Shrimp's No Lightweight

I thought the shrimp was dead. It had arrived at our table (a great round one in a restaurant in Dalian, a seaside town in northern China) gray, whole, and unmoving. Grandma, across the table, became excited, clapping her hands and insisting that I be the first to try one. We were 15 at this table, we had downed two pitchers of local beer—per person—and my Chinese, never much to begin with, was feeling the booze (Chinese is one of those rare languages which is not coaxed to fluency by drinking). I was, it barely needs to be said, the only white person at the table, and after having eaten pig ear, duck brain, and frog that day, I had learned that it was pointless to resist my hosts. So I selected a plump shrimp from the bowl. I figured they were just raw—like sushi, maybe—only a little more complicated to eat. I started trying to peel it and the gosh darn thing jumped out of my hand.

I leapt back in terror and Grandma fell out of her chair laughing. The shrimp flopped onto the table and started trying to escape. The woman next to me snatched it up, held it in front of my face, and said, “Here, like this,” whereupon she delicately cracked the head off, neatly peeled the skin away, dragged the still-wriggling flesh through a bowl of brown sauce, and happily popped it into her mouth.

Still a little shell-shocked, as it were, I asked them why in God’s name we were eating live shrimp. They looked at me, puzzled—wasn’t it obvious? “Very fresh!” said the father proudly. That they were, indisputably. The problem was that they were also fairly reluctant to be eaten. I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think these were drunken shrimp, the famous Chinese dish, in which the crustaceans are first immersed in high-quality Chinese baijiu liquor (an oxymoron, if you ask me) in order to ensure cooperativeness in the eating process, then eaten, drunk and happy. I don’t recall any taste of liquor. What I do remember is the uncanny feel of a slick, smooth shrimp slithering sinuously down my throat, followed by the vicious punch of that brown sauce, which tasted like some kind of liquid wasabi. As my fingers were not as agile as they had been before I’d put down two pitchers of Dalian’s finest brew, it took me a good four or five tries to get the hang of the cracking/peeling process—the shrimp were passionately opposed to this and kept getting away. The only problem was, where drunken shrimp are not only suffused with the grapey fire of baijiu, they’re also loaded with scallions, which provide both crunch and flavor. These shrimp had no garnish, and outside of the wasabi sauce, no flavor to speak of. Certainly, they were most outlandish of all the bizarre foods I’d been fed that day, but taste-wise, they only beat out the pig ear (like a dog chew toy, tough to the point of inedible). The frog had been delicious—texturally, a perfect cross between fish and chicken, but without fish’s tendency to fall apart or chicken’s lack of moisture—but so spicy, even my hosts couldn’t eat it. The duck brain, and the peppercorn-studded roast duck head that it came in, was phenomenal, like an earthy foie gras. I’d even rank it above pig neck.

Traveling through Asia, one is bound to come across some rather alien foodstuffs—pig uterus in Sichuan and spiders in Cambodia, for example. There is, for instance, an old, endlessly invoked saying about the southern Chinese, that they will eat anything with legs that’s not a table or chair. But one has to be careful about over-exoticizing—or assuming that Asia is the only place where, for example, pig penis is common street food, or fugu, the famously toxic fish, a wildly expensive delicacy. One finds warped treats all over the world. Americans invented the Rocky Mountain oyster, for example—also known as the swinging sirloin, or the huevos de toro—and I have never heard a more euphonious name for a dish than the exquisite petites cervelles d’agneau, little lambs’ brains, seen in a bistro in Paris. From Britain we get haggis and blood pudding. From Scandinavia, lutefisk. Is there actually any fish involved in gefilte fish, or is that just an endearing myth? The variety of weird foods humans have succeeded in finding appetizing is astonishing. Every culture has its fragrant and revolting delicacies. Everywhere I go, there’s some alarming fruit whose mere smell triggers gastric rebellion (durian), or a stir-fried meat by product not eaten since the days of Nero (lamb eyes).

Sometimes I can’t force myself to choke it down—I couldn’t even eat durian cookies, much less come within five feet of the actual fruit—but sometimes shutting your eyes and swallowing can pay off. Lamb eyes, it turns out, are not too bad—a little like seared liver. We should open ourselves up more to eating the deeply bizarre. At the very least you get a good story out of it. It’s like your mother told you: try it, it won’t kill you.
Unless, of course, it’s fugu