As an English teacher, I often find myself giving the ‘food’ lesson. I will ask my students to tell me all of the different foods they know in a given category and they will help me compile a list of all the different vocabulary words they know. One day I was teaching this lesson to a class full of 8 and 9 year olds. I was asking them about different kinds of drinks and one of them kept saying a Vietnamese word that I didn’t understand. Every time he said it the class laughed and my teaching assistant scowled at him. I asked my teaching assistant what he was saying and she explained that he was talking about a traditional Vietnamese dish that is essentially blood soup. Cue my first food post.
Blood Soup
Tiết Canh (aka Blood Soup) is a traditional Northern-Vietnamese dish that is literally animal blood. These days it is very dangerous to consume because it is an easy way to contract whatever diseases the animal was carrying. And it is almost impossible to know about the health of whatever goat’s / duck’s / dog’s / chicken’s / whatever’s blood you are drinking unless you killed and bled the animal yourself. So most locals cautioned me against trying this dish. I spoke to some of my western friends and housemates about trying it and most of them said that they would also be interested to try it but we would need to find a safe way to do it.
That ‘safe way’ arrived one afternoon when one of our Vietnamese friends returned to Hanoi from a visit to her rural hometown with a water bottle full of goat blood.
She prepared dish for us over the course of an hour or so. Tiết Canh turns the liquid blood into sort of a blood gelatin, containing assorted nuts and grains. We sprinkled peanuts and leaves into our bowls and ate it. We also squeezed limes into it for some added flavor.
I must say, it didn’t taste the way I expected… but it didn’t taste good either. Imagine the taste of a bloody nose, but cold and coagulated with some random pieces of food adrift and out of place. I probably ate about a fourth of my bowl before I threw in the towel and gave myself a pat on the back for trying it. A for effort?
Now writing this it has been a few weeks with no health problems so far. I think it's safe to say I'm in the clear! (famous last words)
Although the beginnings of the U.S. as we know it today began with British roots, New York City actually began as a Dutch colony called New Amsterdam. It passed into British hands in 1664 and actually served as the capital city of the newly independent United States from 1785 to 1790. So it has been vitally important since the very beginning. As of 2023, the city alone (its metro area, that is) had a stand-alone GDP of $2.30 trillion, making it the most valuable city in the world. In fact, if treated as an independent country, New York City would rank within the top 10 largest economies in the world, ranking above Italy, Canada, and Australia, to name a few. For a domestic point of comparison, the next largest economy in the United States is Los Angeles with an approximate GDP of $1.1 trillion.