[Sca-cooks] Turkey was Squash

[Terry Decker]

Jean-Louis Flandrin in Food: A Culinary History writes, "At a banquet given 
by Catherine de' Medici at the bishopric of Paris in 1549, seventy "Indian 
chickens" costing twenty sols apiece and seven "Indian roosters" costing 
thirty sols were served.  The most surprising thing is these prices were 
already markedly below the prices for native birds such as peacock and heron 
(forty sols), pheasant and bustard (seventy sols), crane (eighty sols), swan 
(a hunderd sols) and so on."

A sol is 12 deniers (roughly equivalent to the shilling).

While I have no evidence at this point, I think that the relatively low cost 
of the turkey is because it was already a domesticated bird in Mexico and 
was farm raised in Europe, where the other large birds were most likely 
taken from the wild.

Bear