The meat - predictably - tastes like the dark meat of chicken. Rabbit heads, meanwhile, come in two flavors: numbingly hot and seasoned with five spices. The brain and the eye, which some regard as treats, are acquired tastes. What does it all taste like? Fish heads are not fishy, but small bones abound. A bowl of seven heads costs 62 yuan, or about $10. The heads are split lengthwise and stir-fried in a mixture of dry herbs and spices. Pang buys cases of frozen heads from a local market, then has her chefs thaw them under running water for six hours to leach them of “bad smells” before simmering them in a spicy soup. What came out has been called “old mother rabbit head” ever since.
Chen, a factory worker in the Chengdu suburb of Shuangliu, opened a small hot-pot restaurant to supplement her income, and one day dropped some of the rabbit heads that her son loved to eat into the spicy soup. Anecdotal accounts credit a woman named Chen from a suburb of the provincial Sichuan capital of Chengdu with popularizing spicy rabbit head in the 1990s, much as a pocked-face woman named Chen from a Chengdu suburb popularized spicy tofu (the now-ubiquitous mapo doufu) earlier in the century. One head is enough for two people.Įating rabbit head, meanwhile, is a messy business, so much so that some diners are supplied with aprons and plastic gloves. These aren’t narrow, bony fish faces, but the big, meaty front ends of fathead carp, which offer plenty to eat. Restaurants offer regional seasonings ranging from the heavy soy-based sauces typical of China’s northeast, to the fiery spices popular in Hunan and Sichuan provinces, to the milder ginger and scallion flavors common to the southern coast. Fish heads have the longest history and widest acceptance, at least in part because they don’t come from mammals.
0 kommentar(er)
