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This page describes practices involving highly flammable materials in ways that create a serious risk of fire or explosion.
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Home › The Principles of Cookery › Peacock
Peacock
This beautiful and majestic bird has been introduced on the table both by the ancients and the moderns, but chiefly as a showy and ornamental dish, the bird being preserved in some of its handsome plumage. The flesh is coarse and ill-coloured. "Kill a peacock," says Bapista Porta, an old-time chef, "by thrusting a quill into his brain, or else cut his throat as you do for young kids, that the blood may come forth; then cut his skin gently from the throat to his tail, and, being cut, pull it off with his feathers from his whole body to his head; cut that off with the skin and legs, and keep it. Roast the peacock on a spit, his body being stuffed with spices and sweet herbs, first sticking cloves in his breast, and wrapping his neck in white cloth. When the peacock is roasted and taken from the spit, put him into his own skin again, and that he may appear to stand on his feet, you shall thrust small iron wires through his legs, and set fast on board that they may not be discerned, and through his body to his head and tail. Some put camphire in his mouth, and when he is set on the table they cast in fire."
Cassell's presents this less as a working recipe than as a curiosity, quoting Giambattista della Porta on the medieval and Renaissance practice of serving a roast peacock re-dressed in its own skin and feathers. It cannot be followed today, and the reasons are worth setting out.
- The camphor is the hinge"Camphire" here is camphor, placed in the bird's beak and set alight for the presentation. Camphor is neurotoxic when swallowed and dangerous in small quantities, especially to children; it is also volatile and burns fiercely. Putting it in the mouth of a dish that is about to be carved and eaten is not a risk that can be managed by care.
- Open flame on a dressed carcassThe plumage, the cloth wrapped round the neck and the fat rendered from the roast are all fuel. A flaming presentation of this kind is a fire hazard of a different order from a flambéed pan sauce, and the book's own editorial warning at the head of the page acknowledges it.
- Raw skin returned to cooked meatThe bird is skinned raw, roasted, then re-clothed in the untreated skin and feathers and displayed on the table. Raw poultry skin and feathers carry Salmonella and Campylobacter, and the reassembled bird then sits at ambient temperature while it is admired. Nothing in the sequence brings that outer layer to a safe temperature.
- Iron wires through the meatThe armature that holds the bird upright runs through legs, body, neck and tail. Anything of this sort left in a carving dish is a foreign-body risk, and unfinished iron wire is not food-safe.
- On the flesh itselfCassell's is candid that peacock is "coarse and ill-coloured" — the bird was a spectacle, not good eating. Peafowl are kept and farmed in some countries, though the Indian peafowl is legally protected in India and the green peafowl is an endangered species; the meat has in any case never had much of a culinary case made for it. Nothing about this entry is worth reconstructing on the plate.
- If the idea appealsThe showpiece roast bird, spiced and clove-studded, is achievable with a goose or a large capon using a current recipe. Use one; there is no salvageable method in the passage above.
Roast peacock served in its own feathers was one of the great entremets of the late-medieval and Renaissance banquet, a dish whose whole purpose was to be looked at as it was carried in. It appears in French, English and Italian sources from the fourteenth century onward, and the flaming camphor in the beak is among the details that recur in the accounts; knights are traditionally said to have sworn oaths upon the peacock at such feasts, though the ceremony is better attested in romances than in household records. The chef quoted here, Giambattista della Porta, was a Neapolitan polymath of the sixteenth century whose Magia Naturalis mixed cookery with optics, cosmetics and what would now be called chemistry — which is why a passage on roasting a bird sits so comfortably beside instructions involving camphor. Cassell's, writing in the late nineteenth century for a middle-class household, includes the entry as antiquarian interest rather than instruction, and its flat verdict that the flesh is "coarse and ill-coloured" tells you how completely the peacock had passed from the table to the lawn.