Description
Taiwanese is certainly one of the world’s most playful cuisines. How about a dish rather grotesquely called “fly heads”? It turns out to be a heap of the stem-only hollow vegetable sometimes known as Chinese watercress interspersed with ground pork–with the meat resembling insect parts. Ha ha! Other things are not quite what they seem, either. Tempura is fingers of fish paste, rather than the battered and fried shrimp one finds in Japan, and many dishes are rife with basil, an herb you’ve probably never seen in Chinese food before. It makes a spectacular appearance in a sweet soy-sauce gravy in the Taiwanese standard “three-cup chicken,” not listed on the menu, but always available.
