Of Cockentrice and Cockatrice: A Monstrous Feast
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Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. And I am Joe McCormick. Hey, what are we talking about today, Rob?

Oh, we're getting into feasting season here, Joe. So we're going to do what we've done in the past, devote an episode to food, but not just, you know, just any food. In the past, we've talked about dangerous foods. We did several episodes on that. You can find those if you go back into the archives.

But this time we're going to be talking particularly about some various feast dishes, some outrageous feast dishes, and then also some sort of related tangential subject matter that's sort of swirling around those dishes. I'm salivating at the thought of the beauties and the grotesqueries to follow. Yes. Historic dishes of overindulgence, you might call them. And such dishes exist throughout the history of human feasting.

As long as human populations have even periodically experienced surplus and or inequality, there's been room for dishes that simply go above and beyond what seems reasonable. Decadent delicacies occupied the tables of the ancient Romans. We'll mention a few. And of course, still to this day, we find such dishes on our tables.

Okay, but I know you got cranking on this topic because you were interested in one particular example from history, right? That's right. One that, you know, I think I've had like a vague familiarity with for a long time because I feel like I've seen depictions of it before. I'm really struggling to figure out if I've actually seen a depiction of this in a film or TV show.

but it's possible because it's a great way to sort of center what's going on in your setting. But yeah, we're going to turn to 15th century Europe. So the Middle Ages are giving way to the first stirrings of the Renaissance, and it's just prime time to sew a suckling pig and a chicken together and serve it to a bunch of nobles and royals.

A lot of great things come out of the Renaissance. Yes. But there are some real clunkers that come out of it as well. And this, I don't know, this could be one of them. I have not tried it. I will not be trying it. But it is not impossible that some of you out there have tried it. The addition question is the cock and trice.

Not to be confused with another word that you may find not in a menu from Tudor England, but more likely in a bestiary. That's right. So this other word is cock-up.

a trice rather than cock in trice. It's easy to confuse the two. They are phonetically similar, spelled similarly, but different things altogether. Now, I'm not going to go extremely deep here because the cockatrice subject will have some overlap with our past discussions of the mythical monster known as the basilisk. These creatures were in many cases, not all, but in many cases treated as the same thing.

Akaka Trice is sort of a loosely defined monster, usually combining avian and reptilian features or associations. Sometimes it is

kind of straightforwardly a wyvern. It's like a dragon with two legs, no little T-Rex arms, just the two legs and then two wings and then a rooster's head. It appears in this form or roughly this form in some medieval manuscripts and some heraldry. But in other cases, it's described as a kind of fantastically venomous serpent or as a serpent that hatches from a

cock's egg. Sometimes after like a cock egg is incubated by a reptile or a toad. Generally, a cockatrice is bad news. It is a venomous monster or a monster that kills everything around it. Though there is an interesting sort of literary history of this word, because if you go reading the King James translation of the Bible,

You will find lots of references to the cockatrice as a kind of beast or venomous monster. A couple of examples I dug up. One is from the book of Isaiah, chapter 59, verses 4 to 5, which say, None calleth for justice, nor any pleadeth for truth. They trust in vanity and speak lies. They conceive mischief and bring forth iniquity. They

They hatch cockatrice eggs and weave the spider's web. He that eateth of their eggs dieth, and that which is crushed breaketh out into a viper. Common theme you will get in some of the Old Testament books of the prophets is, you know, comparing wickedness and sin and lack of moral virtue to venomous animals and predatory animals, dangerous beasts.

So no hatching cockatrice eggs. That's what I'm taking from the scripture. That's not a good thing to do that. You bring forth iniquity. Another good one I found just this one is a little pithier. This is from the book of Jeremiah chapter eight, verse 17. Again, the King James translation. It says, for behold, I will send serpents cockatrices among you, which will not be charmed and they shall bite you, saith the Lord. Yeah.

Oh, wow. That's straight to the point. They shall bite you. Now, the word cockatrice does not appear in later translations of the Bible that are better informed about what the original Greek and Hebrew words that are being translated usually mean. The English usage of cockatrice in the Bible traces back to John Wycliffe's English translation of the Old Testament, in which

A Hebrew word that probably originally referred to like a snake, a venomous reptile, is taken as referring to this strange monster, which was already sort of in consciousness, in part derived from stories that go back to Pliny the Elder. And I think we've actually talked about these stories before in our episodes on the Basilisk.

But the cockatrice also has some interesting etymological confusion in its history because the English word cockatrice is recorded as far back as late Middle English. It's derived from an old French term, cockatrice.

which in turn comes from the Latin calcatrix. So it's not actually related to the English word or the French word cock, which meaning like, you know, a rooster, which that's the imagery we see in like this heraldry where it's a dragon with a rooster's head or somehow a cock's egg that is hatched in conjunction with reptile interference. And,

Instead, it goes back to the Latin calcatrix, which means she who treads. The Latin verb here is calcare, meaning to tread. So a calcatrix is a female entity who treads. So there's some more word confusion for you. But the main point being that a cockatrice is a monster and a cockatrice is something completely different. It is the food that we're about to talk about. Yeah. And I can't promise that the word is just going to get any easier to digest.

