Snake feast

We knew what we were getting into, but when it actually started to happen, we didn’t want it. It’s one thing to read about eating snake, but another to watch the animal’s heart cut out while it’s still alive.

We had taken the motorbike out for its first spin on the highway to reach Le Mat, the snake village. It’s just like the other handicraft villages outside Hanoi, but instead of making pottery, silk or conical hats for hundreds of years, its residents have perfected the art of cooking and eating snake. It’s basically a two street village, with modest houses surrounding a strip of grandiose snake restaurants.

We picked our eatery at random, and like all the others, it had shelf after shelf of reptiles preserved in rice wine, like an alcoholic apothecary. The main attractions, of course, were the three cages of live snakes, where we would have been permitted to choose our lunch from the slithering mass had we not already been dismissed as clueless Westerners. I’m sure my presence confirmed our obliviousness in the eyes of our hosts, as clearly the point of eating snake is to enhance male virility. Also included in the “good for men” category: watermelon rinds, cow penis and the more lethal varieties of rice wine. All the delicious, delicious fruits are for women, so I have some guesses about who devised the system.

The restaurateurs fished a snake about a meter long (three feet, you ignorant Americans) out with a hook and pinned its head down with their feet. Then, they were slicing out its heart and gall bladder, draining its blood and snipping off its head. It was very quick but very intense, and I wished the head could have come off first.



It couldn’t, though, because as the snake was whisked off to the kitchen, we were whisked off to our table where we were prepared shots of snake blood mixed with rice wine and, for our lucky friend Tim, the still beating heart. If a certain absurdly tall American tells you it’s easy to do that shot because it tastes like less strong rice wine, don’t believe him. Technically, it is less strong, because it’s full of blood-tasting blood. Like you bit your tongue hard enough to hit an artery. I had to chase it down with spoonfuls of rice (rice fried in snake fat) to get the taste out of my mouth because, this being Vietnam, there was no water in sight. You just wash down food with more food.

Next, the punctured gall bladder produced shockingly green bile, which was also mixed with rice wine and poured down the hatch. Impressively, the time it took us to do two pretty hesitant shots was enough time for them to prepare our first snake dishes. Within the next half hour to 45 minutes, they turned that not-very-substantial snake into a feast of a dozen dishes, including three kinds of rolls, breaded fried snake skin, powdery meat on a pancake and porridge. We also got to choose a complimentary infused rice wine, and we went with gecko because we figured it was the least likely to be endangered (the snakes are also farmed, not wild, so OK to eating). Gecko wine definitely tastes like a science experiment, no surprises there.



I think it’s a testament to my increasingly steel-like stomach that when I first got here, I’d feel queasy after eating just about everything, and now I’m downing snake bile with no problem.