Bird’s Nest Soup

from - http://blog.knowyourmoney.co.uk

Bird’s Nest Soup
Price per kilo: £1,000-£5,000 ($2,000-£10,000)
Price per pound: £455-£2,270 ($910-$4,535)

When it comes to strange culinary delicacies, China’s Bird’s Nest Soup is right up there with monkey brains and haggis. The birds whose homes make up the soup’s main ingredient are a handful of swift species, particularly the White-nest Swiflet and the Black-nest Swiftlet.

Known as the ‘Caviar of the East’, these valuable nests are actually made of hardened strands of the birds’ unique glue-like saliva – that’s right, spit soup. As you would expect, harvesting the nests of these cave-dwelling creatures is a tricky job, albeit one that has been refined over around 400 years.
The birds nests come in a variety of colours and though all are prized for their culinary, nutritional, medicinal and even aphrodisiacal properties the rarer, and more expensive, ‘blood-red’ nests are prized most of all