But yeah, the cock and trice, to be clear, is a composite dish. So in the front, you have a suckling pig and in the back, a turkey or capon. Capon is a neutered male chicken.

So the result is a feast item of intrigue, as if the folks present for the meal are being served not an animal of the mundane world, but rather some fantastic hybrid that belongs perhaps in a bestiary alongside the cock a trice.

Yeah, making monsters out of our food. A tradition that is not entirely gone, by the way. I'm sure many people listening have seen viral images of this sort that get shared around the internet. One that very much sticks in my mind is whoever first had the idea to make a facehugger from the Alien series out of a turkey's body with some crab legs on the side and then a tail made out of a stuffed sausage. Yeah, you sent me that photo. It's quite horrifying. Yeah.

Yeah, it makes you want to eat them. You know, and even vegans and vegetarians get in on the action as well. I know in my household, it has become a tradition on Halloween. We make a dish that is known by a few different names. You and I, I think, both know it as feet of meat. It has also been called feet loaf. I know Amy Sedaris calls it as such.

But essentially it is meatloaf, or in our case we use like imitation meat, that takes the form of one or two disembodied bloody feet. Beautiful. That's so nice. So, you know, I can't be too judgy about all this because I totally do it as well. Now, as for the cock and trice here, I looked up some more info on this in a book from Terry Breverton called The Tudor Kitchen.

And he goes into a little more detail. He mentions that the way you make one of these things is that you, first of all, you, of course, butcher the two animals in question. And then once you've butchered them, you know, you've removed everything. You don't need to be part of the finished meal. You know how butchering works. You stitch these together. Then you stuff it as you would often stuff, you know, various feast items as turkeys are still stuffed to this day, you know, for Thanksgiving in America.

And then you roast it on a spit per the usual treatment of the day. Now, originally, the dish, according to Breverton, was known as cockagrass or perhaps cottagrass. And this is combining the words for cock and gris, a suckling pig.

That being said, it does. I mean, I couldn't find much where people were really talking about the the the comparison between these two words. It seems to me that if the word for the monster cockatrice is it all in some form like floating around in one's vocabulary, then cock in trice is some sort of an allusion to that. But I couldn't find any hard answers on that.

There are also various other spellings for the food item here, the cock and trice, as well as 15th century recipes that lay out the steps to produce one.

And this has long been a novelty. It was a novelty when it was served on the tables in Tudor England. And you can look around, you can find various videos online of modern chefs and amateur chefs and streamers recreating it for entertainment purposes and for exploration purposes. Like there's nothing, you know, there's nothing, you know,

you know, off the board occurring in the creation of this, this, this dish. I was looking around at various people that were either talking directly about it or sometimes just invoking it. The,

as an example of the latter, I saw a work by a writer by the name of Karen Robber, who describes it as performing meat, which I thought was an interesting phrase. Like the meat in this case is not just here for your consumption. One would assume it is also supposed to taste good. But on top of that, it is like the sheer performance of the presentation, which is

You know, that's going to be present in a lot of meals, but like it becomes part of the forefront in a case like this. Yeah, I might have some different terminology that we could apply to this category later in the episode, but I'd say I primarily think of this as stunt food. Stunt food is good. Yeah. Yeah. It's food that's not just to be eaten. It's also to be admired as an act. Yes. Yes.

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Lock in a 6% or higher yield with a bond account at public.com. But hurry, your yield is not locked in until you invest. Brought to you by Public Investing member FINREN SIPC. Yield to worst is not guaranteed. Not an investment recommendation. All investing involves risk. Visit public.com slash disclosures for more info.

Alright, we're all set for the party. I've trimmed the tree, hung the mistletoe, and paired all those weird-shaped knives and forks with the appropriate cheeses. And I plugged in the Bartesian. Bartesian? It's a home cocktail maker that makes over 60 premium cocktails, plus a whole lot of seasonal favorites, too. I just got it for

So how about a Closmopolitan or a mistletoe margarita? I'm thirsty. Watch. I just pop in a capsule, choose my strength, and... Wow. It's beginning to feel more seasonal in here already. If your holiday party doesn't have a bartender, then you become the bartender. Unless you've got a Bartesian. Because Bartesian crafts every cocktail perfectly in as little as 30 seconds. And I just got it for $50 off. Tis the season to be jollier.

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That's oracle.com slash strategic. What is chronic migraine? It's 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more. Botox, onobotulinum toxin A, prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine. It's not approved for adults with migraine who have 14 or fewer headache days a month. Ask your doctor about Botox.

Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection.

Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis, or Lambert-Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. Talk to your doctor and visit BotoxChronicMigraine.com or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more. This is Jonathan Strickland from Tech Stuff. I've been getting into the holiday spirit by listening to a lot, and I mean...

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So, Reverton's book contains numerous other, at least from my vantage point, strange Tudor dishes.

We can all disagree on this. And and, you know, and ultimately, I'm sure there are examples of similar dishes in various culinary traditions and cultures where it's like totally not weird for you to eat it. Oh, yeah. I mean, what is weird in terms of food is totally a matter of social and cultural expectations. It's like what's familiar to us. Yeah. So when I say it sounds weird to me, it's weird because I'm imagining the tutors eating this.

