Any takers for sssnake soup?

When the temperature begins to dip in Hong Kong, as it has with the advent of winter, its hardy Cantonese residents that turn to a most unlikely preparation to keep the blood warm and the circulation flowing. I, of course, refer to snake soup.

From December until March, over a hundred restaurants in Hong Kong serve sizzling hot dishes and soups made of snake, which are a particular favourite with old folks.

In the Chinese belief system, snake soup provides ‘heat’ and has many medicinal properties.

It’s widely believed that the reptilian congee — and snake blood, if you please — can cure everything from ‘possession by spirits’ to malaria.

I’ve heard it being said that snake soup is also something of an aphrodisiac and a fertility drink — which fact may account for why there are 1.3 billion Chinese!

On bylanes and back-alleys in Hong Kong, wanderers can espy an assortment of snakes — including king cobras — fated for the chopping board.

Some restaurants prepare the snake dishes right in front of their customers, others do it discreetly behind closed kitchens.

When I was in Taipei, I ventured onto the city’s famed Snake Street, and saw giant pythons put out on the streetside to lure curious customers.

Up until a few years ago, the skinning and slaughtering of serpents would happen in full public glare, and was in fact something of a tourist spectacle.

But as a concession to animal rights activists’ sentiments, that’s been outlawed.

Nevertheless, enterprising restaurant owners have put up television screens at the door — on which are played video recordings of snakes being skinned and prepared for the soup.

It’s a graphic picture, with the skinner making an elaborate show of draining every drop of the snake’s blood. It’s also what I’d call a slippery way of getting around the letter of the law.

For a long while, a consular official in Hong Kong  named, somewhat appropriately, Nag — was doing his damnedest to hard-sell the merits of snake soup to me.

I had a standing invitation to a snake soup congee on cold wintry mornings.

And although I’m not overly fussy about what I eat — I’ve dined on reindeer and moose meat in Sweden and have feasted on duck’s tongue, among other delicacies, in China — I’ve held back on snake soup.

It’s got to do with an ancient family story involving some promises made by a snake, through some characteristically serpentine way, to a snake-worshipping ancestor.

But that, as Moustache says in Irma La Douce, is another story….