There were 30 of us. The year was 1987, just a year or two after the famous “opening” of China to full-scale invasion by Western students. The night before we’d spent in primitive concrete tourist yurts in the far reaches of northeastern China. There were those among us who would have made some effort to spend the night on the steppes in a real yurt except that smelly, smoky yak-skin tents in the middle of winter sounded even less attractive than the unheated round cement things that could have passed for a bad facsimile of trailer-park igloos. Besides, we got to sleep on/under smelly yak skins on the bed, so that was plenty “authentic.”
This was leading to something about food.
Right. Having escaped with most of our extremities, we headed back toward alleged civilization in the form of the Empress’s Summer Palace. The Empress had a summer palace in the far reaches of northeastern China because even in the old days Beijing was ungodly hot, dusty, polluted and miserable in summer. (This stands in stark contrast to winter when it’s cold, dusty, polluted and miserable and any sensible Empress would make her way to Suchou or someplace actually habitable.)
The “highlight” (and I use that word in its most quotation-mark-enclosed sense) of the winter Summer Palace tour circa 1987 was the “Empress’s Royal Meal.”
We started with an appetizer of bird’s nest soup. For those who don’t know, this is soup made with the delicacy less colorfully known as regurgitated bird-spit.
That was followed closely by “Phoenix tongues” aka pigeon tongues. (I’ll teach you to spit at me… off with their tongues!)
By this point in the evening the more sensitive East-Coast prep-school girls (and I use that term instead of “women” intentionally) were falling by the wayside.
Then the dishes began to come fast and furious.
Sea slug. Remember school when you used to chew erasers and eat old rubber cement? Sea slug is exactly half way between the two. But as any chef will tell you, it’s all in the sauce. And like the pigeon tongues and the bird-spit soup before them, the spices were… well, they were far too bland. Northern Chinese are not known for their spices. So forget the idea of the sauces saving any of this meal.
Pork trotters showed up somewhere in the process. Once again, there are ways you can cook pigs feet that make them taste okay. Or you can cook them for a bunch of tourists and not worry about that not-so-vague hint of barnyard. Next, please.
About this point I should mention that none of the staff speak any English at all. Most of the students are first- and second-year level and have really minimal Chinese skills. Our advisers had made themselves scarce. Gone out to drink and eat with the cooks, I believe. Therefore, it is up to the three or four of us who have 3rd and 4th year Chinese and who are generally fond of food to try to puzzle out what each dish is and to explain it to the rest of our comrades.
You’d think sea slug would be challenging, but that one is relatively simple. If it’s from the ocean, rubbery-looking and it isn’t squid or octopus or jellyfish, then it’s sea slug.
Then it got a little more challenging. But with the major foodgroups as our guide, and through liberal use of beer-enhanced charades skills and creativity, we were able to work a few things out: Beef tendon was especially hard to identify though because it looks rubbery and sea-slug-like but comes from a large mammal instead of under some rock somewhere. Also, “tendon” ain’t a word that’s in a person’s everyday foreign-language vocabulary.
Pig ears were served, of course. Cartilage and rubber, just like they ever were. If any of the more delicate types were eating anything heavier than beer I didn’t catch ‘em doing it. Personally, I’ve never had a problem eating pig ears. It’s all in the sauce.
The plate of “Four Preciouses” arrived. Easy: Tongue, heart, liver and kidney. Well, kidney was not so easy, but “that thing diabetics have trouble with” led to a positive ID.
About this point I asked where the rest of the cow and the drumsticks and breast from the bird and the shoulder of the pig were. With a completely straight face, the wait-comrade said, “Of course the empress cannot eat such pedestrian fare.” With a flash of insight I said, “So the cooks and wait-staff have to take the rib-eye steaks, the pork shoulder roast, the bacon and anything not defined as offal home to get that crap out of her sight, right?”
“Yep,” he said with a smile.
“So that’s what you’re doing to us too, right?”
He retorted, “Oh no, we’re giving you an authentic Royal Meal Experience(tm).”
“Right,” I said, “Chinese cooks are very clever.”
“Very clever,” he repeated, “5000 years clever.”
“More beer,” I suggested.
Then with great fanfare, the highlight of the meal arrived and was announced: Exploding Flower Dish! Discs of something notched around the edges. You can certainly see where the flower reference comes from, but what of the “exploding.” It’s not spicy. It just lies there in its sauce with nothing resembling an explosion.
The charades begin. The beer flows. Those of us brave enough to dig in without a positive ID dig in. Rubbery. Once again, nothing more than a chewy carrier for sauce.
Beef? No. Pork? No. Bird? No. From the Sea? No.
Okay, dredge up the barnyard words and keep going.
Sheep? No. Goat? No. Cat? No. Dog? No.
Running out of barnyard words.
Yak? No. Horse? No.
Stretching here.
Tiger? No. Bear? No. Fox? No.
Deer? Bingo! BTW, “deer” is really really hard to pronounce in Chinese and it’s not a common word since any wild deer were pretty much eaten ages ago.
Okay, but what part of the deer. This clearly ain’t your daddy’s venison steak.
I’ll save you the litany of body parts. We tried ‘em all. We thought.
Then I dug deep down in my memory for the “street Chinese” I had learned in Taiwan’s less reputable alleys. I made the waiter lean over and I whispered to him quietly. He nodded.
He said to me with his perfect poker face, “But we’d never call it by such a crude term; it’s ‘Exploding Flower Dish.’”
“That explains the ‘exploding part’,” I said in Chinese. He smiled.
Then I said in English, “I know what it is, but I’m sworn to secrecy until everyone has tried at least one bite.”
When they all had grudgingly tried it, and I finally pointed out that we were eating deer dick, the reaction was… priceless.
Ahhh, yes, sweetbreads. The only time I ever ordered them I thought I remembered they were code for brains. A few weeks later the whole BSE thing really got news and I was happy to discover I was mistaken. At the time I ordered ‘em because for some strange reason I really didn’t feel like sharing my meal with my co-eaters that night. It worked.
As for my story, I love the image of all those young “preppies” (male and female) who forever after had to report they’d not only had a dick in their mouths but who had to admit they’d eaten it.