Wednesday, June 11, 2008

When in France... eat weird shit

Just to give a context I am at the moment in Paris (at the Universite Paris-Sud) at a collaboration meeting. Last night going out for dinner allowed me to try a couple of dishes that I'd normally wouldn't expect to eat (and no, it wasn't frogs legs and snails - don't stereotype.) A friend of mine ordered Os a moelle not knowing what it actually was (well none of us really had an idea until it arrived and we remembered what the word os meant - bone. It was a plate of bone marrow served from some nice bits of femur by the look of it - it looked like something you might put on the floor for a dog to gnaw on. I ventured to try a bit of marrow (which I suggested might have been better off being used to cure a poor calf with leukemia) and have to say it wasn't bad - it's pretty slimy, but is fairly tasteless and just kind of like eating fat (which I'm not averse to.) The other dish I tried was again sampled from another friend order, which was Steak tartare. This was essentially a quarter pound of raw beef patty. It was also quite good and nicely seasoned with herbs, but you couldn't get over the fact that you were eat raw meat. These are both things I'm glad I tried, but I'm also glad I didn't order them myself and had more conventional food choices. Maybe I'll have the snails and frogs legs tonight!

[Update: I actually did have a frog's leg on my last night in Paris. It was tasty, but lacking in quantity of meat.]

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