Htims Yert
It's the end of a school day in the eastern Chinese city of Dongyang, and eager parents collect their children after a hectic day of primary school.Now, I don't mean to pick on China. Every culture has their own oddities. What seems strange or vulgar to outsiders seems perfectly normal to us. That said, I am very, very glad that I won't be visiting Dongyang anytime soon, particularly in springtime!
But that's just the start of busy times for dozens of egg vendors across the city, deep in coastal Zhejiang province, who ready themselves to cook up a unique springtime snack favoured by local residents.
Basins and buckets of boys' urine are collected from primary school toilets. It is the key ingredient in "virgin boy eggs", a local tradition of soaking and cooking eggs in the urine of young boys, preferably below the age of 10.
There is no good explanation for why it has to be boys' urine, just that it has been so for centuries.
The scent of these eggs being cooked in pots of urine is unmistakable as people pass the many street vendors in Dongyang who sell it, claiming it has remarkable health properties.
"If you eat this, you will not get heat stroke. These eggs cooked in urine are fragrant," said Ge Yaohua, 51, who owns one of the more popular "virgin boy eggs" stalls.
"They are good for your health. Our family has them for every meal. In Dongyang, every family likes eating them."
It takes nearly an entire day to make these unique eggs, starting off by soaking and then boiling raw eggs in a pot of urine. After that, the shells of the hard-boiled eggs are cracked and they continue to simmer in urine for hours.
Vendors have to keep pouring urine into the pot and controlling the fire to keep the eggs from being overheated and overcooked.
~ from Urine-Soaked Eggs a Spring Taste Treat in China City by Royston Chan ~
I eat very few eggs as it is and, if I'm going to eat food soaked in urine, my preference is fresh jellied donuts soaked in 10 year old platypus urine. But hey, that's just me! :-D
This is in a region of China where they are known for eating almost anything. They cook up the eggs in the same way they make tea eggs. And whenever the Chinese give you something weird to eat (or even not) it's almost always "for health benefits".
ReplyDeleteThere is a practice among some yogis that involves consuming one's own first morning urine for some sort of health benefit. And a good quick treatment for things like jellyfish stings and poison ivy is to pee on the affected area.
The urine story seems to have something to do with the 'ph'. In the same way onion can be rubbed on bee-stings but not wasp stings because of how it neutralizes the 'ph' of the poison.
DeleteIncidentally, by way of a Chinese lesson, if one of the generous people of Dongyang offered you one of those eggs, and you said, "Pee yu," they might understand you as having said "Fish fart." Which is kind of funny. Pi (pee) = fart; yu, (rising tone) = fish.
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