But this particular book includes references to such dishes as sliced cow tongue pie, boiled badger, boiled viper, swan with blood and entrail sauce. Oh, delicious. This one really gave my wife pause. Cow's udders in mustard sauce. Yes.

I'm not sure like where, like that, that one kind of hits in various ways. Like, like when it's the udders, but then also the mustard sauce. I really have a hard time picturing this. Cow's udders in sweet and sour sauce, I think would work better.

And then also multiple peacock recipes. Yes, peacocks. Now, wait, now that I'm thinking about it, why don't any like of these fast food chains have a dipping sauce for your nuggets that is blood and entrail sauce? I mean, they could with the right market, you could call it that and people would go nuts for it.

But these peacock recipes, oh my goodness. I think in the past I'd run across examples of people eating peacocks as a feast food, but I often forget about it because I end up, you know, you see peacocks everywhere. They've spread, they've been introduced rather all over the world from the Indian subcontinent. So most of you, I think, have probably seen one.

You know, they walk around. The males of the species, the peacocks, you know, look dazzling with their feathers. And then, of course, you have the peahens, the females. More on the particulars in just a second. But,

But yes, recipes for this include the gilded peacock. This is a 1661 recipe that calls for the spit-roasted bird to be covered with gold leaf and recovered in the peacock's skin and feathers after it's been presented. So you butcher it, you set aside those gorgeous feathers and its skin,

And then you put it all back together with gold leaf, quote, for recreation and for magnificence. According to Dr. John Wexler's 18 books of the secrets of art in nature from 1661. That sounds like a book by like John Dee or something. Yeah. It sounds like it would be alchemical in nature and not about eating a peacock. Not about how to have fun with peacock corpses. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I guess it makes sense. If you can eat the peacock, you won't admire the feathers. Yes. So the peafowl, as we may more accurately describe these creatures, consists of three different species. There are two Asiatic peacocks native to the Indian subcontinent, and there's also a Congo peafowl that is apparently actually not a true peafowl. The Indian peafowl is the key species for our concerns here, notable for the splendid mating displays made by the male peacocks that surely everyone has seen.

The bird was introduced as a novelty into Europe, traditionally held as being introduced by the Macedonian general Alexander the Great during the 4th century BCE, but some think it might have occurred earlier than that. It's an interesting bird in its own right, and we could probably devote an entire episode to it, no doubt exploring its place, for example, in the history of evolutionary theory.

One of the many animals that ends up being invoked in scientific discourse of the day.

Instead of all that, though, I want to cut right to some interesting religious context for the peacock from Indian traditions. And for this, I turn once more to Krishna's Sacred Animals of India. This is from Penguin Press. I'm not going to go through everything that the author shares here, but I want to hit some of the key points. So first of all, the peacock, this is not really religious at all, but the peacock is a national bird of India.

Getting into religious traditions, the peacock is held as the animal form of the sky god Indra. Also, it's said that Indra granted the peacock its beautiful colors after one of them extended its sail to hide him during a battle with the demon king Ravana. The peacock is an enemy of snakes and represents victory over evil tendencies and violence.

This is apparently based on real life because peacocks in their natural habitat do eat small snakes. And of course, this reminds me a little bit of what we've talked about concerning the cockatrice and the basilisk.

Oh, I don't think I even mentioned this at the time, but some sources say that the cockatrice, the monster, can have a couple of enemies. One is the cry of the rooster. So like the rooster's call can sort of invalidate the cockatrice's magic or banish it. And then another idea is that the weasel is the enemy of the cockatrice and can defeat it. The peacock is also held to be the vehicle of the war god Kartikia.

The crown of Lord Krishna often features peacock feathers. It's apparently just generally a common symbol of beauty throughout Hindu literature, often associated with joy as well as rain. And Krishna, the writer here, not the mythological figure, also mentions that some traditions hold that Sita, the love of Rama, was born from the egg of a peahen.

He also mentions that the peacock may represent compassion and watchfulness in Buddhist traditions, and that in Tibetan Buddhism, there are also connotations of immortality, which we'll come back to in a second, and a symbol for the universal antidote against the poisonous human emotional states. And in Jainism, the peacock feather may ward away evil.

And then finally, he also mentions in passing that peacocks are apparently mentioned in the Bible as an import of King Solomon. Now, during the medieval period in Europe, they were favorite inclusions in menageries and gardens, becoming important in European heraldry, textiles, and art. And of course, they also came up as a prized food item, food

And yet, even as this exotic bird is selected for the dinner table, it retains its novel qualities as well as some of its like supernatural and symbolic qualities. So, you know, I guess, you know, on the medieval European table and, you know, into the

Renaissance times, it's like you can have it both ways. That animal can be, I guess, both symbolic and delicious. So like if unicorns actually existed, you could take on some of the symbolic, I don't know, purity and holiness of the unicorn by eating its flesh, maybe. Oh, yeah. They would totally have spit roasted a unicorn. Yeah.

