Skewered to Eat

Skewered to Eat
Originally uploaded by Bill Bevan

Wanting Quails’ Egg Wantons

My latest Thai food craze is Quials’ egg wantons. We first discovered them in Kanchanaburi on the many fried food street vendors stalls. Most of the time when walking down street lined with food vendors there is no point in us looking at them. Invariably everything is meat or fish. Skewer of five or six fat-coated pork balls are a ubiquitous Thai delicacy. As are squares of processed fish that on first glance looks temptingly like tofu. Delicious wanton parcels hide chicken and pork, again. Less attractive are slashed shiny hot dogs. All are served dipped in pots of various chilli sauces, some with fish and prawns, others light and dark red sweet chilli. Racks and rack of skewers shove food in your face of no use to the vegetarian because of the three commandments of Thai food – thou shall eat chicken, fish and pork.

The thing is, we would really love to be able to join in the Thai love for grazing skewered snacks with chilli sauce. Vegetable spring rolls are a rarity mostly confined to tourist ghettos and tempura is totally absent from the streets. The discovery that some of the yellow crispy rice batter of wantons concealed quails’ eggs was like waking up on Christmas Day to discover that amongst all those presents with other peoples’ names on were some for you after all. We could join in the party at last!

I have never had quails eggs in Britain. A bit too much of a costly luxury. But at 10 baht for a skewer of five, which works out at about 20 pence given the plummeting pound, it was time to discover and indulge, which did mean overlooking the living conditions of the quails. I'm usually very strict to only have free range organic eggs in the UK except when going out for the occasional fried breakfast.

And yes, I did want the hot chilli sauce please, despite being a farang. Darker and hotter the better.