Found in a Medieval Cookbook

[BeckyLa]

To make a Chicken be Served Roasted. Get a chicken or any other bird you want, and pluck it alive cleanly in hot water. Then get the yolkes of two or three eggs; they should be beaten with powdered saffron and wheat flour, and distempered with fat broth or the grease that drips under a roast in to the dripping pan. By means of a feather glaze and paint your pullet carefully with this mixture so that its colour looks like roast meat. With this done, and when it is about to be served to the table, put the chicken's head under its wing, and turn it in your hands, rotating it until it is fast asleep. Then set it down on your platter with the other roast meat. When it is about to be carved it will wake up and make off down the table upsetting jugs, goblets and whatnot.

I wonder if this is something they really did???​

 

[nccountrygirl]

EEEWWWWW, gross, I'm glad I don't live in those days

 

[2mnypets]

OMG...I was waiting to see at the end of the story if you were teasing or not. That's just horrible no matter if it's a chicken or anything else. I love lobster and crab but that doesn't mean I like to watch people put them alive into boiling water. OHHHHHH!!!!!

 

[Itsme]

What in the world?

 

[wegotchickens]

Poor chicken. But this is from the time of bull & boar fights against dogs for entertainment. So I can see them doing this. Ladies screaming, men roaring with laughter and swigging down the ale.

 

[SpottedCrow]

Except for being plucked the bird is okay...but I can picture this...sort of like having house chickens.

 

[GoodEgg]

Spotted Crow, I think if you put a head on your avatar, we have a good picture of what was going on!

I'm glad I didn't live then too. My professor once also talked about babies being tossed to people out of windows (and sometimes missed) back in those times.

Hope none of it's true, but it wouldn't surprise me.

trish

 

[devora]

A fabulous 13th century practical joke. "Let's torture a chicken and scare the dickens out of guests. Ha ha ha!"

 

[PeiTheCelt]

.... Although spectacle was a *huge* thing in those days, I have a hard time seeing this actually. They regularly "faked" living birds out of the dead (there is a recipe somewhere of basically killing and skinning a swan, cooking it, then re-wrapping it in it's skin to "look alive" before eating (god the bacterial issues turn my stomach on that one)..

But..

I would have to see a reference for this (i.e. "Found in Currye on Englyshe, folio x") before I'd actually believe it. THere are a lot of really horrible stereotypes and stories about the middle ages and renaissance and though some of them *are* true, just as many are not.

(I've spent 26 years doing medieval re-enacting and my academic background is early medieval archaeology and history, and though I cannot discount this, I can say "I would want more evidence before I'd believe it").

 

[BeckyLa]

Pei, you want a link? Here ya go:

http://www.medievalcookery.com/index.shtm

I think it's listed as a joke recipe. Whether they actually did this or not only they know. But there are lots of interesting things in this book.