SC - flamingo datea/recipe

[Stefan li Rous]

Nicholas of Falcon Cree asked:
> I thought I would ask you all, and see what turned up.  I have even
> tried searching Stefan's Floregilium and couldn't seem to  find any
> info. 
 
> When were Flamingo's introduced to Europe? 

I'm not sure I can answer that one.

> I have seen evidence that they were found in Rome... 
> 
> "Planet Flamingo. In ancient Rome, Flamingo tongues were considered a
> great delicacy. Their existence was
>           threatened by hunters. The Romans made a law making it illegal
> to hunt flamingos but, it failed. "  
> 
> But I am not sure how reliable that is due to the fact that I couldn't
> get the site to work. 
> 
> Stefan is there something at  your site and I just wasn't searching
> right? 

Maybe. Well, let's see. As Stefan goes bushwacking through the Florilegium.
Ummm. Nothing in birds-recipes...Here we go. In the FOOD section in this
file:
exotic-meats-msg  (63K)  9/27/00    Period and SCA exotic meats. Swans,
ostrich, 
                                       crawfish, dormice.

I've pasted the two messages I have below.

I really do hope to have a decent search engine built into the site in
the near future.
- -- 
THLord  Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra
Mark S. Harris             Austin, Texas         stefan at texas.net
**** See Stefan's Florilegium files at:  http://www.florilegium.org ****

> Date: Tue, 27 Jul 1999 12:13:28 -0500
> From: Wajdi <a14h at zebra.net>
> Subject: Re: SC - cod and parrottongues
> 
> LrdRas at aol.com wrote:
> > agora at algonet.se writes:
> > << I wonder if someone remember a Roman recipe for parrottongues.  >>
> >
> > Hummingbird tongues yes. Parrot tongues, no.
> 
> My copy of apicius (giacosa) has a recipe for roasted flamingo or parrot
> (Apicius 232), but nothing for parrot-tongue.  However, the commentary refers to
> tongue in the following: "...flamingos were said to have been slaughtered for
> their tongues or brains alone (Historia Augusta, Heliogabalus 20, 6: Pliny,
> Naturalis historia 10, 133; and Martial 13, 71)."
> 
> wajdi
> 
> 
> Date: Wed, 28 Jul 1999 00:21:10 +0200
> From: Thomas Gloning <Thomas.Gloning at germanistik.uni-giessen.de>
> Subject: SC - cod and parrottongues / Apicius
> 
> Ana wrote:
> >>>
> I wonder if someone remember a Roman recipe for parrottongues. They
> imported parrottongues from Africa, how did they prepare it? Is it in
> Apicius or in other texts?
> <<<
> 
> As far as I can see, Apicius has no recipe for parrottongues, and the
> only passage where parrot (_psittacus_) is mentioned is at the end of
> the flamingo recipe in VI 6.1:
> 
> "Idem facies et in psittaco"
> 'The same way you can do it with the parrot'.
> 
> Given this close connection between flamingo and parrot, perhaps a
> passage from Pliny's Naturalis Historia could be interesting. He says:
> 
> "Phoenicopteri linguam praecipui saporis esse Apicius docuit, nepotum
> omnium altissimus gurges" (X 133; ed. Mayhoff II, 259,5ff.).
> 
> roughly
> 
> 'Apicius held that the tongue of the flamingo has an excellent taste, he
> who was an outstanding gourmet/glutton among all the squanderers'.
> 
> In addition Martial has a passage about the phoenicopterus, the
> flamingo:
> 
> "Dat mihi pinna rubens nomen, sed lingua gulosis
> Nostra sapit. Quid si garrula lingua foret?"
> 
> Could be something like:
> 
> 'I have my name from the reddish/coloured feathers, but my tongue is
> delicious to the gourmets. (...)'
> 
> Alas, these passages do not indicate how the tongues were prepared.
> 
> Thomas