Searching the web, I came across this site for Medieval recipes and cooking tips. There’s some bizarre stuff on there, (Including how to cook with quicksilver and lye :eek: ), but some of the strangest involves cooking animals, and then serving them while they’re still alive.
Is this possible? Was this ever really done? Is there any way an animal can be cooked enough to be edible and yet still be alive, or is the movement just a reaction to the heat? I know that sometimes Chickens and such move after death, but wouldn’t cooking damage the body enough to kill the duck?
[sup]I would never do this or condone doing this. Just wondering[/sup]
On that “Ripley’s Believe It Or Not” show in the 80’s hosted by Jack Palance and his daughter, they showed a fish being served that was seared on (I think) both sides that was still flopping about on the plate.
Almost twenty years ago, I remember watching a * Faces of Death * documentary in which a small monkey was trapped in a hole in the table. The diners seated around the table used small mallets to crack the moneky’s head open and then ate his brain raw. Whether he was a live or not, I couldn’t tell you, but the image is burned into my mind.
Maybe it’s not cooked, just warmed up a bit. Plenty of people eat their dead cow still mooing after all. Not a common serving suggestion for poultry these days, but they did things different back then.
Of course, they’d probably be putting themselves at risk from all sorts of parasites and diseases, but I don’t think that was a big priority in mediaeval times.
Oh, and it probably tasted repulsive too. (Raw goose? Bleeech!)
This suggests an experiment, and the answer. Remember the old experiments where scientists made corpses twitch with electricity? Run a high voltage current through a cooked chicken breast. Does it twitch and act like a muscle, or just sizzle and cook more? I am with scr4, in that I suspect the latter i/e cooked tissue is dead, and the fowl would not be walking if even half cooked( nerve impulses would not cause a reaction).
Additionally, cooking is a chemical process. The proteins in the meat are substantially altered in the process. Think about the observable changes in a chicken breast from raw (pink and slimy) to cooked (white and stringy/grandular) Cooked muscle would be useless for movement.
The only professionals I can think of to answer this are those who understand burns. Any burn specialists care to comment?
On second thought, nevermind, I dont wanna think about it anymore.
Ive had live-cooked fish before. At a fancy chinese restaurant. The fish didn’t flop around but it’s moth was still moving. It was boiled IIRC, not seared, the head is wrapped in cold towel and the body gets boiled. Didn’t taste any different.
Could be, but how warm can the muscles be before they stop working? Think how poorly your body works when the body tempearture is a mere 10 degrees above normal.
Well, “lusty” has a different range of meanings in early modern English; here, I think the best modern gloss would be “lively.”
As far as I can tell, it looks genuine from a linguistic perspective; I doubt that a modern faker, unless he or she were well versed in the history of English, would be able to come up with constructions such as “put Salt and Meum to them” or “his heart then wants moisture.” (Somebody trying to fake an archaic style would usually throw in a bunch of -eth and -est endings in inappropriate places, and leave it at that.)
However, I notice the title of the work this is taken from is “Natural Magic,” which suggests that it’s more likely to contain tall tales than actual recipes. My verdict: authentic document, probably fake story.
Oh, good! I’ve just been saved thousands of dollars in therapy from the childhood trauma of seeing this film. To whom should I make out the check to express my gratitude?
The whole site looks pretty authentic to me too (In historical terms, not scientific), which is part of what made me curious.
Awesome responses so far. Thanks!
The more I consider it, the more I think that (a) The goose wasn’t cooked very well at all, and (b) People probably mistook muscle spasms for signs of life. I’m still curious as to how hot cooked muscles can be before they stop working. Wait, no I’m not.