[Sca-cooks] Magpies

Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius adamantius1 at verizon.net
Mon Mar 3 20:16:29 PST 2008


On Mar 3, 2008, at 9:20 PM, Stefan li Rous wrote:

> Alligators are New World, right? Do we have any period recipes or
> indications of them eating Crocodile?  Perhaps in the Middle Eastern
> cookbooks? What about snake?

Alligators are generally regarded as New World because that's where  
most early European explorers would have found them. However, there is  
also an alligator species in China, one of the only two species known  
to exist today. So, while technically, alligators are Old World, it's  
a really easy mistake to make.

Eating them? I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't some practice of  
eating alligators in China, at least in some medical capacity.  
Certainly a bunch of other reptiles are eaten...

I'd kind of assume, though, that Europeans would be turned off by the  
whole, um, non-docile man-eater thing...

But then, of course, you do all sorts of things to survive when you're  
more than 3000 miles from home and really hungry.

Adamantius

  



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