Ask a Trini : Sweat Rice vs other scary foods

As a travelling man, you take the good and the challenging in the same bucket. When you roam across the planet, you also end up eating many strange things. In many ways, I don’t mind the challenge of these strange foods. Here are some highlights from my travels …

• In the Phillippines, I’ve eaten Sisig and Balut. Sisig was actually pretty decent, especially when you’re drunk – it has tons of pepper. Balut on the other hand are duck eggs that have been incubated until the fetus is all feathery and beaky, and then boiled alive. The bones give the eggs a uniquely crunchy texture. You can also find them in the fifth and seventh levels of hell. I won’t put a picture, but you can get the idea here.
• In Morocco, I’ve had steamed sheep head or Pacha. Of course, before the head can be cooked, it’s charred over coals until completely blackened. The burnt fur and skin are scraped off, and the head is cut into pieces. The brains are removed and cooked separately; the tongue is steamed with the head.
  

• In Korea, I’ve had some dog meat. That actually wasn’t half bad as I thought it would be.
  
• In Brazil, you can get some blood sauce chicken. Its’s called (Brazilian Chicken With Brown Gravy) … and it looks like Stewed Chicken, except when you realize that it’s not sugar, but blood that you’re eating.
• How about eating ants in Mexico. Yep, it’s true … you can eat Escamoles in Tacos. Or how about going to Oaxaca and having a cup full of Chapulines and spicy channa and peanuts?
  

So you would think that it would be pretty difficult to disgust me … right? Then I remembered in Trinidad, that there are some rather superstitious people and some women would resort to any measure to keep their man.  So this takes me to the stories of “Sweat Rice”. If you don’t know any Trinidadians, then you would not know about it.
Sweat Rice is a local custom given to describe the preparation of a love potion which will allow a woman to trap her lover. Before hand, your future wife had cooked a pot of rice where at the later stages of it being thoroughly cooked, she removed her garment and squatted over the iron pot causing the steam to condense on the her skin and deep between her crotch. Any sweat occurring from enchanting brew simply drops back into the pot of rice. Not a drop is wasted. The secretion is well mixed in and a pinch of salt is added to camouflage the sweet pheromone taste.

What!?!! Da F%%@?!?!

Yeah .. seriously. In fact, if you come from an Indian family, you will undoubtedly be told by your father, that you shouldn’t eat from anywhere strange and you shouldn’t eat from any woman that you don’t know really well (especially at her house and if you’re dating until you know her really well). If you want even more disgusting types of recipes concocted to keep a lover at home, you can read this page.

So my Trini friends, when next you’re travelling on the road and someone gives you a piece of rotting shark or Casu Marzu, don’t twist your nose up … it could be worse and you could be eating “ganga channa” or “sweat rice”