birdsnest soup

Travellers have so often spoken of birdsnest soup, canine hams, and grimalkin fricasees, rats, snakes, worms, and other culinary novelties, served up in equally strange ways, that their readers get the idea that these articles form as large a proportion of the food as their description does of the narrative. […] The famous birdsnest soup is prepared from the nest of a swallow (Hirundo esculenta) found in caves and damp places in some islands of the Indian Archipelago; […]

1848, S[amuel] Wells Williams, “Architecture, Dress, and Diet of the Chinese”, in The Middle Kingdom; A Survey of the Geography, Government, Education, Social Life, Arts, Religion, &c., of the Chinese Empire and Its Inhabitants. […], volume II, New York, N.Y.; London: Wiley and Putnam, pages 42 and 50

When I tell you, sir, his grandfather was scalped by the Sioux forty years ago, and he has a profound dislike for birdsnest soup, you know everything I’ve spotted from a quick look round.

1978, Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper, Michael Turner, transl., Tintin in America (The Adventures of Tintin), Egmont, published 2012, →ISBN, page 45

In Southeast Asia, swifts’ nests are gathered for the famous curative delicacy “birdsnest soup,” featuring filmy masses like boiled eggwhites—actually the special gluey saliva swifts work up for constructing nests.

1988, Daniel Mathews, Cascade-Olympic Natural History, Raven Editions in conjunction with the Portland Audubon Society, →ISBN, page 395