the menu casually, as if I were used to encountering such dishes regularly. I recalled when I had decided not to drink snake blood in Taipei a few years before and figured this was the time to correct what I now hoped was a show of culinary cowardice.
“I’ll have one of these,” I said, pointing to a line in the menu. “The, uh, cobra.”
“Bat very good, sir,” the waiter said, pointing at the menu.
Obviously, I hadn’t read far enough down the drinks list. “Bat blood?” I said. I tried to play it cool.
“What sort of bat?” I asked, as if it really mattered and I would know what he was talking about, whatever he said.
“The fruit bat, sir. Also have bat stew. Very good.”
I told the gentleman (actually about a third my age) that I’d try it. With a can of 333, the local beer. Two of them. First a bracer. Then a chaser.
What happened next surprised me. After the cold beer was delivered, the bat was brought to my table still alive, its legs and wings gripped in the waiter’s hand as he cut the creature’s throat with a small, sharp knife. The blood fell into a small glass.
“Chuc sue khoe!” the waiter said. It was the standard Vietnamese toast meaning good luck.
I raised the small glass and drank the warm liquid, tried to roll it around my tongue as if it were vintage wine, but then chased it rather quickly with a swallow of 333. The waiter smiled, still holding the limp bat in one hand, cupping the head with the other in a small bowl to prevent any blood from falling onto the floor.
“One more, sir?” he asked.
“Maybe after the meal.” Still trying to be cool. As for the bat stew, think Dinty Moore with very stringy meat.
“How many foreigners order bat?’’ I asked as I paid the bill.
“You are the first this year,” the waiter said.
In American cinema, Tom Cruise’s presence in Interview with the Vampire (1994), and a number of actors playing Batman may have done something to soften the poor reputation held for so long by bats, but the fear of these creatures prevails in much of the world. The author Bram Stoker, who wrote the original Dracula (1897), must take some of the blame for this sorry state of affairs, but the American writer Anne Rice must share it for her series of best-selling vampire novels; it was the movie adaptation of her first that starred Cruise. With a hundred years of such inglorious history and images of neck-biting men who sleep during the day in coffins and who only can be killed by having stakes driven through the heart or shot with a silver bullet, is it any wonder that people turn away from the notion of deep-fried bat for dinner, or a glass of warm bat wine?
Nor is this all. Bats are grimly prominent in much folklore. The Bible calls it an unclean bird-although it is a mammal—and from India to Ireland to the United States it is regarded as a symbol of death. In many folk tales, the devil takes the form of a bat and there is a belief in much of the Euro-American world that bats will become so entangled in a woman’s hair that nothing but scissors or a knife can get them free.
Bats may command such a prominent role because they’ve been around for so long-fifty million years, according to fossil evidence—and because they’re so widely distributed and so numerous; it is estimated that one out of every four mammals on earth is a bat. There are more than nine hundred species, ranging in size from the bumblebee bat of Thailand that weighs less than a U.S. penny, right up to some flying “foxes” in South America and the Pacific, with bodies the size of small dogs and a wingspan of nearly six feet.
They’re not very attractive, either. Their furry bodies look like those of rats or mice; their leathery wings stretch on a framework similar to an opening umbrella; their outsized, translucent ears are ribbed with cartilage and laced with blood vessels; their pig-like snouts are spoked with whiskery projections; and they sleep hanging upside down, clinging to a cave’s ceiling with their feet...well, the picture is not appealing.
That said, bats are one of the most interesting of nature’s creations, mainly because of their echo-location, or sonar, senses. Similar to radar, which uses radio waves to detect location of another object, sonar uses sound waves to accomplish the identical task: the sound goes out and bounces back, giving bats the precise location of obstacles-they don’t want to be flying into buildings and trees, after all—and prey that may be moving at speed.
Most of the sounds humans perceive may be counted in hundreds of vibrations per second and humans can, with difficulty, hear sounds with a frequency of, maybe, twenty thousand vibrations per second. Bats hear sounds between fifty and two hundred thousand vibrations per second, and send out a series of clicks at the rate of thirty or so per second. This keen sense of hearing is unequalled in the natural and scientific worlds. Scientists say fishing bats have echo-location so sophisticated that they can detect movement of a minnow’s fin as fine as a human hair, protruding only eight hundredths of an inch above a pond’s surface, while African heart-nosed bats can hear the footsteps of a beetle walking on sand from a distance of more than six feet. It also keeps them from banging into things. Most (but not all) bats are, as the old saying goes, quite blind and able to react to a “sonar” bounce with unerring and astounding speed.
So, how in the hell does anyone catch one? Easy. It doesn’t take much effort to position several men with a fishing net outside one of the caves from which the bats emerge by the thousands at dusk to feed. A man with a shotgun at such times also can bring down twenty to thirty with a single blast, although when the cook prepares the meal, care must be taken to remove the pellets.
The easy catch is part of the bat’s appeal, but there’s more to it. Images of the devil and Count Dracula aside, there are millions in the world who believe that eating bats increases fertility and one’s chances for long life and happiness. To the Chinese, a symbol of five bats indicates the five blessings: wealth, health, love of virtue, old age, and a natural death. Eating bats also is believed to improve eyesight and in India, bat oil-made from melted fat mixed with blood, coconut oil, and camphor—is sold as a cure for rheumatism and arthritis. In Cambodia, it is prescribed for a child’s cough. And...it’s low in fat.
The bat is regarded as food today mainly in Asia and the Pacific. One species of “flying fox” in Guam has been hunted to extinction, but elsewhere they are numerous and the bat is not considered threatened. Probably the most cherished is the fruit bat, found in much of the western South Pacific, including the Philippines, Indonesia, and most of Micronesia.
The preparation of bat always is simple. Bat has not yet breached the barrier that might one day make it more acceptable to a wider audience, much as emu and kangaroo have done in Australia and various wild game meats have in Africa, where “native” foods are now fashionable and for which chefs dream up fancy recipes. Some day, there may be recipes for Bat Lasagna and Bat Casserole, but for now, it’s mostly soup, with maybe a little ginger, soy sauce, or coconut cream.
Grilled bat is a local speciality of the foothills of the mountain range separating Burma and Thailand. Limestone provides abundant caves for the bats, and several small restaurants near Ratchaburi (about an hour and a half’s drive west of Bangkok) serve them whole, grilled, or fried.
Eating bat may also be difficult for those put off by its appearance on the plate. Rabbits don’t look like rabbits when they are served, after the flesh has been hygienically distanced from any resemblance to living creatures, but bats often do still look like bats. Because most bats available for eating are small, and they are generally grilled or deep-fried, the entire creature may be cooked and consumed, including the wings, head, and brittle bones, bringing a crunchy sound to the table along with the undeniable reminder of what you are eating. Alternatively, the bat may be skinned, the head and wings removed—they contain only a little meat, after all—and the body cut into cubes for soup or stew.
A word of caution: most species exude a somewhat pungent odor as they cook. This can be alleviated by the addition of chili peppers, onion, or garlic, or any combination. (An American