The French will swallow almost anything, so long as it’s surprising to see and delightful to taste. Jennifer J Davis explains why in a study called Masters of Disguise: French Cooks Between Art and Nature, 1651–1793. The 14-page report, replete with old drawings and few new photographs, is published in the journal Gastronomica.
“Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,” Davis writes, “cooks engaged in a multitude of games in which one food masqueraded as another. Such games often played along the fault lines of alimentary taboos, as the cooked imitated the raw, the dead masqueraded as the living, and the injunctions of Catholic fasts were followed to the letter, if not the spirit, of the law.”
Religious fast days, especially, became opportunities for cooks to strut their ingeniously stuffed stuff. All things seemingly became possible….
So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.