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.
At the risk of making broad racial generalisations, that’s the difference between Asian and Caucasian dining.
We delight in the challenge and work of picking flesh from the carcass. We see a fish head and think, “Yum, can’t wait to braise that thing in curry and suck it clean.” To us, true gastronomic appreciation is chewing the fat, licking the skin, jawing on tendon and cartilage, then spitting the bones out on the table.
When I lived in Canada, the local KFC loved my uncle because whenever he ordered a bucket, he always demanded “no breast meat”. The manager happily obliged because everybody else wanted the breast. My uncle hated the dry and bland white meat, which had little of that secret herbs and spices coating. The bony dark meat had the delicious crispy batter stuck all around.
Admittedly, not all Asian diners fit this mould. Mughal chefs in India created a royal kebab called galouti, where the meat is minced so finely that chewing was unnecessary. It was considered luxury for the nobility of the time.
In many cultures, it is the poor who are the true pioneers of nose-to-nail dining. It certainly wasn’t a rich guy who first cooked cod sperm or marinated duck tongue, or who turned a pig’s snout into a terrine. Eating the more unusual cuts of meat came about through poverty.
When you see a fried shrimp head on a Japanese plate, it’s not meant to be decoration. You’re supposed to eat it. Really good chefs will skilfully fry prawn shells so you can crunch the whole exoskeleton. That’s why they season the outside of a shrimp.
What can I say, real men can sometimes be real lazy.
