Yes indeedy, baby mice wine.  It’s wine with, well, baby mice in it.

Found in China and Korea, this deliciousness is believed to be a cure-all health tonic.  Koreans in particular believe it can cure anything from asthma to liver disease.

This wine isn’t just baby mouse flavoured, or have one baby mouse inside.  Oh no, it has a whole pile of them, only a few days old, floating around at the bottom of the bottle.  Nasty huh?  Well it gets worse - the mice are plucked from their mother’s teet, placed in the bottle alive and drowned.  Perhaps that improves the flavour?  

Baby Mice Wine

One thing I haven’t clarified is whether the mice are eaten/drunk along with the wine, or just filtered out.  Surely if they are the source of the ‘goodness’, they should be crunched upon and ingested along with the wine.  

Baby Mouse Wine

One commonplace food is spider, usually fried and crispy.  Mmmh.  Now spiders in Cambodia aren’t your little coin sized beasts we see so often, they are more akin to tarantulas in size, black and hairy.

I read that spiders were first eaten by desperate refugees, but have recently become known as a national delicacy, particularly in the Skuon region.  And when I say recently, I mean as recent as the 1990s!

Now people don’t just go trapsing around trying to spot and catch these spiders, they are actually bred in holes in the ground to eat, just like battery chickens!

The species are actually a type of tarantula and known as ‘a-ping’, and tend to be about palm-sized.  You can check them out in the pic below:

So how are they cooked?  Well as mentioned above, usually fried in oil, sometimes with garlic and salt, sometimes with sugar and MSG added.  The spiders are cooked until their legs are stiff, which means the insides are cooked through and no longer runny.

Taste?  Apparently something similar to chicken (doesn’t everything taste like chicken?) and cod, with some comparing them to crickets (which I have tried!).  Mostly crunchy but with a soft abdomen.  Inside the abdomen is a brown paste including organs and who knows what else (eggs, excrement …) - which many dislike or remove, while others call it a delicacy and chow down.

And it doesn’t just taste good - the locals swear by the spiders’ medicinal properties, such as helping relive back ache and asthma.

Price?  Well you can pick yourself up a crunchy deep fried spider for as little as 8 cents!  Sounds ridiculously cheap, but when you compare to the average daily wage of less than a dollar … it’s not a bad living if you can sell enough.  That said, the price of a spider is on the rise as supply starts to struggle to keep up with demand.

Well in Korea it’s a delicacy and they like nothing better than slipping that little sucker (no pun intended) into their mouth and chewing.

And you really do need to chew - reports go that if you don’t chew it up properly, you risk choking as it wriggles in your throat.

So how does one serve live baby octopus, I hear you ask?  Well it seems there are a few options.

1. Simply with sesame oil and perhaps a little samjang (red pepper paste) on the side for dipping.
2. With soru, a Korean alcohol.  You dip the octopuses (or octopi if you prefer) in the alcohol which sedates it (puts it to sleep as one writer states … though I don’t really believe that) before chomping on it.
3. You can have it cut up into pieces (but they still wriggle!), or eat it whole.  The latter option is hardcore, as shown in the videos below.

So, want to see what it’s really like?  Here’s someone eating the chopped up variety:

That’s nothing - check out how difficult it is to eat it whole (with assistance from the waitress!):

And here’s anohter (skip to about 3:30 to avoid too much of the annoying American presenters):

If you squint a bit, you can see on the label:

Cholest. 3500mg 1170%

Yes, that does say 3,500mg of Cholesterol, which is 1,170% of your recommended daily intake. This product also contains Sodium Nitrate, a colour fixative and preservative for meat products - but interestingly, four grams are lethal to you or me, yet it can also be used as an antidote for cyanide poisoning.

And there’s not just one brand of Pork Brains in Milk Gravy, oh no.  You get a choice between Armour and Rose brand!

Oddly, the only recipe for Pork Brains in Gravy I could find (it seems that Pork Brains are also popular in their uncanned form in Asia, but we’ll cover that in a separate post) was submitted by The Honorable Howard Coble, United States Congressman, North Carolina to the Congress Cooks site.  Here is his recipe!  It even contains bacon grease in case the brains didn’t have enough cholesterol in them!!

When I was a youngster, my mom used to prepare Brains N’ Eggs for breakfast. It was a fairly regular breakfast, not at all unusual. So that’s when I started eating them. I’ve enjoyed them ever since, but I can’t find any on Capitol Hill. I’ll admit the name of the dish is not the most appetizing, but try ‘em, you might like ‘em!

Ingredients

2-1/2 Tablespoons bacon grease

4 eggs

1/3 cup whole milk

1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

1/4 teaspoon salt

1 can (5 ounce) pork brains in gravy (Rose Brand preferred)

Melt bacon grease in an iron skillet on low heat. Add pork brains to heated grease. Stir with a fork. Add salt and pepper and stir. Whisk eggs and milk together. Increase heat and add egg mixture to brains. Scramble to desired consistency. Serve immediately over toast. For a truly southern dish, serve with grits and apple butter.

Serves: 2