Mouthing Off | From fish heads to chicken feet: why some Asian diners love to gnaw on bones and gristle
- While most Western cooks prefer trimmed meat and filleted fish, some Asian diners like to eat their food off the bone and shell
- Nose-to-tail eating may be a trend in the West, but has never gone out of style in Asia
They say real men don’t eat quiche. I would go further and say the really masculine real men also gnaw on gristle and bones.
There’s nothing more primal than eating a roast chicken with your hands, tearing off the legs and wings and using your teeth to get all the meat from the bones. It’s almost as satisfying as digging into a plate of barbecued ribs with the sauce staining your fingernails, or attacking every crevice of a lobster, so you can suck out the tasty green tomalley.
Eating has always been one of life’s great tactile and sensual pleasures. Think of all those portraits of English king Henry VIII, where he’s holding his giant turkey leg. But somewhere in the course of Western society’s prudish progress, it was decided genteel people shouldn’t touch their food. Proper, civilised behaviour meant that using utensils was the correct way to eat.
So, we dress up and gentrify our sustenance as etiquette demands. Fine cuisine isn’t devoured but nibbled on. Fish is filleted, meat is trimmed and deboned, even the skin on potatoes and fruit has to be removed for sanitised consumption.