Now, some select groups in India also historically ate the bird. And we also have accounts that the ancient Romans enjoyed peacock meat, as well as the ostrich and various other items. In a Roman work titled On the Subject of Cooking, a work that is attributed to a Roman by the name of Apicius, though apparently there are two different Apiciuses in the historical record that

historians think this might have been. So I'm not sure if we know with any degree of accuracy who this was that wrote this. But in on the subject of cooking, this is in translation, of course, it is stated, Entrees of peacock occupied the first rank, provided they be dressed in such manner that the hard and tough parts be tender. The second place in the estimation of gourmets have dishes made of rabbit,

Third, spiny lobster. Fourth comes chicken and fifth, young pig. So according to this source, peacock is right at the top if you cook it right. And, you know, modern American mainstays of chicken and pig like that's that's just down the list. That's after your rabbit and your spiny lobster. Wait, beef doesn't even make the list. No love for fish. Where's my goat?

Whoever Apicius was, the delicacies based on peacock tongues are also attributed to him. But I wonder if even the Romans ever considered such a Tudor dish as listed by Breverton in his book as redressed peacocks which seem alive and how to make them breathe fire through their mouth. Yeah.

This is one of the listings from Tudor England that he goes over. So basically, this is very similar to the gilded peacock, I'm assuming here. It amounts, though, to a complex, first of all, butchering and then spit roasting of said bird. But then it's stuffed and mounted and its skin and its feathers are added back. And then on top of everything else, they use some sort of a fire effect.

created via camphor, a waxy, colorless substance that burns at a low temperature. So like some sort of little...

pyrotechnic device inside the peacock's mouth so that as you serve it, it is breathing fire. Were peacocks thought to breathe fire in life or I wonder what this is connecting to. I mean, I guess it's just, it's kind of like lighting the candles on a birthday cake, right. Or, um, you know, a flaming, uh, drink, you know, a little fire makes it even more exciting. And so, yeah, if you're going to have an animal with its head on it, uh, why not have that head spitting fire? Okay. Yeah. Blow out the peacock, honey. Yeah.

Now, this leads us to another aspect that we kind of touched on very briefly. We mentioned how the Romans said, okay, peacock flesh is the best, but you got to dress it right. You got to cook it right so that you don't have to deal with the hard and the tough parts. You can make those parts tender. There does seem to be a lot of discussion about just how tough peacock meat can be.

And this gets into this idea that you also see sort of reverberating through even ancient literature, the idea that the peacock's flesh did not rot, that it was incorruptible.

This is getting more and more unicorn by the moment. It is really. These are attributes you would expect to be applied to the unicorn or something like that. And not a peacock, which, you know, it's like I grew up knowing people who had peacocks wandering around their homes. Like it didn't seem weird at all. It didn't seem like a magical creature. You know, I mean, it's impressive, but not magical. To be clear, this, this is not true. Peacocks rot when they die. Right, right. But this idea seems to go back a ways. Um,

I've seen it attributed to Aristotle, but I don't believe he ever directly addressed it. Though I think there are some later authors who then kind of like

tried to claim that, oh, he was aware of this belief and perhaps he's somehow alluding to it. Writers such as Pliny and Plutarch, they also discussed the bird's links to traditions of immortality. But where we really find a firm example of this being discussed is in the 5th century CE book On the City of God Against the Pagans or The City of God by Augustine of Hippo.

And I'm going to read for you here from the Marcus Dodds translation. "For who but God the Creator of all things has given to the flesh of the peacock its antiseptic property? This property, when I first heard of it, seemed to me incredible. But it happened at Carthage that a bird of this kind was cooked and served up to me.

And taking a suitable slice of flesh from its breast, I ordered it to be kept, and when it had been kept as many days as make any other flesh stinking, it was produced and set before me, and emitted no offensive smell. And after it had been laid by for thirty days and more, it was still in the same state, and a year after the same still, except that it was a little more shriveled and

I don't think I understood that last sentence. Well, he's tying it all into the power of God, the creator. The chaff and the ripening of green fruit, that's not directly involved with the peacock's flesh.

But it's some context of theological observation. Wow. Right. And I have to say, this may be the single most impressive leftovers inspired theological argument or example of all time, just hands down. I can't imagine that there's a better one out there where like Augustine's like, yeah, I brought some food home from dinner and it didn't rot. And a year later, it's still good. What can I say? Glory to the creator.

Imagine if you saw that video, I don't know when this was, of like the McDonald's burger that wouldn't rise. Remember that? Yeah, I mean, similar thing, right? Glory be to God. But anyway, the peacock, in large part,

due to this discussion, but also, you know, trailing off of other cultural and religious connections. It becomes a symbol of not mere pride, as you might expect from watching a peacock stroll about, but of Christian eschatology, informed as well by medieval ideas concerning their molting and also, you know, very real observations that they eat small snakes and therefore, well, maybe they're killing and eating venomous serpents.

And so the peacock becomes a symbol of the resurrection in early Christian art. You see it in early catacombs and so forth. And thus we shall dine upon it. Yeah. I don't know. It's so interesting that, you know, a bird like this, you know, is very spectacular. And it can take on all of these additional meanings and so forth. But then also, you know, you come down to it. It's like, let's put it on the dinner table. Let's make it look amazing. Let's eat it.

