Chapter 2 — The Explorer-Gourmands

"To a lover of natural history it was a pleasant sight to see him at dinner with a chicken before him … and see how, undeterred by foolish prejudices, he devoured the brain." — Charles Lloyd, a surgical colleague, on Frank Buckland (quoted in G. H. O. Burgess, The Curious World of Frank Buckland, 1967)

D arwin ate his specimens almost absent-mindedly, a working naturalist's habit that he never troubled to make into a creed. The men of this chapter were not so casual. For a stretch of the middle nineteenth century, a loose and enthusiastic band of British naturalists, surgeons and sportsmen elevated the tasting of the animal kingdom into something between a science, a hobby and a patriotic cause, gave it a name borrowed from the Greek — zoophagy, the eating of animals — and pursued it with a seriousness that is by turns admirable, comic, and, viewed from the far side of an ecological century, a little alarming. They believed, with real conviction, that the world was full of untried and delicious creatures, and that a sensible nation would set about eating them.

The Deanery Table

The presiding spirit of the whole movement was a clergyman-geologist who never joined it, because he predated it: the Reverend William Buckland, pioneer of British palaeontology, Canon of Christ Church at Oxford and, from 1845, Dean of Westminster, and the most famous eccentric diner of his age. Buckland was no dilettante; he was the man who first described and named a dinosaur, Megalosaurus, and who read the deep history of the earth out of its bone-beds. But he carried the same omnivorous curiosity to his own table, where he kept a standing experiment in what he called the edibility of the animal kingdom, and his ambition, so far as it can be reconstructed, was frankly to work his way through the whole of creation and report, with a scientist's flatness, on how each part of it tasted.

None of this was the whim of a mere crank. The same Buckland who kept the strangest table in England was among the most serious men of science of his age: it was he who excavated the bone-cave at Kirkdale in Yorkshire and reconstructed, from the gnawed remains within, a lost England once roamed by hyenas — work that did much to establish the very art of reading a vanished world from its scraps. The palate, to his mind, was simply another instrument of that same restless empiricism. If the record of the rocks could be read by any man willing to look without prejudice, so, he reasoned, could the larder; and the disgust that kept a sensible Englishman from a dish of mice or a slice of crocodile was, like the old reluctance to face the true antiquity of the earth, merely a prejudice waiting to be reasoned away. It is a coherent, and slightly mad, philosophy of the table, and his son would inherit every article of it.

The Oxford house and the Westminster Deanery after it were half laboratory and half menagerie. Guests picked their way past snakes, monkeys, eagles and a pet hyena named Billy, and sat down to a table that might offer, without warning or apology, mice in batter, squirrel pie, horse's tongue, or a joint of ostrich. His verdicts were pronounced with authority and remembered with a shudder: pressed to name the nastiest things he had ever eaten, he ranked the mole and the bluebottle at the very bottom of creation, the two flavours that had defeated even his enthusiasm. His prime favourites ran the other way — roasted hedgehog, panther, crocodile, puppy, and above all mice on toast, a dish he served often enough that the young art critic John Ruskin, a friend of the household, would look back and write, without irony, "I have always regretted a day of unlucky engagement on which I missed a delicate toast of mice." The point behind the menagerie of flavours was serious in its way. Buckland held that a nation's diet was a matter of habit and nerve, not of nature, and that most of the disgust a Victorian felt at his table was learned prejudice a rational man could simply decide to overcome — a proposition this whole volume will test.

Visitors learned to be wary of the Deanery breakfast, where a dish set cheerfully before a guest might prove, on inquiry, to be crocodile, or garden snail, or a batter of mice, and where the host's running commentary on the merits of each was delivered with equal relish whether the verdict came out as delight or disgust. He pursued the project for decades and never finished it — no man could — but the mole and the bluebottle stood, to the very end, as the two frontiers his enthusiasm was never able to cross.

