Food
William Skidelsky says balls to eating bull's testicles
Published 02 May 2005
In order to eat bull's testicles, you yourself need a suitably pendulous pair
Culinary adventurism is in fashion at the moment, thanks largely to Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck in Berkshire being announced as the winner of Restaurant magazine's suspiciously Anglocentric poll to determine the best restaurant in the world. Blumenthal, in case we need reminding, is famous for concoctions such as snail porridge and bacon-and-egg ice cream. He is hardly the first British chef to test the boundaries of acceptability: Fergus Henderson, of St John in London (the world's tenth-best restaurant, according to the poll), has long been delighting courageous diners with dishes such as marrow-bone salad and gizzard stew. It seems that, having only recently discovered they can compete with the world's finest, British chefs are acquiring a reputation for outrageousness.
Well, hang on a minute: let's not get carried away. As much of the recent press coverage has shown, the most common reaction to Blumenthal's cooking is a mixture of derision and disgust. And it is worth asking whether Blumenthal and Henderson would have been as successful as they have been had they not been chefs of a particular sort. Henderson is a former architect, while Blumenthal is a likeable nerd whose ruminations on culinary science appear in the Guardian. British people are perfectly happy to sample strange food, it seems, but only if it has been prepared by suitably respectable hands.
A different school of culinary adventurism is represented by the American Jerry Hopkins, whose book Extreme Cuisine has just been published by Bloomsbury. Hopkins has devoted his life to eating foods that most people would go out of their way to avoid. And his desire to do so, it becomes clear, is motivated by a very particular part of his anatomy. After describing eating field mice in Thailand and bat blood in China, he tells the story of the time in 1969 when "I found myself travelling with an American rock'n'roll band, the Doors, a group not known for its sissyness, whose lead singer wore leather trousers made from cowhide and unborn horse and who called himself the Lizard King". Sure enough, Hopkins and the Doors are treated to a platter of deep-fried bull's testicles in Mexico City. "Most of us did consume at least a portion," he reveals. "Why? Because we were men, that's why."
So there you have it: in order to eat balls, you yourself need to be equipped with a suitably pendulous pair. Unfortunately, manliness of this magnitude does not necessarily equate with being a good storyteller. Extreme Cuisine is packed with macho exploits, but Hopkins's ungainly prose ensures that his tales of gustatory prowess rarely come alive. The response to his book is that which greets most travellers' tales: you probably need to have been there.
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