SC - eyeballs and rotting fish

[Heather Law]

: I posted most of your remarks to the medieval list, leaving out the
most insulting, so as not to be the go-between in a flame war. I got a
response from another member of the list and his permission to pass this
on if I really wanted to.
Caroline Richenda
  From: "C. Liang" <cliang at carleton.edu>
    To: 
        Heather Law <lynnx at mc.net>


Interesting post RE: the current discussion on Apicius.  I wish I
had time to go home and do a throrough delve of some of the translations
and secondary material I have to short up some of my memory on such
cooking subjects (the new Madeliene Kamman behemoth has a long chapter
on
her take of the history of cooking).

The only nit I had with your post was "Anyone who refers to the
wholesale eating of eyeballs of any kind (especially of such a small and
not especially prevalent creature as a lark) is talking through his or
her wimple. Eyeballs have been eaten, but not as a general rule, and the
recipe sources available from the Classical or Medieval sources fail to
document it as any kind of widespread habit."  I would have qualified
the
statement a bit.  As far as I know, your statements are definitely true
for what we know of Western cooking habits. I'm not sure that there has
ever been a good survey of what might have normal in the Eastern /
Byzantine empire, given its strong Arabic and Asiatic influences.  It's
fairly common to eat fish whole (including the head, where the eyeballs
are sometimes considered the most "tasty" part) in parts of Asia.  I
imagine that, in the West, smaller game birds that retained their heads
may also have been eaten in a similar manner.

Now, if you mean that people were unlikely to commonly make a dish
that required digging out eyeballs and eating them *separately* from the
animal that produced them, I'd agree with you.  It strikes me as
something that might be served on occasion during a banquet, where
labor-intensive dishes could carry certain cachet=
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