Around the elder Buckland has gathered the single most repeated anecdote in the literature of strange eating, and it is worth telling precisely because it demonstrates how such stories work. As the tale runs, Buckland was shown, at a country house, a silver casket said to hold the embalmed heart of a French king — Louis XIV, in most tellings — whereupon he remarked that he had eaten many strange things but never the heart of a king, and swallowed it before his hosts could intervene. It is a marvellous story. It is also almost impossible to verify in the form in which it is told, resting on second- and third-hand recollection rather than any contemporary record, and this book passes it on exactly as what it is: a piece of cherished tradition, very likely with a grain of truth at its centre and a good deal of polish added by every mouth that has since repeated it. The Curiosity Mandate of this volume asks that such tales be enjoyed and labelled, not laundered into fact.

The Man Who Ate the Zoo

William Buckland's habit descended, intact and amplified, to his eldest son. Frank Buckland — Francis Trevelyan Buckland, born at Oxford in December 1826 — grew up in the menagerie, and the appetite came early: at Winchester he trapped, dissected and sometimes ate the rats and mice of the school, and his housemates complained of the smell of a decomposing cat kept under his bed for study. He went up to Christ Church in 1844, spent a season in 1845 learning chemistry under the great Justus von Liebig at Giessen, and there acquired the habit of treating dinner as another bench of the laboratory. Two Oxford stories fix his character for good. Hearing that a panther had died at a menagerie, he had it disinterred so that he might taste it, and reported, with a connoisseur's disappointment, that it "was not very good"; and when the British Association met at Oxford in 1847 he brought his pet bear, Tiglath Pileser, to the evening party in cap and gown and introduced it formally to the assembled zoologists, until an exasperated Dean informed him that "either you or your bear must go."

He trained afterwards for surgery in London, took his MRCS in 1851, and in 1854 accepted a post as assistant surgeon to the 2nd Life Guards — an appointment of genius for a man of his interests, since the Household Cavalry were not sent abroad between Waterloo and 1882, leaving their surgeon a decade of London leisure to fill with natural history. Fill it he did. A torrent of vivid articles in The Field, and a hugely successful four-volume miscellany, Curiosities of Natural History (1857–72), made him one of the best-loved naturalists of Victorian Britain, the man who carried the subject to a mass readership as no learned monograph could. The Curiosities themselves — four fat volumes of rats and salmon, sea-serpents and performing fleas, mermaids exposed and monkeys eulogised — sold in their tens of thousands and were read aloud in parlours the length of the country, and their secret was that Buckland wrote exactly as he talked, in a headlong rush of anecdote that never once condescended to its reader. He was, in a sense the age had not yet troubled to name, among the first great popular naturalists of the mass press, and the zoophagy was of a piece with the prose: a way of pulling the whole animal kingdom down off its pedestal and onto the breakfast table, where an ordinary reader might feel he had some share in it.

His household at 37 Albany Street was half kitchen of curiosities, and the menus that issued from it have become legendary: boiled elephant trunk, rhinoceros pie, porpoise heads, stewed mole.

What redeems all this from mere freakishness is the headlong, comic, slightly slapdash prose in which he told it, and his account of casting a giant sturgeon is the specimen of the form. A fishmonger in Bond Street, he wrote, had a fine nine-foot sturgeon on the slab and lent it to him overnight to make a plaster cast, on condition it was back by ten the next morning. Having wrestled the thing home, "I was determined to get him into the kitchen somehow; so, tying a rope to his tail, I let him slide down the stone stairs by his own weight. He started all right, but 'getting way' on him, I could hold the rope no more, and away he went sliding headlong down the stairs, like an avalanche down Mont Blanc … he smashed the door open … and slid right into the kitchen … till at last he brought himself to an anchor under the kitchen table. This sudden and unexpected appearance of the armour-clad sea monster, bursting open the door … instantly created a sensation. The cook screamed, the house-maid fainted, the cat jumped on the dresser, the dog retreated behind the copper and barked, the monkeys went mad with fright, and the sedate parrot has never spoken a word since." It is the reason his readers forgave him the elephant trunk.

