My current favorite example of old-school culinary tomfoolery is this medieval recipe for an enormous egg using 30-40 normal-sized eggs and two pigs' bladders. That sucker's huge! There's no reason to make such a huge egg except to mess with visitors' minds. "Yup, everything's bigger here in Mecklenburg-Strelitz. You should see our cows!"
![[Comments]](/nb//themes/Default/comments.png "3 comments")
(3) Sat Mar 12 2005 20:41 PST:
I think woefully unexplored is the continuity of modern haute cuisine ("deconstructed dishes", recent causes celebres of turning food into aerosol foams, printing images on rice paper with flavored inks, etc.) with similar bizarre preparations used in medieval and ancient times, Not strange ingredients like flamingo tongues and lampreys, which was what I always used to think of, but the dishes themselves: the ground meat of animal foo molded into the shape of a roasted animal bar, the Satyricon's twelve-course Zodiac meal, four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie, etc. It's the same impulse in both cases, but now we have better technology. I would love to read (or write) something that tied these trends together.
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