Adventure on the menu

I think of myself as an adventurous eater. I’ve had kangaroo in Australia, crocodile in Cambodia, deep-fried Mars bar in Scotland… but not much could have prepared me for my trip to China.

In the narrow, brightly lit streets of Beijing, street vendors start early, preparing the day’s delights: steamed buns filled with pork, prawns or vegetables (known as baozi); spicy lamb kebabs (chuan’r) cooked on roadside barbecues; and tanghulu, ‘fresh’ fruit on bamboo skewers covered in sugary syrup. The tanghulu sellers cycle their wares around the city, the fruit becoming steadily less fresh in the heavily polluted air, until by nightfall it’s best not to look too closely.

Wangfujing and Donghuamen night market is where you will find the more exotic menus. There’s shark fin, birds’ nest soup (made from the saliva of cave swifts), all manner of deep fried insects, donkey and dog meat.

First up on the menu for me was a seahorse, which led to immediate feelings of guilt. Poor seahorse! How could I? The taste was similar to soft-shell crab but extremely salty.

Next up, grasshopper and my first bug. Nothing cute about him, I thought, I’ll be fine. No such luck. It was disgusting: crispy on the outside and with a peculiarly unpleasant soft and chewy centre. Its wings stuck in my teeth. It makes me grimace to think of it even now.

A young boy who had just finished off a scorpion in two bites bet me that I couldn’t do the same. So, after being assured that the heat from the grill had neutralised the venom and that the sting had been removed, I took up the challenge. But this one was easy! Crispy, like fried chicken, but no gooey centre, no horrid surprises, and now I knew why the brat had been so confident — he had eaten one before. Just for a moment I considered upping the ante and daring him to take a bite of a sheep penis, which lay curled around a skewer on the tray. But it turns out I’m not quite that adventurous after all.