Meat for Jesus

In a rare reunion of the Taipei and Taichung ends of the Donkey, the Christmas season proved to hold several spectacular culinary experiences. Kinger and I began the festivities with a Christmas feast at the home of Wade Davis and family. Davis outdid himself as per usual, this time by not only roasting up a healthy sized turkey, but also serving up a full leg (cloven hoof and all) of one of Taiwan's famously succulent black mountain pigs. And I'm not talking some puny suckling piglet. This was a full-grown beast of the mountains--think Lord of the Flies. This limb must have weighed in at around 10 kg and was close to 3 feet in length. Due to these mammoth proportions, home cooking was out of the question. Unperturbed, Davis hauled this obscene hunk of flesh down to the local Peking Duck joint and had them roast it up in one of the oil drums they use for the ducks. It was a sight for sore eyes, believe you me. This spread was fit for the table of Henry the 8th, Genghis Kahn, or John Candy. The flesh from these two creatures could have easily fed 100 men. When Kinger entered the threshold and saw the bounty before him, he was overcome and swooned. Luckily he was caught in the strong embrace of his life-partner, Sabrina, saving him from a nasty fall. We quickly revived him by waving a chunk of pork fat under his nose. The ensuing feast was properly gluttonous. The meat was so delicious and plentiful that several of the guests went into a meat frenzy and took leave of their senses. They started attacking the food like Friar Tuck and making guttural noises like Helen Keller. We had to restrain them in chairs and feed them by spoon until they'd regained their sense of decorum. 

Boxing day proved to be equally exhilarating on the culinary front. We took a field trip down to the Zhong Hua night market for some special holiday snacks. Me and Kinger quickly separated from the group and made a bee-line straight for the offal. On the menu were testicles of rooster and small intestine of pig. If you've never had rooster testes, you might imagine them to be dense and rubbery. How wrong you would be. The rooster testicle, much like pig's brain, can be most closely compared with a semi-soft tofu, in both taste and texture. This was the second time I had sampled this delicacy and it was prepared differently both times. The first time they were cooked in a kind of gravy with mushrooms. As with many Chinese dishes, the ingredients mimicked each other in size, shape and colour. Thus one could never be sure if one was raising a mushroom or a testicle to one's lips until actually biting down. If one was lucky enough to hit a testicle, it was like a happy surprise as the delicate juices burst forth. At the night market, the testes were prepared with an indigenous mountain vegetable of Taiwan called 'chuan chi', along with large slices of ginger, and sesame oil. It was a perfect harmony of flavours and textures. Chuan chi is a spade shaped vine leaf, similar to spinach but with more girth and a smoother texture. It has a rich but mellow flavour that complemented the creamy taste and texture of the testicles. The ginger contributed the sharper staccato notes while the sesame oil provided the smooth underlying nuttiness.

I'll leave you now to ponder the wonder of rooster testicles. Next up: the skinny on pig intestine.