JAKARTA GLOBE (Indonesia) 11 January 10 Take a Bite on the Wild Side (Marcel Thee)
Here’s your order of fried python, sir.”
Sitting inside the Istana Raja Cobra restaurant in Kelapa Gading, I am about to experience my first taste of snake meat.
Throwing away my repulsion for these slithering creatures, I dig in for my first bite — served in the shape of buffalo wings, with a side dish of sambal and salty soup.
Smelled like chicken, tasted like it, too. Not too shabby, I thought.
My plate of grilled python, which was recommended to me as the restaurant’s most popular dish, had the tenderness of chicken thighs, with a certain spicy sweetness, perhaps due to being marinated before cooking.
Diners can choose meat marinated in their choice of satay or other sauces. I had chosen satay.
The only clue that this was not your everyday meat was the abundance of small bones.
“People like it because the meat is thick, like chicken, pork or beef,” said Nur, our waiter.
She also told us that diners at the restaurant regularly drink snake blood as well. I declined, but my more courageous female dining partner — who happens to be my wife — chose to try it out.
“It is healthy and it enhances your sexual prowess,” said Nur, not realizing that no man would publicly admit he needed “enhancements” of any sort.
She then took us to the kitchen, where a cobra was being held just behind its head by Warta, the cook. The cobra seemed to sense no danger and remained calm as the cook laid it on a table. Warta then cut off its head with a butcher’s knife, immediately pouring the blood into a cup already filled with strong Chinese wine and bile from a cobra’s gall bladder (an optional ingredient).
Skinning the snake for its meat and organs, Warta told my partner to drink it “before the blood begins to freeze.”
She held her nose to block the smell, and took one quick gulp with no visible gag reflex. “It tastes completely like Chinese wine,” said Ingrid, my wife.
The thought of drinking snake blood seemed more off-putting than the actual act and I promised myself that for our next visit, I’d muster enough courage to drink the hot and bitter beverage.
Istana Raja Kobra is just one of Jakarta’s many restaurants that serves up unorthodox delicacies. Many of these are sold as exotic health foods rooted in traditional Chinese medicine. Apart from cooked meat and blood, there are pills (which are to be taken regularly like medicine) and meat resembling beef floss, but made of animals like snake, lizard and monkey, with prices ranging from Rp 18,000 to 150,000 ($2 to $17) per serving.
To have a better understanding of these exotic feasts, my adventurous companion and I made our way to the Mangga Besar area of West Jakarta a few days later.
A hotbed of sorts for bizarre health food, the main road in Mangga Besar is lined with stalls with large text and corny pictures advertising everything from cobra blood to biawak (a Malayan water monitor), squirrel and monkey meat. It’s like a macabre McDonald’s — McPsycho, if you will.
According to Uli — a cook at one of the stalls who did not want to use his real name — consuming snake meat is a good way to cure asthma, rheumatism, excess uric acid and other ailments.
This supported what Nur from Istana Raja Kobra had said when she told me snake meat could cure diabetes, jaundice, vaginal discharge and various allergies.
“I recommend eating snake meat two to three times a week if you are doing it for health reasons,” Uli said.
For those seeking sexual prowess, Uli said that for men, he will cook the snake’s penis — affectionately referred to as a “torpedo” — along with the meat. He also mixes in some of the snake’s bone marrow for this dish.
We ordered a plate of mixed snake meat (except python, as we had already tried that earlier), biawak meat and biawak soup.
Uli said that the meat he sold has already been butchered and prepared, it just needed to be cooked. The boxes of live, slithering snakes (there for their fresh blood) clearly visible behind the counter, however, didn’t make me feel comfortable.
The snake meat was served with satay sauce, as was the biawak. Each had a taste not unlike beef, if just a tad more chewy.
As we made our way along the numerous stalls, we encountered another married couple who have seemingly made it their life’s mission to track down the weirdest foods possible.
Mario, 28, has a clear lead on his wife in terms of the variety of odd meals he’s eaten.
“I’ve eaten alligator, camel, snake, dog, bat, kangaroo and also other things like deer,” he said.
He said alligators tasted like “a mix between chicken and fish,” and that dogs and bats — which are often served with spicy sauce or Chinese wine — had a somewhat similar flavor to beef.
“I don’t really know about the health aspects of it, except that I’ve heard of bats being good for asthmatics,” Mario said.
His wife, 23-year-old Stefanie, said she had eaten dogs and bats, too. But added that she has also sampled dry water snails and rats. Yes. Rats.
“The rats are white paddy field rats, not sewer rats,” she said. “In Manado [where she is from] they are cooked with a special sauce, so the taste of the sauce overtakes the taste of the rats. I’d describe the taste as like a cross between chicken and beef,” she said.
As we continued down the rows of food stalls, we asked various cooks and vendors about the alleged eating of monkey brains, which — if urban legends are to be believed — involves sucking down a live monkey’s brain with a straw. The unanimous answer was that such a practice no longer occurs and that the monkey meat for sale was mostly brought ready to cook from suppliers.
Hadi, a stall owner, added that most of the suppliers were in Bandung.
“Like for snake meat, they stock up and then deliver it to us,” he said.
We finally managed to persuade a food stall owner, Benny (not his real name), to tell us about the inhumane method of serving monkey meat “back in the day.”
He seemed reluctant at first — stressing that “we don’t do it anymore” — before becoming visibly excited as he detailed the practice.
“The monkeys are strapped into a wooden cage, where their heads pop out of a hole about the size of their neck [so that their heads are secured in position]. The cooks bring them out and either cuts the top part of their head in half, or drills a hole in it, so that the brain is exposed.”
That made my stomach turn, but I bravely continued and asked him how the monkey brain was served.
He said that sometimes the cook would scoop out the brain onto a plate and mix it with strong wine or herbs to hide the smell. But there was also another, even more grotesque, method.
“The cook pours some wine onto the brain, and then you take a straw and suck out the brain juices.”
He eagerly noted that while all of this happened, the monkey retains consciousness as it dies slowly.
It is worth mentioning, however, that this description of serving monkey brains seems very close to the urban legends promulgated by depictions in popular culture, with films such as “Indiana Jones” portraying it on screen.
But regardless of how monkey-related delicacies are prepared, a serving of monkey satay is on the menu in every one of these stalls.
What is interesting is that for every one of these exotic dishes, especially the snake meat, the most common selling point almost always involves virility enhancement — something that is yet to be proven by medical science.
Dr. Sutisna Himawan from the University of Indonesia said there is no medical proof of the health benefits of these exotic foods, whether for curing impotence, eczema or any of the other ailments they are used to treat.
But as Mario, who I met in Mangga Besar puts it: “If you eat it and it cures you, that’s good. If it doesn’t, then at least you’ve tried a different sort of meal. Either way, you really have nothing to lose.”
Take a Bite on the Wild Side