Black Shit
I have a confession to make. I have grown rather fond
of eating shit. Black shit to be precise. Down here
on the
Mexican border the stores sell something called
cuitlacoche which is a form of
corn. Always
ready to try something new, I bought a can of this last
week and was quite surprised by what I found. Rather than
looking like corn in any way, this stuff looks vaguely like
some sort of greasy button mushroom cap dipped in tar. If
you eat it with your eyes shut it's actually rather tasty. And I do recommend eating it with your eyes
shut, unless you're the sort of person who
delights in
challenging foods. (I finished my
cabeza, but I have to say those goats eyes looking up at
me out of the skeletal head did give me a few seconds
of queasiness. I had to eat them just to stop them
staring at me...)
Cuitlacoche, it transpires, is something that Norteamericano farmers
fear. It's a fungus that takes corn and swells it up like popcorn without the fake butter. When it
happens to a crop in the cornbelt they generally trash the
whole crop. When it happens in Mexico they dance with
delight and sell it at double the price as cuitlacoche
(not unlike the Germans when a grape field is
stricken with edel faule (or noble rot),
giving them a fine harvest of the more profitable
Trockenbeerenauslese wine.)
In recent years cuitlacoche has been rediscovered by the Californian nouvelle cuisine types as an exotic imported delicacy.
I just wonder if they'd treat it with such reverence if
they knew the translation of its name. Yes, you guessed
it: black shit.