My palate has come a long way from my "Europe through the gutter" days, when my travel diet consisted of peanut butter and strawberry jam on cheap baguettes. Now one of my favorite parts of travel is sampling local specialties. From horse meat in France to pig's ears in Spain, I make it a point to try dishes that make a place unique — no matter how strange or unappetizing they sound.
Think of it as sightseeing for your palate.
How much you enjoy the food (or the experience) depends on your attitude. Remember, "weird" is subjective. Take the Dutch classic, salt-cured herring. With their seafaring heritage, the Dutch embrace this vitamin-rich food. This delicacy is something you won't forget (no matter how hard you try).
I still remember the first time I tried pickled herring. It was market day in the town of Haarlem, and I was at a herring stand — the Dutch version of a hot dog stand. The fish looked more like bait than lunch.
Sensing my hesitation, Jos, the friendly herring vendor, demonstrated how to eat it. He mimed swallowing a sword, and said, "I give you the herring Rotterdam-style. You eat it like this. If I chop it up and give you these" — he pointed to the toothpicks — "this is Amsterdam-style."
After my first bite, the only polite comment I could muster was, "It's salty." Later, as I wandered through the market taking Amsterdam-style bites of my Rotterdam-style herring, I felt a kinship with the Dutch.
Tradition and history
Like Dutch herring, local specialties often stem from tradition and history. It's said that Roman cooking didn't come out of emperors' or popes' kitchens, but from the cucina povera — the home cooking of the common people. This may explain the Romans' fondness for meats known as the quinto quarto (fifth quarter), such as tripe, tail, brain and pigs' feet, as well as their interest in natural preservatives like garlic.
Haggis, Scotland's national dish, also began as peasant food. Cooks, unwilling to let any part of a sheep go to waste, would create a hearty meal by boiling scraps of heart, liver and lungs in stomach lining. The trick to appreciating such dishes is to think of how it tastes, not what it's made of — just like with caviar or hot dogs.
Even France's foie gras, which has attracted endless controversy for the method of fattening livers by force-feeding geese, is one of the country's most expensive indulgences for a reason. The dish is most popular in the Dordogne region, where ages ago, locals caught geese on their migration — and found the goose livers were enlarged for the long journey (like traveling with a topped-off gas tank). As French are inclined to do, they ate the innards, found them extra-tasty, and decided to produce their own.
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Source: Strange food: Take a bite of Europe's offbeat delicacies
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