I've never eaten peacock, but I would love to hear from anyone out there who has, who can testify to the corruptibility of its flesh, but also just how does it taste if prepared properly? What are your tips for cooking peacock? Yeah, if it tends to be tougher than your normal poultry, like chicken or whatever, I would imagine it's one of those things they do a long cooking time on, like maybe some kind of...

peacock equivalent of coq au vin. Yeah, yeah. I don't even know where you go to get peacock meat officially because, I mean, it's not like you can't go to like a, what a Fuddrucker's in the 1990s and get a peacock burger. Like you could get like an ostrich burger apparently, but at any rate. I bet they got it at Walmart. Yeah.

Listen up, folks. Time could be running out to lock in a historic yield at public.com. As of September 23rd, 2024, you can lock in a 6% or higher yield with a bond account. But here's the thing. The Federal Reserve just announced a big rate cut, and the plan is for more rate cuts this year and in 2025 as well. That's good news if you're looking to buy a home, but it might not be so good for the interest you earn on your cash.

So if you want to lock in a 6% or higher yield with a diversified portfolio of high yield and investment grade bonds, you might want to act fast. The good news, it only takes a couple of minutes to sign up at public.com. And once you lock in your yield, you can earn regular interest payments even as rates decline.

Lock in a 6% or higher yield with a bond account at public.com. But hurry, your yield is not locked in until you invest. Brought to you by Public Investing, member FINRA and SIPC. Yield to worst is not guaranteed. Not an investment recommendation. All investing involves risk. Visit public.com slash disclosures for more info.

Alright, we're all set for the party. I've trimmed the tree, hung the mistletoe, and paired all those weird-shaped knives and forks with the appropriate cheeses. And I plugged in the Bartesian. Bartesian? It's a home cocktail maker that makes over 60 premium cocktails. Plus a whole lot of seasonal favorites, too. I just got it for

So how about a Closmopolitan or a mistletoe margarita? I'm thirsty. Watch. I just pop in a capsule, choose my strength, and... Wow. It's beginning to feel more seasonal in here already. If your holiday party doesn't have a bartender, then you become the bartender. Unless you've got a Bartesian, because Bartesian crafts every cocktail perfectly in as little as 30 seconds. And I just got it for $50 off. Tis the season to be jollier.

Add some holiday flavor to every celebration with the sleek, sophisticated home cocktail maker, Bartesian. Pick up your phone and shake it to get $50 off any cocktail maker. Yes, you heard me. Shake your phone and get $50 off. Don't delay. What is chronic migraine?

It's 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more. Botox, onabotulinumtoxin A, prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine. It's not approved for adults with migraine who have 14 or fewer headache days a month. Ask your doctor about Botox.

Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection.

Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis or Lambert-Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. Talk to your doctor and visit BotoxChronicMigraine.com or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more. This is Jonathan Strickland from Tech Stuff. I've been getting into the holiday spirit by listening to a lot, and I mean...

a lot of music on my Sonos Move 2 smart speaker. Now, the thing I love about the Move 2 is that I can pick it up off its cradle and just carry it with me room to room. So whether I'm decking the halls or I'm prepping hot apple cider or I'm just

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Because less time shopping means more time for what truly matters. Get more this holiday season. Download the Shipt app and start shopping today. All right. Well, I wanted to come back to something I think we alluded to a little bit in terms of extravagant meals and performing meats, as you mentioned earlier, Rob. Yes.

This is the subject of ingastration, which is the culinary term for stuffing one animal inside another. At this point, most of you out there listening have probably heard of the famous or infamous turducken, a three-bird roast made of a duck, a chicken, and a turkey. And I've seen dispute about what order they are stuffed in.

Now, I was reading that it's most often a duck stuffed inside the body cavity of a chicken stuffed inside the body cavity of a turkey. But sometimes it sounds like the the duck and chicken rolls are reversed. It may just have to do with how large each one you've got is.

But in most descriptions, these birds are they're not stuffed in whole with the bones at all. The birds, the bird carcasses are fully deboned beforehand. So you take all the bones out and just have the meat and the skin. And then there's usually also some form of stuffing to pad out the spaces in between.

I had to be reminded of this, but apparently my brother-in-law made one of these years and years ago. And the main surviving detail of it is that he had to get up super early in the morning because he did have to remove the bones from everything. Deboning a whole poultry carcass is, I have actually done it before. It's a lot of work. Yeah. I'm sure if you're an experienced butcher, it's, you know, it's pretty easy. But to my amateur hands, it was a task. I bet.

Though I've never made a turducken. This was just a chicken. I mean, I apparently ate of this turducken, but this was a long time ago and I have no memories of what it might have tasted like.

So the turducken is something that I suspect is referenced for comedy value at least a thousand times as often as it is actually eaten. Not only because for, you know, many people for whom it is not a regular part of their dining find in castration a funny concept. Also, I suspect because the word turducken contains the word turd. That's true. It's just a funny sounding word. Yes.

So famously, the American football commentator John Madden talked about the idea of a turducken on some NFL event broadcasts around Thanksgiving across the years. You know, I'm not a football fan, so I knew nothing about this. I only came across this because I was reading about it. But I looked up some of these videos.

