Extreme Cuisine: The Weird & Wonderful Foods that People Eat

Front Cover
Periplus Editions (HK) Limited, May 15, 2004 - Cooking - 320 pages
"I could not have written A Cook's Tour without this book. There is so much I would have missed. So dig in. Enjoy […] Eat. Eat adventurously. Miss nothing. It's all here in these pages." —From the Introduction by Anthony Bourdain

Sit down for a meal with the locals on six continents and what they eat may surprise you. Extreme Cuisine examines eating habits across the global neighborhood, showing once and for all that road kill for one culture is restaurant fare for another!

"I've tried to make this book a guide to how the other half dines and why. Over a period of twenty-five years I've augmented my meat-and-potatoes upbringing in the United States to try a wide variety of regional specialties, from steamed water beetles, fried grasshoppers and ants, to sparrow, bison and crocodile. I've eaten deep-fried bull's testicles in Mexico, live shrimp sushi in Hawaii, mice cooked over an open wood fire in Thailand, pig stomach soup in Singapore, minced water buffalo and yak butter tea in Nepal, stir-fried dog tongue and "five penis wine" in China, the boiled blood of a variety of animals in Vietnam, and pate made from my son's placenta when I lived (and he was born) in the UK. This list goes on, and I share some of these experiences in the chapters following, along with many recipes. After all, no matter what humans eat, by choice or circumstance, the one thing all the dishes have in common is that they must be prepared properly." —From the introduction by Jerry Hopkins

Chapters include:
  • Mammals
  • Reptiles & Water Creatures
  • Birds
  • Insects, Spiders & Scorpions
  • Plants
  • Leftovers

About the author (2004)

Anthony Bourdain was born in New York City on June 25, 1956. He graduated from the Culinary Institute of America in 1978. He wrote numerous nonfiction books including Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, The Nasty Bits, A Cook's Tour, No Reservations: Around the World on an Empty Stomach, Medium Raw, and Appetites: A Cookbook. He also wrote several works of fiction including the graphic novel Get Jiro! and the comic Anthony Bourdain's Hungry Ghosts. He was the host of several television shows including A Cook's Tour, Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, The Layover, and Parts Unknown. He committed suicide on June 8, 2018 at the age of 61.

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