Poultry Books

“Thus a dish of tench and eel was arranged so that the pointed head of the eels, gills splayed, thrust through a sea of delicate yellow sauce (toasted breadcrumbs, red wine and vinegar, more red wine reduced to defrutum, long pepper, grains of paradise, cloves, all passed through a sieve and tinted with saffron) towards the gaping lips of the tench. A plate of grilled partridges was presented with the birds still spitted from arsenal to beak, the spits radiating out from a magnificent cockerel, skinned, roasted and recloaked in its feathers, tail and red-combed head; the whole arranged on an armature so that it raised one leg and crowed at the ceiling. Inside the hollow body of the cockerel I had arranged a small silver alembic, its narrow end, no wider than a stalk of grass (I had borrowed it from an alchemist I knew through the Academy) protruding from the beak, and below it a tiny spirit lamp, which I lit as the serving men were already taking the dish away. The alembic was filled with Greco wine tinted with the milk of almonds, and I calculated that the wine would boil more or less when the dish was set on the table, and jet from the proud cock, showering the skewered partridges in aromatic white sauce.
There were the ripest figs, all splitting, of course, served with boiled crayfish- as eager, these bright red fellows, to explore the figs as the eels had been curious about the tench- and torte of rucola and pine nuts, liberally spiced with garlic and cloves.”
― Philip Kazan, Appetite