Oui, oui! Rabbit. NOT!

Language difficulties can prove at best, a problem when ordering from a menu in other countries. At worst, it can be dangerous, frightening or nauseating.

On one trip we confidently ordered from a  French menu. Cervelles d’agneau. Fine! We knew that agneau was lamb, so how bad could a cut of lamb be?

When the fried brains arrived, my partner blanched. He’s not an offal-eater. Luckily I am, so we switched.

But I was the unlucky one in France (why is it always France we get caught?) hmmm - gotta learn the language, I guess.

Here is an extract from my book Pardon My French where, in the west of France, my menu-French was just not up to it!

‘At Coulon it becomes vital for us to eat soon before it is too late to find a restaurant open. Today we don’t want to picnic. This is our last Sunday in France and I have my heart set on lunching in a restaurant, somewhere memorable. The water’s edge it has to be, and when we sight La Pigouille, with its apple-green shutters and awnings, it seems to have everything I want. Unfortunately on joining the queue, we are told, brusquely, it is absolutely full, and to try again in half an hour.

These restaurants are doing a roaring trade in lunch and boat tour packages. Apart from that, the weather is showing off the Marais at its loveliest and you’d be mad not to want to dine outside by the canal. Further down the barge path, shortly we come across another restaurant, La Passerelle, equally well-located. Also full. However, there is one empty table for two in the corner of the terrace, beside the footpath.

“That’s ours!” I say.

As we approach the waiter, he begins to shake his head until I point it out, and he nods. We’re in! What’s more the blackboard offers a generously priced Menu du Terroir (regional food menu). There is local ham, and fresh Atlantic-caught fish, a plate of regional chevre with salad, and a terrine of myocastor. I query this last one, but the waiter shrugs and makes 'small-animal' running movements with his hands. I ask if it might be rabbit, and he shrugs.

It is only much later that I Google it and discover I have consumed coypu, a small rodent. Yes, I know, I’m pretty shocked to learn this too. It is not consumed in most other parts of Europe (they all say it is harmful – whatever that means) yet is considered a delicacy in Central and South America. It lives in marshy areas, so it is certainly regional here, and looks like a water rat. Too much like a rat, I decide when Google helpfully directs me to a photograph.

I have a Fawlty Towers flashback, channelling Manuel. ‘Eees haaam-ster!

I thought I was well up on food names but this one has caught me. Silly, but I feel quite nauseous for the rest of the day after I find this out. All I can say is, it ‘terrined’ very nicely and tasted enough like rabbit to fool me!’

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If you thought this blog had died and gone to blog-heaven, it hasn’t.

It has merely stalled because we’ve had a huge assignment, visiting 200 Sydney cafes for an exciting app. Find Sydney Café Culture on the iTunes App Store.

Squeamish Ominvore

Once, long ago, I was a vegetarian. Now I define myself simply as a ‘squeamish omnivore’.

To explain – I have never seen the Sardinian cheese meant to be consumed maggots and all, and I don’t know how I would fare with that. But washed rind cheese is fine with me, and while we are onto smelly food, so is durian that love-it hate-it fruit of south east Asia, every bit as ugly to look at as some people say it tastes.

But perhaps the worst-smelling dish I have ever encountered was in the Marquesas in French Polynesia. A favourite local delicacy is raw fish marinated in seawater – for a few days. The stench when the lid was lifted to show me the great treat inside was overpowering. Thank goodness they liked it so much (or me not enough) that they did not offer a taste.

There are some things, though, that I’ll be happy if I don’t ever eat again. Witchetty grub comes right up there at the top of the list. Vic Cherikoff is an Australian bush food expert and he was at a food event many years ago, which I also attended. He was determined I should try witchetty grub. These are fat white grubs a few centimetres long, which live underground and are actually moth larvae. I grew up in Western Australia knowing them as bardi grubs. Either way I had no desire to eat one, even though indigenous people regard them as a delicacy.

Vic was adamant I should taste a grilled grub and I gave in when my generally honest husband, assured me he had already downed one. I have to say the taste was not so bad – buttery (some say they are like peanut butter) and not unpleasant – but it was the texture that got to me. Because it had been grilled, the skin was tough and rubbery and I could not chew it and had no option but to swallow it down pretty well whole. It was only after we left the event that my partner admitted he had disposed of his witchetty grub in a convenient nearby potted palm!

Chicken’s feet in China, or in any dim sum restaurant for that matter, need never be on my plate again either. Nor sea cucumber which I once ate (no, I didn’t – it was like chewing an eraser so I spat it out) at a Vietnamese wedding, and water rat (in France – that story coming up soon) or raw crab in Seoul. Even my Korean guide shuddered at the idea of eating that.

Some other foods I am simply ethically against. Shark fin soup, turtle, bear, tiger, monkey – anything that is rare (and here I don’t mean barely cooked), endangered, or may have been treated cruelly in order for it to be considered fit for human consumption. Foie gras is borderline for me, because of the last point, although I have eaten it often, especially in France.

I can tackle a plate of haggis, and black sausage or boudin noir depending on which country you are in. Andouillettes, too, without a quibble, although for some reason once I get as far south as Lyon they become so strongly flavoured and rank smelling that I swear off them until I reach Paris again on the next trip and discover I can’t resist them, all over again.

In China I have been served pigeon (or some entire small bird, with its head hanging over the edge of the bowl) and camel, alligator, caribou, snails and frog’s legs in other countries.

I grew up eating offal, so brains, bone marrow, tongue, liver, even stuffed heart are no problem – which is lucky, as once in France my husband ordered cervelles d’agneau. The last word meant ‘brains’. We weren’t sure what the other was until the dish arrived – perfectly cooked lamb’s brains, as any Francophone would have known. A quick switch of plates saved the day. Emu, kangaroo and possum, I can stomach, and wallaby is delightful, but caribou - sampled once in the US, was too rare and too sinewy.

Then there is what I call shudder-territory. I hope I am never in the position of being expected to eat any of these creatures – or parts of them: crickets, bugs, snakes, centipedes, dog, cockscombs, bull’s ‘bits’, lark’s tongues, silk worms, duck webs, white veal (aka the unborn foetus), partially developed chickens still in the shell, puff balls, eyeballs, snake blood or fallopian tubes!

And, no, I did not make that last one up – I have a photo of it listed as an ingredient in a restaurant dish in Shanghai.

There’s a lot to make you think twice in this omnivorous world. So, how about a nice drink to calm our nerves?

But not tequila, please. I hear there are worms in that!