Queen Marie Antoinette is often given credit for saying, “let
them eat cake”, which exemplified her disdain for the French peasants who could
not afford the price of bread. After what I witnessed yesterday, though, it may
be time to upgrade the phrase.
My wife and I were a few blocks from home, after running a few
errands, when a HUGE black crow landed on the road about 100 feet in front of
our car. After a brief pause, it flew off again. Naturally, that triggered an
old memory in my head, which I’ll share with you in a couple of minutes.
I discovered a couple of years ago that a large percentage of
the people of Africa actually consume rats as their protein source. Believe it
or not, you can find numerous recipes on line on how to cook rats. The link below is one example:
None of those recipes, incidentally, would be considered
ratatouille, which is a dish that it made entirely of VEGETABLES. Here is the
Disney ratatouille recipe:
Eating crow is a colloquial
idiom, used in English-speaking countries that means humiliation by admitting
having been proven wrong after taking a strong position. Crow is presumably foul-tasting in the same
way that being proven wrong might be emotionally hard to swallow.
Since
there ARE recipes on line for cooking rats, I though that there might be
recipes on line for cooking crow, and I was right. I found the video below on
YouTube yesterday:
If you ignore the fact that the man in this video is eating
crow, the finished product actually looks pretty good. Keep in mind, though,
that I lived in China for a year, where you will find PLENTY of unusual foods
being served on a regular basis.
The SARS epidemic of 2002, incidentally, was caused by people
in southern China eating civet cats. I saw bamboo rat, snake, and donkey on
menus, and I knowingly consumed a couple of cooked worms, AFTER I had a couple
of beers. I also witnessed people at a large shopping center eating squid on a
stick, and chicken feet REALLY ARE considered to be a treat by a lot of people.
Would I eat cooked crow? Not a chance, and I’d feel a lot
better if we had one of these guys in our neighborhood:
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