Customer Reviews

Fierce Food: The Intrepid Diner's Guide to the Unusual, Exotic, and Downright Bizarre

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London writer Weil conducts this global guide to exotic, often culturally celebrated food with wit, panache and practicality. Each entry even includes precise instructions for preparation and consumption, should you be so inclined.

There's fugu, for example, the Japanese puffer fish that can prove fatal if incorrectly prepared. Or durian, the Philippine fruit that smells like rotting corpses. Or bat soup, the Guam festival dish, which may contain a deadly neurotoxin, depending on where your bat hales from. And the dung beetle larvae, about which no more need be said.

There are more appetizing things, however. As in a real guidebook, Weil provides a symbol key so you can see at a glance if an entry is smelly, messy, revolting, has eyes, is an aphrodisiac, might kill you, or tastes like chicken.

Hardly anything in this book seems to taste like chicken. Not lichen or cricket or blubber or fermented mares milk or sea cucumber or dog. Frogs do, of course, and guinea pig too.

Weil introduces the reader to ceremonial eating in remote places like Kazakhstan where the many vodka toasts will help in washing down the sheep's head dinner's ultimate moment, the eyeball, and she debunks a legendary shocker - the delicacy of the live monkey brain.

Sometimes hilarious, always entertaining, "Fierce Food" will spice up the most jaded armchair adventurer's palate.

-- Portsmouth Herald

It is true that photos would have been nice, but the descriptions are excellent. The author also takes time to include interesting quotes both historical and hysterical

the book had great content- interesting subject matter- outlined alphabetically - but its missing the visual - no photos and very boring font- makes it more of a dictionary than an entertainment book - I was disappointed and wont keep it in my "foodie" collection for long.