Fruit bat? Excellent choice sir. Would you like fries with that?

Without doubt one of the greatest delights of travel is the amazing range of food on offer in the countries we visit. Some countries offer familiar dishes cooked in a different way; others give us the opportunity to try the food we love in their native places. But perhaps the most memorable meals are those where we are able to try dishes that are unavailable anywhere else in the world. Having tried many of these unique foods, I am on the one hand happy to have tasted something unusual, and on the other hand now nervous whenever I hear the term “local delicacy”. There’s often a good reason why that dish hasn’t travelled! Here’s a selection of our most memorable culinary experiences – one from each continent:

1. Fruit Bat – served in the Seychelles, and caught by throwing a large net over a tree at night and snaring the unfortunate bats inside the net. When I saw fruit bat curry on the menu, I couldn’t pass it by. The taste is ok, a little like beef I remember. What lets this dish down is the number of bones in the meat. Every mouthful is full of them, and I spent most of the meal picking out bones from my mouth. For that reason, I would not recommend fruit bat as a meal.

2. 100 year old egg – a Chinese delicacy, these eggs are stored for several weeks or even months, until they develop a disgusting green colour. The yolk looks like mould, and the white is the colour of dirty dishwater. A common belief is that the eggs are marinated in horse urine. Our Chinese guide did tell us this after we had eaten it, although by that time nothing would have surprised us having almost vomited from the appalling taste. It was only the determination to try this strange food that got us past the initial putrid smell. I did manage to finish it (nearly) and nothing would induce me to ever try it again!

3. Guinea pig- a common food in Peru, the creature are bred in their thousands for sale on the streets of South America. These cute little critters don’t have the same sentimental attachments in Peru that they enjoy with British children. Perfectly designed to fit on a skewer, the guinea pig does not provide a huge amount of food for the effort of eating it, but the meat itself is good. A bit like chicken, you won’t be surprised to hear.

4. Crocodile – an Australian restaurant we visited served a bush kebab mix, with crocodile, emu and kangaroo meat. Although the other two can be found in Europe with increasing frequency, at that point we hadn’t seen crocodile meat on the menu, so we had to give it a try. Barbecued, marinated and served with fries, the taste of the meat was somewhat lost on us. I am happy to report however, that as expected, it tasted a bit like chicken.

5. Pigs’ Ears – on our recent visit to Estonia, we found these local treats on offer as a starter in an Estonian restaurant. With some curiosity we received our plate, and yes they did look like pigs’ ears. The taste was certainly pork, although the texture was very chewy and each mouthful took quite a bit of work to get it to the point where we could swallow it. Again, good to try but we weren’t tempted with another plate.

6. An unconfirmed pig’s private parts – at a Sunday lunch buffet in Toronto, we ventured into a restaurant in Chinatown where we were the only non-Chinese present, and the lady who served us could only say two words in English – “snake” and “soup”. The soup was good, and we continued to point to a set of random dishes that came around. Eventually we tried a purple broth, where we proceeded to fish various items of pork meat out of the murky liquid with our chopsticks. Suddenly Sam stopped in her tracks when she pulled out a part of a pig that we couldn’t be certain of, but looked very much like its reproductive apparatus. In an instant we both realised we were full, and our appetites subsided. I would be interested to know if we were correct in our guess…