Coming up on today’s Moncrieff Show, Seán will be finding out the finer points of global dining and talking to writer Mimi Sheraton, author of 1,000 Foods to Eat Before You Die.
Sheraton, a journalist and restaurant critic, will be guiding Seán on a culinary odyssey, revealed the choices she made when compiling her list. Crossing cultures and the globe, her list takes in the haute and the snack, comfort and exotic, the hyper-local and the universally devoured.
Listen in live today at 2pm: http://newstalk.ie/player/
If an enviable list of 1,000 foodstuffs to try before shuffling off this mortal coil seems too mammoth a task to take on, you could always take a look instead at this list of five foods to try, but only as a last resort...
(Trigger warning: while almost everybody will find the following foods horrible, some people may find the photographs disturbing)
- Lutefisk:
Those Norwegians sure are fond of a nice piece of healthy cod – just why they marinade it in an industrial cleaning fluid remains a mystery. The fish is soaked in lye (potassium hydroxide/sodium hydroxide), which is normally used for cleaning drains or fuelling batteries. Contact with it can cause chemical burns and blindness – and presumably a bad dose of heartburn.
[Wikipedia Commons]
- Pacha:
An Iraqi stew made by boiling a sheep’s head, the flesh then falls off the bone and into your mouth. But wait, that’s only half the culinary fun, as you chow down on the bone marrow and pick every edible morsel from the skull. Season to taste.
[Pixabay]
- Balut:
You’re stumbling home from a night painting Manila red, on the hunt for some street food to sate your rumbling tummy. Well, avoid anything egg shaped, as it might just be a duck foetus that’s incubated long enough to have feathers, then hardboiled and eaten whole. The bill comes at no extra charge.
[Wikipedia Commons]
- Baby Mice Wine
Need something to wash down the crunchy duck bone-filled balut, but now have caught a taste for foetal foods? Well wash it down with the cheapest white wine you can find infused with the flavour of baby mice. Bottoms up...
[Reddit]
- Casu Marzu:
It’s traditional to finish any meal with a cheese course, and all this now-outlawed Sardinian stinker needs is some nice cream crackers and some quince paste. It’s a ewes’ milk cheese that’s intentionally invested by Piophila Casei, better known as cheese flies. The flies lay their eggs with turn into wriggling maggots you can chow down on as part of a cheese dish that will definitely give you nightmares.
