[Sca-cooks] Massively expensive feast WAS: Smithsonian Stuff

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

Khadijah wrote:
>>      The Coronation feast of Suleyman the Magnificent.  Something along
>>the lines of 40 courses, each containing five or so dishes.  The
>>centerpiece of the meal being several camels stuffed in that "6 animals
>>inside" manner with eggs at the very center.

After which Olwen pondered:
>Cripes they must have been small camels.  Where do you get camels small
>enough to do that with?

Big camels cooked in really big pans on big fires and served on big
tables, or how else can you get 6 animals inside one.

This recipe floating around the web is, i think, a joke. Some of the
quantities seem a bit doubtful... (you couldn't get 20 chickens into
a lamb and 5 lb seems like way too much pepper), not to mention some
of the language in the recipe. Interesting idea, though.

1 whole camel, medium size
1 whole lamb, large size
20 whole chickens, medium size
60 eggs
12 kilos rice
2 kilos pine nuts
2 kilos almonds
1 kilo pistachio nuts
110 gallons water
5 pounds black pepper
Salt to taste

Skin, trim and clean camel (once you get over the hump), lamb and
chicken. Boil until tender. Cook rice until fluffy. Fry nuts until
brown and mix with rice. Hard boil eggs and peel. Stuff cooked
chickens with hard boiled eggs and rice. Stuff the cooked lamb with
stuffed chickens. Add more rice. Stuff the camel with the stuffed
lamb and add rest of rice. Broil over large charcoal pit until brown.
Spread any remaining rice on large tray and place camel on top of
rice. Decorate with boiled eggs and nuts. Serves friendly crowd of
80-100.

Shararazod Eboli, Home Economist, Dammam, Saudi Arabia
from "International Cuisine", presented by California Home Economics
Teachers, 1983 (ISBN 0-89626-051-8)
---------------

However, i have heard of legitimate recipes involving stuffing one
critter into another... For example, Chef Paul Prudhomme's
Tur-duc-ken recipe that sometimes is heard on NPR at Thanksgiving -a
chicken stuffed into a duck stuffed into a turkey - the bones having
been taken out first. Here's Chef Paul's recipe:
http://www.chefpaul.com/turducken.html

Or you can buy one ready-to-cook for around $105 from several on-line
"cajun" food vendors. At 16 lb they're only half the size of Chef
Paul's 30-lb monster, though.

Can it really be done? Here's a page documenting a multi-day process
to create one by a bunch of scientists in Colorado:
http://origins.colorado.edu/~kachun/turducken.shtml
This page describes the set-up, and the actual photographically
documented recipe is on a following page "for the strong of heart".
It's pretty impressive.

Anahita
It can't be a sotiltie, there's nothing subtle about it!