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Eating snakemeat per se is not unheard of for Americans. Some more esoteric spinoffs common in Southeast Asia are snake wine and drinking snake blood. The latter is done mainly as a "pick-me-up" (read "aphrodisiac"). Some guy will have his driver waiting for him with the engine running while the chef slices the snake, preferably a large cobra, down the middle and drains the blood into a shot glass. The adrenaline from the dying animal, together sometimes with a garnish of squeezed gall bladder, give the diner the boost he's seeking as he dashes to his assignation. OK, I never tried that, but you could get a cheap cobra fried rice at these places, since snake was not the flesh that Casanova would have had on his mind. I often imbibed in snake wine, though. It's a rice-based liquor with one or more snakes curled up in the bottle, and medicinal herbs and spices thrown in. A variation on this is gecko wine, with the whole lizard floating in the bottle. For some reason, that put me off, though, and I never tried it. |
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