In London all many restaurants are serving turkey and Christmas pudding and every office and club wants a group party, ideally a Friday lunch, finishing so late there's no point going back to work, might as well do some Christmas shopping. What exotic food can you buy? Maybe a hamper for the hosts? Or an exotic food for your friends who invited you for a Christmas meal or New Year's eve. Should you buy them a treat or taken them for a meal out?
For some of the people you know chocolate covered insects these would be a gourmet treat. For other people they would just be a joke gift. It might be an idea to ask - and check prices.
What can you take? What would be a treat? Or maybe treat yourself? Or just enjoy window shopping. Caviar? Real caviar from Russia is expensive. Caviar is the egg cells from a fish. I've tried real caviar and, don't tell anybody, but I prefer the cheaper imitation from supermarkets from different fish. Yummy. Many people will be happy with imitation so called caviar in little pots from the UK supermarkets. You can buy it coloured orange or black.
Shellfish? Many restaurants such as Club Gasgon also sell bottled French foods.
Restaurant oysters.
Oyster photo. Courtesy of Trevor Sharot.
Crab shell. Supermarket crab.
I am afraid the crab has gone. Somebody ate all of it. Not me.
Crab shell. Photo by Angela Lansbury.
You can see from the fork in the lower left of the crab shell picture that the crab shell is about the size of a fist, much larger than an oyster. This is not news to people who eat shellfish.
But my pictures will solve a mystery for people like me who never eat shellfish. Like me and some of my friends and acquaintances.
When I was a child we never had frogs nor horsemeat (horse meat not horse men which spell check prefers), eaten by the French, along with snails and oysters. In England we regarded eating horse meat with the same sort of horror and suspicion that most people in the UK still regard these exotic fruits:
1 DURIAN
I ate durians for the first time in a Thai restaurant in Singapore in the 1990s. D u r i a n s (spell checker, horror of horrors, corrected this word to drains), are eaten in season in Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, and now available from some restaurants in London.
Durian? It smells strongly of sulphur. It is banned on the Singapore MRT underground trains and buses and taxis. You will see signs.
The durian fresh fruit I can't eat. But the flavour in ice cream and cakes is wonderful, like mashed banana and chestnut puree. Green. Like pistachio.
2 ANTS
Chocolate covered ANTS and other insects.
3 LOCUSTS
(All kinds of insects available at Xmas time from the major food department of big speciality department stores such as Fortnum and Mason, until stocks run out,.
4 CROCODILE
(I have eaten this in Florida, in the USA. I have a souvenir certificate which I was given on a travel press trip in the USA, somewhere stored hidden behind something more important in one of the 100+ picture frames in my home.)
5 WICHITY GRUB SOUP, Australia.
Soup eaten in a restaurant in Perth, Australia. The grubs are not wiggling around and leaping like tiny dolphins, nor china depictions of the Loch Ness Monster, as I had feared. Just a thick white soup rather like potato soup. Neither disgusting nor delightful. As they say, try anything once. (If I appear to have written nonsense, it's because Spell check thinks W i c h i t a is more likely than w i c h i t y.)
6 BUFFALO meat. USA.
Buffalo or bison were a mystery to me, a visitor from London to the USA in the 1980s. Not to be confused with Buffalo wings, which are chicken wings in sauce, first served in a brain Buffalo in bad weather when chicken and sauce was available and not much else so the cook created a new dish from what was to hand.
7 SNAKE from China. Mescal from Mexico.
Eaten in Shanghai and many parts of China and Asia. Also seasonal. A snake steak is slides so a portion looks like a piece of salmon, circular thick white or pale pink meat, texture of cod, with a circular white bone in the middle.You also see snake inside large glass bottles of wine and flagons of wine.
Mescal from Mexico is a drink with a larva inside. It is sometimes called a worm. Not a worm. Not live.
9 EXOTIC NUTS such as macadamia
Thinking back, when I was a child, most nuts were peanuts, which aren't nuts at all. W, almonds and hazel nuts were an expensive treat. Chestnuts only appeared at Xmas. Pistachio nuts appeared much later in the first Asian restaurants probably in the 1960s. Cashews were a treat.
I had pecan nuts for the first time in the USA in the 1980s, and pecan pie. Now you can get pecan pie in American restaurants in London, and often in the bakery sections of supermarkets.
Then I tried macadamia nuts, for the first time, on a side trip from the USA where we were living, to Hawaii.
Chestnuts were a favourite Christmas treat in England, roasted chestnuts sold from stalls on cold days in November and December. In previous years they were sold outside the World Travel Market in London, outside Excel on the passageway to the Station.
When we went on holiday to Jersey in the Channel Islands we discovered that tins of chestnut paste imported from nearby France were much cheaper and more readily available than the same tins in London supermarkets.
We bought half a dozen tins and had chestnut puree on vanilla ice cream for a quick self-catering lunch on holiday. We took two leftover tins home and enjoyed our holiday treat for a fortnight (two weeks) back in Britain.
10 EXOTIC FRUITS - such as mango
Mangoes were also exotic. Now orange mango juice and transparent red or pink cranberry juice are everywhere in supermarkets in the UK. Hotels buffet breakfast in the UK and Europe, as well as the USA and Asia, often serve in addition to the class orange juice, apple or pineapple juice.
Exotic Foods
Back to shellfish. Now shellfish is in every supermarket in the UK. We can even eat durians from Asia, foods from all over the world. When I was a toddler for several years after WWII ended in 1945 you could not even eat a banana. We still had food rationing until 1952. Yay mother told me you had to queue for bananas.
For more on oysters, see my previous post on oysters.
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer. Author and speaker.
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