Some of the more “exotic” dishes I’ve had in my country (Bulgaria) are:
- Shkembe chorba tripe soup made with pig’s, lamb’s or cow’s stomach; usually served very spicy and often believed to be a hangover remedy. A similar dish is the pacha soup
- Pacha - also called “cold pacha”, to differentiate it from the “hot pacha” soup mentioned above. The cold pacha is made from parts of the pig’s head, ears, feet and sometimes tail; it’s kept cold and becomes jellied.
- Kărvavitsa and bahur - basically, blood sausage not much different from anywhere else.
- Drob sarma - it kind of looks like Bulgarian mussaka (not to be confused with Greek and Turkish mussakas, which are quite different), in that it can have a topping layer (made with eggs, flour and yoghurt), but the filling is different - lamb liver, rice and spices. Also goes well as a filling for a St. George’s Day lamb (in that case, without the topping, of course).
- Fried or grilled pork liver - no special description needed; when fried, it goes great with fried onions. According to my grandparents, back in their days, when someone donated blood, they were given such pork liver to “recover” their blood; nowadays chocolate is given instead. I’m not sure which do I prefer more.
- Chicken hearts and other innards - they go well in a soup and on their own
- Pork tongues - various ways to prepare
- Lamb and veal brains (I guess I’m secretly a zombie now)
Of course, most of those dishes (aside perhaps from the last ones) are not all that exotic to me. At least not as much as my limited forays into, f.e., French exotics, like frog legs and snail soup (though, to be honest, the frog legs aren’t really exotic at all and do indeed remind me of chicken). Or some things that some of my more well-traveled friends and acquaintances have had in other countries, like grasshoppers in Vietnam and Mexico.
P.S. A bonus round: While it’s not really a dish (despite being relatively thick for a drink), let me introduce you to the one thing that foreigners, especially from outside the Balkan and Middle Eastern areas, find the most unpalatable - boza. It’s a fermented-wheat drink with a very minor alcohol content (and supposedly, hmm, breast-enlarging abilities), which we’ve inherited from the times of the Ottoman rule in our lands. It’s a common breakfast staple here, one of the two most common drinks to go with our morning banitsa (the other being ayran a yoghurt drink), but for some reason, most foreigners seem not to like it, to put it mildly. As an example, you can check out this video it’s a rather extreme reaction, but it’s not a unique one. More than 90% of the foreigners I’ve seen, who have tried boza, have expressed at least a mild distaste for it. It’s certainly one of the prime examples of “acquired taste”, as far as Bulgarian food and drinks are concerned.
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