🤢 Frankly Gross 1912

Peacock

Kill it with a quill through the brain, roast it, sew it back into its feathers, and set its beak alight.

From: Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery
Published: 1912
Also printed in: 1 other book
Yikes Scale: Big yikes

Exactly as printed, 1912

This beautiful and majestic bird has been introduced on the table both by the ancients and the moderns, but chiefly as a showy and ornamental dish, the bird being preserved in some of its handsome plumage. The flesh is coarse and ill-coloured. "Kill a peacock," says Bapista Porta, an old-time chef, "by thrusting a quill into his brain, or else cut his throat as you do for young kids, that the blood may come forth; then cut his skin gently from the throat to his tail, and, being cut, pull it off with his feathers from his whole body to his head; cut that off with the skin and legs, and keep it. Roast the peacock on a spit, his body being stuffed with spices and sweet herbs, first sticking cloves in his breast, and wrapping his neck in white cloth. When the peacock is roasted and taken from the spit, put him into his own skin again, and that he may appear to stand on his feet, you shall thrust small iron wires through his legs, and set fast on board that they may not be discerned, and through his body to his head and tail. Some put camphire in his mouth, and when he is set on the table they cast in fire."

Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, 1912. Public domain; transcription unaltered.

So what happens if I make it?

The camphor is the genuine hazard. It is neurotoxic when swallowed and it is being set alight inches from food, on a carcass wrapped in plumage and dripping rendered fat. That is a fire, waiting.

The bird was never the point. Cassell's says outright that the flesh is coarse, and that the peacock came to table as a showpiece. This is theatre with a meal attached.

Notes from the 21st century

The quill is about the skin. Bleeding the bird through the brain rather than the throat keeps the plumage unmarked, because the plumage is what is being served.
Camphor is restricted internally. It can cause seizures, and ingestible camphor was withdrawn in the US in the 1980s. Here it is burning in the beak.
Medieval, revived. The dressed peacock is a fourteenth-century conceit that Victorian antiquarian cookery brought back for effect.

Also in this book

Porpoise — “This fish is often caught at sea by the crews of vessels, and its flesh makes a pleasant change.”
Russian Mode of Preserving Fruit — Fresh fruit packed in quicklime slaked with creosote water, in a wooden box.
Syllabubs Under the Cow — A punch bowl of sherry, brandy and lemon, carried out to the dairymaid to be filled from the cow.

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