Some bravery as a side dish

2) Cobra heart. A major stop on the extreme-eating circuit is Vietnam, and the pinnacle of the Vietnamese “do you dare?” dining experience seems to be cobra heart. 

Preparations vary: Some hearts are served up as a little raw tidbit, still-beating, to be chased down with a slug of cobra blood.

Anthony Bourdain stirred up a bit of attention a few years ago when he sampled it this way and wrote about it in “A Cook's Tour,” a feat captured for TV posterity. Other hearts are dropped into a glass of rice wine and slurped down as a rather gruesome drink garnish.

Harry Teicher Bottoms up!  What else to use as a cobra-heart chaser than a glass of the snake's own blood. Harry Teicher recently tried this delicacy in Vietnam.

Inspired by Bourdain's efforts, Harry Teicher decided to try this specialty when on a teaching trip to Vietnam last summer. The Seattle gastroenterologist convinced a concierge at his Ho Chi Minh City hotel to direct him and his girlfriend to a back-streets bar that served it.

“We got to the front of the place and they were roasting a dog on a spit, so she took off,” Teicher says.

After some haggling, he was presented with a live cobra. The snake was beheaded, its blood drained into a glass, and cuts were then made to extract the thumb-sized heart and quarter-sized kidney.

“I gulped the heart and the kidney down, and I chased it with blood,” Teicher recalls. “It was just like an interesting oyster.”

Honestly, the heart part isn't really what inspires the squeam factor. Chicken hearts can be the best part of a trip to a Brazilian churrascaria, and beef hearts have their fans, though fewer nowadays. 

It's the live part — not only because having your food killed before you takes a strong stomach, but because cobras are a bit deadlier than the average chicken. You have to hope a snake's relatives aren't watching as it's eviscerated for your dining pleasure.

And did we mention they're rather large? Teicher's specimen was about six feet long.