STRANGE FOODS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 9 June 1938, Page 4

STRANGE FOODS

SOME ANCIENT DISHES. Throughout the ages choice or compulsion has prompted people to eat strange and incredible foods. From America comes a report of fried mice and owl broth, and in the Middle West three years ago there was a demand for roast crows. An English manuscript of the fourteenth century mentions a pudding made from porpoises; and in one of his poems Ben Jonson suggests that dolphins were sometimes milked and the milk made into “a rare butter.” A seventeenth century book carries the information that "the Chinese, especially the women, know that rats used as food stop the falling out of the hair and make the locks soft, silky and beautiful.” Frogs and snails are well known as dishes on the Continent, and during the war (food must have been very short) grasshoppers were recommended as food, and also a certain type of caterpillar, to be cooked in boiling butter. One English Queen was reputed to be very fond of bullfinch pie. During a medieval famine two young girls were accused of witchcraft because they stayed fat and healthy while everyone else was starving. They confessed that they had been living on the white flesh of cockroaches!

Spiders were often eaten in past days, sometimes as a “cure,” sometimes as a delicacy. There is a documented report of a lady who used to spread them on bread as a “luxurious substitute” for butter. The flavour was said to resemble that of nuts!