And it is quite fun. Madden is talking about the turducken with an adorable combination of amusement and amazement. It's just like, get a load of this. I'm about to knock your socks off. It's a chicken inside a turkey.

And I found this clip from a it's like some pre-show chatter from the Eagles versus the 49ers game on the Monday before Thanksgiving, November 2002. And Rob, I shared this video with you. So hopefully I can get your reaction to it. But this video is one of the most like year 2002 things I've ever seen.

Uh, so the, the announcer comes on and they're like Monday night football pre Thanksgiving brought to you by Budweiser brewed fresh in America, touchstone pictures, the hot chick coming soon to theaters everywhere. And then there's also an, uh, there's an ad for radio shack and then an ad for Chrysler. And the, the tagline for Chrysler at the time was love equals drive. Wow.

Yeah, I watched this video and I, yes, this was impressive. I also am not a football fan. I know of Madden from his many video games, but yeah, he gets into it. Literally. He made so many video games. Yeah. Yeah. Prolific. How do you have time for that? Yeah.

Oh, by the way, just important correction to what I just said. JJ just chimed in because he watched the video also to let us know that it was not love equals drive. It was drive equals love, though. I think by some principle of mathematics that works out to the same thing.

I think so. Right. Right. Sure. It's got to, I don't know. Mathematicians let us know. But also, so the funny thing about this video is that Madden is extolling the virtues of the turducken. Like he, he explains what it is. He's like, yeah, it's, you know, you put this bird inside this bird and it's so great. But then he also demonstrates how a turducken is structured by, he like brings the camera over to this,

prepared roasted turducken and then just rips it apart with his hands to show all the layers. Oh my goodness. Somebody spent all day on that. Yeah. So who actually invented the turducken and when is a matter of some dispute. The American Cajun and Creole chef Paul Prudhomme at one point claimed he invented the turducken at a lodge in Wyoming at some point. This probably would have been in the 1960s or maybe the early 70s.

though the first time he published his recipe was in a cookbook in the 80s. And then a couple of other Louisiana-based chefs named Junior and Sammy Herbert, brothers who ran a butcher shop together in Louisiana, they claimed they were the first to create it. So it's, as far as I can tell, still in dispute when the first authentic turducken was conceived. But part of the problem with assigning credit for the invention of the turducken

Turducken is how close does a recipe have to be to count? Because if you get a little looser in your criteria and you just start looking for examples of birds stuffed inside birds and cooked, examples start to go way back hundreds or thousands of years into history. It's just the question of who specifically did this combination in this order. Well, plus it also comes down to the question, are you talking about doubles or are you talking about triples? That's right. Yeah.

So I mentioned the idea of stunt food earlier. You know, the cock and trice clearly seems to me to be a kind of stunt food. But stuffing meats inside meats, stuffing whole animal carcasses inside other animal carcasses and then cooking them, that seems to me to be like the quintessential stunt food. Like whatever actual unique pleasures lie in the eating of three different kinds of poultry meat all layered together and then cooked is

As opposed to just, you know, served on their own or separately. I think it's hard to deny that the primary appeal of this kind of thing is conceptual novelty. The novelty, the extravagance, the expense and the difficulty imagined in the preparation. It's the idea that like you didn't have to do this, but you did it anyway. Yeah.

And, you know, that's an interesting thing to think about in food preparation because you could represent that appeal in more sympathetic and less sympathetic ways. So in our cultural context, a more sympathetic view would be that it's like an expression of creativity by a cook, a desire for a challenge, a desire to delight diners and your guests by giving them something new. Like you may have had poultry before, but not like this.

And then a less sympathetic view in our cultural context is that it's about like showing off. You're showing off your skill if you yourself are the cook or maybe if, you know, you're hiring the cook or buying this thing. It's about showing off your power and wealth.

So I want to keep that in mind while we turn to one of the most interesting antique accounts of ingastration that I came across. And this is a story that was in a book I found about the evolution of the human diet by a University of Edinburgh biologist named Jonathan Silvertown. So the book is called Dinner with Darwin, Food, Drink and Evolution, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2017.

And so Silvertown tells the story of this particular ingastration project as follows. So the year is 63 BCE. This would have been during the Roman Republican period.

And in 63 BCE, there was a banquet held in honor of the Roman statesman Cicero, who is still known today for being a great orator and rhetorician, a great giver of speeches. But he wasn't just a, you know, it wasn't just style points for Cicero. He was also a very important power player in Roman politics at the time. The host of this banquet for Cicero was one of the richest citizens of Rome, a consul named Servilius Rullus.

And allegedly, you know, it starts off with some appetizers, early courses of the feast that went over extremely well. The guests were very happy. And in fact, they burst into applause after the appetizer courses. But the real centerpiece of the feast would be the Porcus Troianus, or what French authors would later call the boar a la Troian, the Trojan pig. Now, why would it be called that? Your mind might already be jumping to the answer. But if you stick with me for a second.

Whoa.

