Sea Horse Soup

My assistant Coco was chatting up WeirdMeat to a Guangdong-ese friend of hers and they suggested we go to a traditional Chinese medicine shop and get some dried seahorses.



I've always thought sea horses were cute little bizarre animals. I learned that it's actually the male sea horse that gets pregnant and carries the babies, from watching indie rock band Yo La Tengo play a live performance set to the films of Jean Painleve -- an underwater cinematographer from the 1930s or something. Real stoney stuff.

Anyway, the Cantonese make a medicinal soup with dried seahorse. Good for the facial skin and a restorative detox/cleanser. I happen to be blessed with perfect facial skin, but I could always use a little detoxing. So we found 4 seahorses -- 2 pregnant males, and 2 females (virgins?) -- and put them in a soup with carrots, ginger, and some pork stock.



The broth had a salty and pleasantly pungent oceanic flavor. The seahorses were just thrown in dry and lent their flavor and magical medicinals to the mix. And they still looked cute.

Have you ever looked at a seahorse? They have a boxey body shape, the profile of a horse's face skeleton, and a tail that curls inward towards the belly and head. They also have these perfectly symmetrical little bone spikes sticking out (like the Hellrasiser guy) that make them very difficult to eat. That's when I asked the question -- are we actually suppose to eat these? How? A few desperate calls to the medicine shop and some random Guangdong-ese comrads didn't help -- no answer. But we could taste the things from the soup broth. I did manage to extract small bits of meat from the softer part of the tails, and from the pregnant bellies of the males, and found it reminded me of dried scallops, but more salty and less complex.



There's all kinds of weird stuff I want to try in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). One that really intrigues me is this little worm thing that every Chinese person I've talked to tells me, begins life as a plant, and then turns into an animal species. Or vice versa. That's impossible, I tell them. Something lost in translation perhaps?

Why is everything in TCM good for male virility? Is there anything in TCM that isn't? What do I take if I've got too much male virility? I suppose if male humans got pregnent like the male seahorse, we'd be a bit less horny, you think?