennui, emptiness and loneliness in a post-modern life where everything is possible, and thus nothing is worth doing. Another good yarn was that the canvas was the meticulously-painted likeness of the the nurturing, primordial wellspring of artistic creation finally given its proper recognition.
In the ancient world, the value of an artwork was closely tied to the artist's ability to show off their culture's ability to create. But what kind of artwork best represents our modern world? We live in a culture that accepts as "normal" things like Wal*Mart, MySpace, Paris Hilton, intellectual property patents, celebrity pet therapists, paying big bucks for eco-friendly goods made by tortured slave laborers, shopping around for churches with nice gyms and upbeat priests that can rationalize away our sins, egregious abuses of power by governments run like Ponzi schemes, etc. Isn't the "artwork" in MOMA brilliantly capturing the very essence of what our culture values above everything else -- the quality of the swindle?
Absolutely, but,alas,though we value it greatly, actually admitting it explicitly would make so many sham and consensus "nicey-nice" lies of the world tumble in a domino rally string...and then where would we be? standing pretty in the dust that was a city?
The process of even something as mundane as art being legitamated and validated through an institutionalized gallery, art dealer, and exhibition process is already dependent on keeping up the facade of "trust us we know what we're talking about".
You know? That's quite an upbeat story. When life gives you nasty animal bits that normal people won't buy and that you would otherwise throw away, find a way to convince stupid tourists and superstitious fools to buy them as a special.
As Quentin Tarantino so eloquently put it in Reservoir Dogs: "Dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick."
Pardon me, I've got to go pour bleach in my eyes.
*YEAAAARGH!*
There, that's better.
"[...] while the donkey had a firm colour and taste."
Eat donkey dick. For real, even.
okay, THAT is not vegan.
Yeah, the chicken broth really ruins it.
Always looking for a new way to eat cock, aren't we?
Efficiency is good - it'd be a shame to waste a perfectly tasty cock.
It'd also be a shame not to make vanilla out of cow shit.
But we already have imitation vanilla extract, and it's made from the trees that these cows are digesting. What is the point of running it through the cow first?
Also, at my grocery store, the price of real vanilla extract is $3.40 an ounce vs. $1.15 an ounce of the same brand of imitation. That's one-third the price. I can't imagine anyone preferring the dung version, especially if it costs more.
this was in my
dreamsnightmares last night.i think i was being forced to eat boiled cock
and it was all gray and disintigrating.
*shudders*
thanks again....
Dear Chinese people,
Please stop exploring your cuisine. It's beginning to really freak us out.
Love, American People.
My main objection isn't that it's disgusting (no more so than any other organ meat that Westerners have been eating for years), but that it doesn't sound like it would make for very good food. The penis is composed largely of spongy erectile tissue that probably wouldn't taste very good when cooked. As they stated I'd imagine somewhere between gristle and overcooked kidney.
Testicles... well, the same as most unplesant organ meats really. Likely spongy, crumbly, and not the sort of thing a sensible person puts in thier mouth regardless of what they were originally used for by the organism in question.
Almost as yummy as GenPets
In case anyone was wondering: NOT VEGAN.
If ever you find yourself in the seedier (read: rural) parts of the Philippines, don't forget to order lansiao. Soup Number Five is a good choice too.
Then again, I'm sure you've already stopped at balut. :)