It's already getting outrageous. And we haven't gone inside the pig. Haven't even gone in yet. Yeah. Then they cut open the roast boar to reveal that inside it, there is a second roast boar. And then inside the second roast boar, a third and so on and so on, giving way to smaller and smaller animals until the final core. You reach the core, you know, the center of the Death Star. What's down there? It's a tiny little cooked bird.

Oh, my goodness. Now, I enjoy cooking a challenging dish, but also this is true for a lot of the dishes we've talked about today. But for some reason, in this particular example, I was just filled with horror imagining this dish made by people who were not aware of germ theory and did not have like time temperature charts for pasteurization. I'm just feeling like that that bird in the middle was not cooked properly. Yeah. Or if it was, everything else was dry as heck.

But anyway, so this is how you get the name Trojan pig. As one Roman author tells us, it was stuffed with smaller animals in the same way that the Trojan horse of the Iliad was filled with armed soldiers. And I also like the implication that it will launch a sneak attack on your body from the inside. Well, yeah, yeah, it sounds like it just might.

By the way, this is the way that Silvertown tells the story in the book. But elsewhere, I've seen alternate accounts. Apparently, there are multiple ancient texts that mention versions of this dish. And alternate accounts of the Trojan pig describe it as a roast boar stuffed with cased sausages, which were said when you cut open the boar to spill out of the hog like intestines. Delicious. Okay. Yeah.

Maybe it's more amusing if you're like closer to your butchery culture, I guess. Yeah, possibly. So in this book, the author frames this within a discussion about the shifting pressures dictating how we prepare food when our relationship to food resources changes.

you know, of course, with wild animals and for most humans, for most of the history of our species, the primary concern with food has just been making sure you have enough access to the nutrients you need to survive. But once humans get into a situation where there is what feels like a dependable surplus of food, our attitude about what food is for changes.

It becomes less about meeting the metabolic energy needs of the body. And food can be used for other things to achieve other important goals, such as trying to boost social status. And I think there's no doubt at all that in like most cultures throughout history, food

There has been a social status benefit to being a good host. That's like a I don't I don't know if I can say it's a cultural universal, but it's got to be close to universal. Like being a good host is widely recognized as a thing that makes you a socially respectable person.

And one of the ways you can approach trying to gain a reputation as a good host is by serving elaborate and impressive and delightful meals. Not only meeting your guests' energy needs, but beyond that, giving them gustatory pleasure. And then beyond that, giving them novelty in food. And then beyond that, giving them excess just for excess's sake, just to show them that you can and you're willing to. Hmm.

So there's an interesting relationship here that that Silvertown points out is sort of a difference between satisfying hunger and satisfying the need for status, because hunger is fundamentally hunger is both limited by some kind of stigmatization.

physical constraints on the body, but it's also insatiable in the long term. So you can eat a meal, but you can only eat so much until you're full, even if you got a big appetite, you know, there's going to be a limit. And then also on the other end, eventually, no matter how much you eat, your satiation will trend down towards zero over time. So at some point, even if you had a really big meal, you're going to need to eat again. You meet the need and then over time, the need recurs.

Pressure for social status, on the other hand, can be subject to a positive feedback loop. Silvertown writes, quote, My three-bird roast raises my status among my dinner guests, who then feel the need to reciprocate. When everybody is serving three-bird roasts, I have become like everyone else, so I go one better and show off with a four-bird roast. Four-bird roasts become the new norm, and so I have to go one better. And, you know, I was thinking about this and thinking that

there are actually different and more familiar ways this can be acted out and socially understood. So we are not all like Roman consuls or Tudor British aristocrats jockeying for political power. But the desire for status can manifest to us in ways that seem more benign in our cultural environment. So here's an example I'm thinking of. You want to host a family Thanksgiving, maybe.

And you want to make sure that the spread is really nice so that the people in your family and your friend group who are attending will like you and will have a good time and will enjoy coming to your house at the holidays and will want to spend time with you.

That is a perfectly reasonable thing to want. And it feels a lot less crass and cutthroat than the historical examples, you know, of these like Roman politicians. But I think it's fair to say that this is still a way of using food to boost our social status. I think that's a good point. I mean, it's like we are social animals. Like we cannot help but engage in those currents, whether it is about the grander game of food

You know, thrones and politics or if it is about a much simpler and maybe more wholesome game of just appealing to friends and loved ones. Right. Wanting to be liked and accepted by your social circle, by your friends and family. Now, to cite a I don't want to judge too much, but a potentially fine or potentially less wholesome feeling example from today.

Another variation is not actually physically hosting guests in person, but like posting your impressive food creations on social media.

In that format, you don't actually have to go to the trouble of hosting people, but you can still presumably impress others and gain social status by digitally showing off your turducken or whatever other impressive food creation on the gram. Well, you know, it is one of those things that I guess is kind of like doubly impressive because not only does it mean you can cook said dish, but you also have the talent and skill to properly photograph or film it.

And those, those two skills don't always go hand in hand. Oh, they don't. Yeah. Uh, yeah, I know food photography is a real, it's a thing people don't appreciate enough because they consume like food, food photography all the time and like, don't realize how disgusting even a lot of really good food looks if you know, the light conditions aren't right and so forth. Yeah.

