Thai Fried Rat

“What did you eat for breakfast, fried rat?” Americans classically asked this question after a friend’s methane netherhole expulsion.

“It wasn’t me.” The guilty party protested without forgiveness. Fast Food is more to blame for their noxious flatulence than dining on strange meats, because no one knows for sure what 100% Beef means for Micky Ds. Everything cow except for the moo.

Rat, owl, vulture, and crow are four animals Americans will never eat and only owls will eat crow. I’m sure there are several other animals missing from any menu of the 50 states, such as seagulls, seals,jellyfish as well as a legion of endangered species, especially whale, which I ate as a child in Boston fish market next to Fanuiel Hall.

But this last trip to Thailand I ate fried field rat or noo yang.

Mem, Fenway, and I had spent a week in a Cambodian border town and she brought down several fried rats for her cousin, uncle, and me. The rats are fat for eating only rice. Field rats. Not house rats. Clean creatures.

Back in Sriracha her cousin opened the plastic plastic and was immediately transported to a rapture like a glue-sniffer huffing a tube of Dupont after a year’s sabbatical. Nai is 100% a native of Bannok. The uncle pranced like a trained bear in anticipation of feasting on his two rat carcasses. Needless to say my enthusiasm was a little more decorous.

“You no want eat.” Mem was upset. Cooking rat takes hours. She had saved me the largest corpse. If I didn’t eat it, she would have been insulted by my refusal. Thais have thin skins and long memories.

“Who say I don’t want to eat rat?” I gave Nai money to buy 6 large bottles of Leo beer. it was good enough to take the sting out of a scorpion tail, on which I had dined the previous evening.

Mem happily fried the rat and cut the body into sixths.

It still looked like a rat and not Mickey Mouse either

New York rat on a plate.

“Why you not eat?” Mem had her arms crossed. Everyone else asked the same question.

“Wait for it not to be hot.”

Two minutes later I cracked off a leg. The meat was dark. I took a bite. Not bad, in fact good.

Rat does not taste like chicken or pig or beef.

Something entirely different yet familiar.

I finished my serving and had seconds. We threw the bones to the mongrel dogs in the street. They fought over these scraps. Mem was happy and the assembled Thais said, “James not same other farangs. He eat same Thai.”

“That's not true. There’s no thing I won’t eat. Chicken feet.”

Ting gai.

Bleech.

But the Thais love to suck on the rubber feet.

Even my son.

He's definitely not 100% farang, but not 100% Thai either.

Fenway was scared of rat.



Good boy.