Happy Easter everybody! | Salute the balut

Did you chew the rubber fringes off toys when you were a child? I did: I bit off parts of He-Man figures and the tyres of toy cars, those translucent little tabs and misshapes where cheap plastics had slightly overflowed their moulds. I was certainly never a finicky eater.

I hadn’t thought about this habit in years, until I went to Jeepney, a Filipino restaurant in Manhattan’s East Village. The food – local takes on sweetbreads, burgers and hot dogs – was good, the drinks were strong, and on the spur of the moment I asked if I could try the speciality of the house.

Balut is a hard-boiled, fertilised duck’s egg, served whole, so hot you can’t hold it in your hand at first. You chop the top off its prettily patterned blue-white shell with the edge of a spoon, then tip out and drink the juices (two small spoonsful of stock-like fluid). Then it gets weird.

I’ve seen frankly alarming pictures of people eating the balut whole, but I went spoonful by cautious spoonful. Around the solid yolk, and through it, amidst it, are cartilaginous pieces, soft fleshy parts, elements that are – well, not quite meat and bone yet, but recognisably on their way. Embryonic. The texture is neither particularly meaty, nor gelatinous as I had expected (it’s more pleasant than a raw clam in seaweedy brine I was served in Barcelona once and really had to force down, though that doesn’t quite convey the length of the swallowing process). It is, almost disappointingly, mostly like eating the yolk of an egg left on the boil a bit too long, the slightly powdery clag that gets into the teeth. Visually, of course, it’s a different matter: something greyish-brownish-pinkish, inchoate, folded into the yellow, seemingly mere second away from developing a bill, a claw. An accusing eye.

It has exactly the inorganic quality of the rubber tires I once prised off the wheeled bricks in a set of Lego and stuck in my mouth

Finally, there’s a plug of pale matter at the base of the egg, about the size and shape of a peeled chestnut. This is the egg white, condensed and consolidated. Were you so minded you could use it as a doorstop, or a paperweight, or to smash a window. It has exactly the inorganic quality of the rubber tires I once prised off the wheeled bricks in a set of Lego and stuck in my mouth. I chewed and I chewed, breaking the white down to smaller and smaller fragments, but I could have been there till the next morning, still milling the stuff between my molars. I can only assume that balut is one of those few foods that yields fewer calories than you burn in eating it.

Chefs like to describe a formative experience or memorable flavour that’s informed a particular dish. Never in my life did I expect, aged 36, to encounter a Filipino speciality to remind me of my childhood taste for the inedible. I guess (thanks to my time in Japan, where you eat all manner of utterly unidentifiable but often rather bland foodstuffs) “weird foods” hold fewer terrors for me than they used to. But now I’m eyeing the grey rubber cowl that runs around my e-reader and thinking: “are you lunch?” C

Jeepney, 201 1^st Avenue, New York NY 10003, USA
+1 212 533 4121; jeepneynyc.com