But anyway, coming back to the argument from this book, according to this author, Silvertown, this is why in a food surplus environment where our investments in food become more about promoting social status than about simply satisfying the body's energy needs.

There can be a tendency to to always try to go one better, to keep one upping the social expectations because the need for status can have this this zero point adjusted to whatever your cultural baseline is, which might feel to you like it involves cramming seven chickens inside nine pigs for Thanksgiving or whatever.

But like you were saying, Rob, it cuts to a core biological reality about humans, which is that we are not sharks. You know, we are a deeply social species and social reputation is nearly as important to us as food. It's like barely under food in terms of needs. It's core.

core to our wellbeing. And so the desire to, to have a good reputation, to be liked by friends and family, uh, to, to, and, uh, to have, you know, to have positive social status, uh, that, that is something that it cuts really deep to the human experience. It's a strong need we have. And if you get in a cultural situation where you've

feel like in order to meet those needs, to meet that pressure for reputation and to be liked and thought of as a good host and all that, that you need to do increasingly impressive and possibly even strange creations of food. It can seem perfectly logical. It's just like, this is what I've got to do. Yeah. I mean, this is the reason why we have religious and mythological tales in which

it is uh it is stressed that you were you were always good as a host because the people you are entertaining uh they may seem like nobody but they could be gods in disguise you know like that's how that's how essential hosting is uh to the human experience yeah now i want to sort of close things out in uh maybe a less cerebral area i want to talk very briefly about tofurkey

Because tofurkey is also, I mean, I think objectively a funny word. It makes me laugh anytime I see a package of tofurkey at the store. And that alone makes me want to buy it. Can I do a ranking of words? Yeah. I'm going to say the least funny word is chicken. Turkey is a funnier word than chicken. Tofurkey is a funnier word than turkey. And turducken is a funnier word than tofurkey.

Yes, I think that ranking is solid. But if you're not familiar with Tofurky, it is a holiday meat substitute, really a feast meat substitute in a limited way. It's a blend of wheat protein and tofu. According to the website of the official Tofurky product, the company anyway began in 1980 when a teacher and naturalist by the name of Seth Tibbett

made some from scratch tempeh to share with friends in Portland. And then the company takes off and eventually gives the world tofurkey in 1995 as a vegan holiday roast, which, I mean, you know, mid-90s, like that's,

For a lot of people, that's early in vegan cooking. That's a time period where I feel like it's more likely to be the punchline on a late night joke. But I guess that's also the beauty of the word tofurkey. It is just innately funny and is therefore going to wind up the subject of late night jokes.

But essentially what we're talking about here is, yeah, a vegan meat substitute loaf filled with stuffing. So, you know, it does connect to these various traditions of big roasts and stuffed meats, but with this meat-free twist. I still prefer feet of meat, but still, I admire the tofurkey.

And it makes me think like what additional twists on these traditions we might see in the near future even, either with our already robust imitation meat capabilities, which really have come a long way since the mid-90s. Some phenomenal meat substitutes out there. I'm a big fan of several of them. But then also we have the ever potential future of vat-grown meat.

Um, I, I, I always hear conflicting things about how far that, uh, how far off that is in terms of feasibility. Um, but maybe not so far off in terms of just pure, um, you know, meat spectacle, you know, like you could imagine that grown, whatever being like the extravagant centerpiece because it's like, you know, it's not at the point yet, uh, you know, where it, uh, it can be rolled out to everyone. Yeah.

My God, though, I mean, the create, like, if you're impressed by, uh, cramming together some crab legs and a Turkey to look like a face hugger, imagine what could be done. If you can actually like grow the meat to a specified mold, you can make all kinds of things. And that could also be an interesting, uh, yeah, like a, uh, an extravagant kind of, you know, it's probably not cheap to do that, but if you really want to impress your guests, it's like here you're, you're going to eat a, I don't know, a delicious, a unicorn head. Yeah.

I mean, what do meats end up tasting like when they are still on some level biologically meat, but they're divorced from the concept of living animals and they are subject to human tinkering and engineering? Like, you know, what strange new tastes and forms are possible? I mean, I guess it's worth pointing out that certainly to a large extent, humans have already manipulated nature.

The taste and form of various meats in their domesticated meat animals. But this would just take it to the next level, potentially. It depends, I guess, to what extent you feel like you have to stay in line with the traditions and to what extent you can stray away from them.

But who knows? There could come a time when on the same table, you could serve both cock and trice and cockatrice right there next to each other on silver platters.

Yeah. So, hey, folks out there, if you're listening and you work in the lab-grown meat field, write in and let us know, like, how feasible is this? Could you grow a cockatrice to eat? Yeah. And the rest of you out there, pro chefs, amateur chefs, et cetera, write in with your thoughts and experiences with any of the recipes that we've discussed in this episode. We'd love to hear from you. Send your food pictures as well. We'll have a look at them. Especially if they look disgusting because of the lighting. Yeah.

We will not. We will not judge you on that count. All right. We're going to go ahead and close out this episode. But we'll just remind you that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.

Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to send us your interesting holiday creations, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hi, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com. Thank you.

Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. ♪♪♪

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