Who's afraid of chicken feet?

The sinewy nature of chicken feet (and the resulting crunch) make it hard to forget what you are eating: The edible tissue is mostly skin and tendons, not muscle, and laced with small bones. Because skin dominates the dish, it's thought to be good for the complexion.

While we foreigners cheerfully eat poached eggs, rare beef and other treats that our Chinese friends rank somewhere between odd and disgusting, we struggle to embrace alien textures enjoyed here. I'm not talking about the night-market weirdness of, say scorpions on a stick. The posh Beijing eatery Da Dong sells many more plates of sea cucumber, for example, than of its famous Peking duck. My tongue still curls in horror at the memory of my first－and last－taste of that gelatinous critter.

Where I come from, "chicken foot" is a game we play with dominoes. Before I arrived in China I had only seen the real thing on dim-sum trolleys in Houston－and quickly looked away. My otherwise appealing new Beijing neighborhood offered two freak-out moments almost as soon as I arrived: There was no coffee served at 7-Eleven, and the only late-night restaurant was the 24-hour House of Chicken Feet across the street.

But I learned to embrace the crunchy nuggets at a Shanghai restaurant where the feet were, well, dismembered a bit－enough that I couldn't pick out my bird's ring finger. Perhaps that chef saw me coming, and didn't want me to describe his food later as if I'd been a contestant on the reality show Fear Factor. The dish was at least partially deboned, a tedious process that reduced the volume of food considerably.

It was delicious.

In fact, it tasted just like chicken.