My husband tells me of a high school teacher who taught his class about an interesting Roman Empire-era dish: talking parrot soup. Supposedly, as a delicacy for only the most wealthy and noble, servants would teach parrots to talk, then cut out their tongues and serve them in a soup.
It’s supposed to be a story of unbridled decadence (i.e., how ridiculous things can get when one has unlimited amounts of power and riches), but to me, it smacks of apocrypha. Was this high school teacher spreading ignorance? Cecil? Anyone?
I remember seeing a similar reference once in one of those “Book of Interesting Facts”. It was about a famous Roman dinner where all the dishes were made from birds that could imitate the human voice. I don’t remember any other details or whether there was an authoritative source.
It’s probably the same one that the high school teacher referred to.
Parrot-eating by the Romans, or psittacophagy is evidently a fact. Whether their tongues were refined into a delicacy I haven’t been able to find…yet.
The Romans would eat anything they could stuff down their throats. i would also confirm some famous Roman orator (singer?) favored delicacies made from the tongues of talking birds. I read it when I was a kid in Ripley’s or somesuch.
Turning to Davidson’s Companion to Food he makes no such claim. He does note the last mention of eating parrots come from early Australian cookbooks. He says the meat of these birds is tough and inedible.
He does not say anything about the tongues.