Nanjing Chicken Embryo, Duck Blood, Bull Penis

Nanjing chicken embryo, duck blood, bull penis ... well isn't that a mouthful? Yes, and a delicious one. Last weekend I took the train to Nanjing, just a few hours up river from WeirdMeat's Shanghai headquarters. My good friend Coco introduced me to her good friend Nono, and thanks to Coco, because Nono turned out to be the perfect guide to Nanjing.

Nono took us to Nanjing Da Pai Dang, a very nice, but not too expensive, Nanjing specialty restaurant on the Hunan pedestrian street. It was a food explorer's dream. Literally hundreds of small dishes to choose from, each with real samples to look at instead of having to read the menu. Clean and modern, but classically decorated. We were greeted by kind elderly men in traditional dress, and seated by shy giggling waitresses who went to great lengths to ask me if I needed a fork. They could not believe I, a foreigner, could possibly handle two sticks to eat my food with. I amazed and charmed with my unorthodox but capable chopstick skills.

So here's what we ate! I'd heard about a Nanjing specialty that is similar to the Philippine balut, and the Cambodian duck embryo, but the difference in Nanjing is that they're chicken egg embryos, not ducks.



Nono carefully explained there are two types in Nanjing -- the dead ones, and the live ones. That didn't make a whole lot of sense to me, and I doubt the Supreme Court could handle it either, so I demanded a better translation. The "dead" ones are called "wang ji dan" and apparently they are D.O.A. before they're cooked. The "live" ones are called "huo zhu zi" and they're younger and fresher. The wang jidan are perhaps seasonal, and more difficult to hunt down, so we only got to try the huo zhuzi. They're chicken eggs so they're smaller than the duck embryos I'd had in other countries, and their flavor is more subtle. They are delicious, but not as thrilling as the SouthEast Asian ones. But you use the same salt-pepper-spice mix to flavor them. I had 3 of these. They each had tiny little chicken heads, less than an week old, so no feathers. I'd say about 12% chicken, 88% egg. BTW, what is that hard circle part on the bottom -- future bones? I'm told that Nanjing girls are crazy for them. If Nanjing girls are crazy for weird meat, that's cool with me.



After that we tried the duck blood soup (ya shui tang). This looks and tastes like dark purple-brown jello firm tofu, in a spicy broth. I'd seen something similar in Guangdong (Canton), but I was told that was pig blood. Nono confirmed this, and called Guangdong "the fountainhead of weird meat". Yes, indeed. The duck blood was also very good, full of bloody flavor and soaking up the spicy broth.

We ate all kinds of other good local dishes, and drank the local beer, which of course, was much much better than anything brewed in Shanghai. Before we left, I took another look at the offerings, and found "black bone chicken soup with bull penis (wu ji niu bian tang)." Had to try that one! The black meat silky chicken is a popular health tonic around China, which I've had many times. And in the bowl was a small cut of a bull's penis. It was a soft rubbery little thing that looked like calamari, with little half slices cut into it to make it more pliable and soak up flavor. I believe this was a small, circular cut of the bull's penis.



This penis was soft and tender like a fresh noodle, and captured the flavor of the soup nicely. Speaking of male cows, one of the waiters came up and told me I looked like ... the coach for the Chicago Bulls NBA team. OK. That's a new one.



On my second return, I tried a "quail on a stick". It's a whole quail. On a skewer. I'd had some quail at a French restaurant in Shanghai last week, and I'm finding that quail is my new favorite bird. Dark, gamey meat that goes well with red wine. Anyone know what kind of wine goes well with penis?