Attitudes are overwhelmingly cultural, says Sybil Kapoor, author of “Sight Smell Touch Taste Sound: A New Way to Cook”. Compare China and Japan with countries such as Britain and America. Texture is taken far more seriously in the former. According to one study, Americans use just 78 words to describe the texture of food. By contrast, there are more than 400 such terms in Japanese. Puri-puri describes the feel of biting into something like a prawn, bouncy, with a slight resistance; neba–neba, the slimy, viscous feel of foods such as natto, fermented soyabeans. Shuko Oda, head chef at Koya, an udon bar in London, says that only Japanese customers order it; the rest balk at the snot-like strings clinging to the beans.

In China, texture is part of the pleasure of food and people praise the feel as much as flavour, says Fuchsia Dunlop, a British writer on Chinese food. Ingredients are used for their mouth-feel alone. Birds’ nests and sharks’ fins don’t taste of much, but both contribute a gelatinous texture that is prized. For non-natives, the choicest textures can be puzzling, at best. At Sanxia Renjia, a Sichuan restaurant in London, shredded chicken doused in chilli and soy sauce makes sense to the British palate. The cool, translucent strips of jellyfish that accompany it are more challenging; they feel like a cross between a cucumber and a condom, rubbery but with a tendency to break apart with each bite. The flavour of chicken gizzards, fried and nestling amid wild chilli, is inoffensive. Bite down and appreciating them becomes harder. The tense little muscles once used to grind up food skid between your teeth, forcing you to work as hard to chew them as the gizzards themselves once did. Recipes from Westerners about how best to cook these gristly morsels seem designed to strip them of their texture, with directions to braise them for hours in order to melt the connective tissues before frying them to a crisp.

That misses the point. Dunlop says she ate the knobbly chicken feet and goose intestines set before her only because she had been brought up to be polite. But repeated exposure and experimentation have been transformative. She now relishes the gristle in a roast chicken, she says. The sea cucumber, a slithery yet crisp delicacy revolting to most non-Chinese, has become a beautiful thing to her.

https://www.1843magazine.com/food-drink/looks-good-enough-to-eat