Of Cockentrice and Cockatrice: A Monstrous Feast

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.

going to turn to fifteenth century year. 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 There are some real clunkers that come out of it as well, And this, I don't know, this could be one of them, can't.

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 Tutor England, but more likely in a bestiary.

many cases treated as the same thing. A cockatrice is sort of a loosely defined monster, usually combining Avian and Reptilian features or associations. Sometimes it is kind of straightforwardly a wivern. 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 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 fifty nine, verses four to five, 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 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 in and predatory animals, dangerous beasts.

that are being translated usually mean. The English usage of cockatrice in the Bible traces back to John Wickliffe's English translation of the Old Testament, in which a Hebrew word that probably originally referred to like a snake of 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 plenty of 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. 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 cockin trice is something completely different. It is the food that we're about to talk about.

once you've butchered them, you know you've removed everything. You know 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, you know, the usual treatment

of the day. Now. Originally the dish, according to Breverton, was known as cock a griss in this or perhaps catt agriss. 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 are really talking about the comparison between these two words. It seems to me that if the word for the monster cock a trice is at 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 fifteenth 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 and Tutor 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 dish. I was looking around at various people that were either talking directly about it or sometimes just

invoking it. As an example of the latter, I saw a work by a writer by the name of Karen Robber who described or raper, 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 you know that's going to be president a lot of meals, but like it becomes part of the forefront in a case like this.

males of the spece. These the peacocks, you know, look dazzling with their feathers, and then of course you have the pea hens, the females. More on the particulars in just a second, but yes, recipes for this include the

gilded peacock. This is a sixteen sixty one 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 for the 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 doctor John Wex, there's eighteen books of the Secrets of Art in Nature from sixteen sixty one.

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 fourth century BCE, but something 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 contexts for the peacock from Indian traditions, and for this I turned 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 said that Indra granted the peacock its beautiful colors after one of them extended its sale 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 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 talking of what we've talked about concerning the Kaka trice and the basilisk oh.

a pea hen. 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 will 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. And yet even as this exotic bird is selected for the dinner table, it retains its novel qualities as well as some of its supernatural and

symbolic qualities. So you know, I guess, you know, on the medieval European table and you know into Renaissance times, it's like you can have it both ways. The animal can be I guess, both symbolic and delicious.

So I'm not sure if we know where any degree of accuracy, like who this was that wrote this, But on the subject of cooking, this is in translation. Of course, it is stated entrees of peacock occupied the first drink, provided they be dressed in such manner that the hard and tough parts be tender. The second place in the estimation of gourmet have dishes made of rabbit, third spiny lobster, fourth comes chicken, and fifth young pig.

he goes over it. So basically this is a This is very similar to the peacock I'm assuming here it amounts though to a complex First of all, you know butchering and then you know 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 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.

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.

discussed the bird's links to traditions of immortality. But where we really find a firm example of this being discussed is in the fifth 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 bought 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. 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 drier. Who gave to chaff such power to freeze that it preserves snow buried under it, and such power to warm that it ripens green fruit.

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 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 and also you know, very real observations that they eat small snakes and therefore well maybe they're you know, 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.

it taste if prepared properly. What are your tips for cooking peacock?

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 duck and chicken rolls are reversed and 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 bird carcasses are fully de boned beforehand, so you take all the bones out and just have the meat in the skin, and then there's usually also some form of stuffing to pad out the spaces in between.

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 forty nine Ers game on the Monday before Thanksgiving November two thousand and two, and Robbie, 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 two thousand and

two things I've ever seen. So the announcer comes on and they're like Monday Night Football pre Thanksgiving, brought to you by Budweiser, Brood Fresh in America, Touchstone Pictures, the Hot Chick coming soon to theaters everywhere, and then there's also an there's an ad for Radio Shack, and then an ad for Chrystler, and the tagline for Chrysler at the time was love equals Drive. Wow.

recipe was in a cookbook in the eighties. 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 turducan was conceived. But part of the problem with assigning credit for the invention of the turducan is how close does a rect 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.

served on their own 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, and the preparation. It's the idea that, like, you didn't have to do this, but you did it anyway. And you know, that's an interesting thing to think about in food preparation because you could represent that 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 or 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 into one of the most interesting antique accounts of in gastration 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 name Jonathan Silvertown. So the book is called Dinner with Darwin, Food, Drink and Evolution, published by the University of Chicago Press in

twenty seventeen. And so Silvertown tells the story of this particular in gastration project as follows. So the year is sixty three BCE. This would have been during the Roman Republican period. And in sixty three 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, you know, 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 was one of the richest citizens of Rome, a consule 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 troyanis, or what French authors would later call the bore a la troyenne 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, the description goes that this dish is brought out on a

giant silver plate that takes four slaves to carry. The plate is The plate is huge, and on it there is a roasted bore with baskets of dates hanging from its tusks, which are still attached. And then it's surrounded by delicate little pastries made to look like a brood of little piglets.

you get the name Trojan pitch. 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.

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, there has been a social status benefit to

being a good host. That's like a 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 guest's energy needs, but beyond that giving them goostatory 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. So there's an interesting relationship here that Silvertown points out as 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 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've 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 safe 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 overtime the need recurs. Pressure for social status, on the other hand, can be subject to a positive feedback loop. A silvertown rights 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 they are actually different and more familiar ways this can be acted out and socially understood. So we are not all like Roman consuls or tutor

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 we'll want to spend

time with you. That that is 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.

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 turducan or whatever other impressive food creation on the gram.

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 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 to our wealth being. And so the desire to have a good reputation, to be liked by friends and family, to do and to have, you know, to have positive social status, 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 feel like in order to meet those needs, to meet that pressure for 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. That's you know, it can seem perfectly logical. It's just like this is what I've got to do.

a less cerebral area. I want to talk very briefly about tofurky, 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.

a blend of wheat protein and tofu. According to the website of the official Tofurky product, like the company anyway, began in nineteen eighty when a teacher and naturalists by the name of Seth Tibbott made some from scratch Tempe to share it with friends in Portland, and then like the company takes off and he eventually gives the world Tofurkey in nineteen ninety five as a vegan holiday roast, which I mean, you know, the mid nineties, Like that's as you for a lot of people, like that's early

in vegan cooking. You know, that's a time period where I feel like it's more likely to be to be the punchline on a late night joke. But I guess that's also the beauty of the word tofurky. 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 Toferki, 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 nineties. 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 that grown meat. I always hear conflicting things about how far that, how far off that is in terms of feasibility, but maybe not so far off in terms of just pure 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, you know where it can be rolled out to everyone.

to a specified mold. You could make all kinds of things, and that could also be an interesting uh yeah, like ah, 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 unicorn head.

of various meats and their they're domesticated meat animals. But you know, this would just take it to the next level potentially, mm hmm. 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 cock a trice right there next to each other on on silver platters.