Buckland gradually gave up the lancet for the landing-net. When he fell out with the editor of The Field he founded and edited a rival weekly, Land and Water, in 1866; the following year he was appointed Inspector of Salmon Fisheries, a post he held with tireless energy and a showman's flair for the rest of his life, founding a Museum of Economic Fish Culture, restocking depleted rivers, and turning fish-hatching into a public cause. He built model fish-ladders to carry salmon past the weirs that industry had thrown across their rivers, and the same appetite for the physical stuff of natural history had, years earlier, sent him down into the reeking vaults of St Martin-in-the-Fields to hunt out the lost coffin of the great surgeon John Hunter — whom he called "the greatest of Englishmen" — emerging, after days in the foul air, with the coffin found. There is a fine irony threaded through the friendship-at-a-distance of the two great naturalist-eaters of the age: Buckland was a determined opponent of Darwin's theory of evolution, and was reportedly annoyed when Darwin, in The Descent of Man, quoted his observations from Land and Water approvingly. The compliment landed on a man who wanted no part of the argument. Frank Buckland was no theoretician; his life was lived, contentedly, on the practical and edible side of natural history, and when he died in 1880, aged fifty-four, he left instructions and endowments that still fund a Buckland Professorship in the fisheries to this day.

The Society for the Acclimatisation of Animals

Frank Buckland's zoophagy might have remained a private eccentricity had it not found an institution, and the institution had a French parent. In 1854, in Paris, the zoologist Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire had founded the Société zoologique d'acclimatation, dedicated to introducing useful foreign species — plants and animals alike — into French farms, forests and larders. The idea crossed the Channel with the confidence of an age that believed the map of nature was a thing to be improved by human management. The English branch of the enterprise can be dated almost to the hour. On 21 January 1859, a company of naturalists sat down at the London Tavern in Bishopsgate, the anatomist Richard Owen at the head of the table, to a dinner whose centrepiece was the roasted flesh of an eland — that largest of African antelopes — which had lately died in the gardens of the Zoological Society. Around it were ranged a great pike, brace of American partridges and a young bean-goose, a bill of fare designed to prove a thesis: that the British countryside might be stocked with new and better creatures for every man to hunt and eat. The diners left persuaded. Owen carried the argument into the newspapers, dilating on the delicacy of the eland and the need for a society to promote such things; others recalled that the late Earl of Derby had run just such experiments in his celebrated private menagerie at Knowsley, only for the results to be scattered at his death in 1851. Within a year the case had carried, and Buckland and his allies constituted the Society for the Acclimatisation of Animals in the United Kingdom, with the express purpose of stocking Britain's fields and tables with the wildlife of the world.

The Knowsley precedent was no small thing. The thirteenth Earl of Derby had assembled, in the park of his Lancashire seat, one of the largest private menageries the world had yet seen — many hundreds of mammals and birds gathered from every quarter of the Empire, so remarkable a collection that the Earl had kept the young Edward Lear on the estate for years to draw it. Among its inmates were eland, and it was partly the sight of the Knowsley elands, calm and thriving in an English park, that had first suggested the great antelope might be naturalised in Britain at large. When the old Earl died in 1851 the collection was broken up and much of it sold, a part of it passing to the gardens of the Zoological Society; the acclimatisers took up the experiment he had been quietly conducting in private and gave it a public, dining constitution. The eland dinner, in that sense, was Knowsley carried from the park to the table.

The Society's guiding notion, argued by Buckland from the platform, was that the nation's diet had grown monotonous. He liked to remind audiences that the turkey, the musk-duck and the pheasant had each been newcomers once — introduced, as he reckoned it, in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — and that a country which had welcomed them so profitably had since lost its nerve, sitting down to the same unvarying dinner in the very heyday of Victoria's reign when it might be trying eland, kangaroo, capybara and a dozen more. The most theatrical expression of the creed came in 1862, when a hundred guests gathered at Willis's Rooms in St James's to sample a bill of acclimatised fare: Japanese sea slug — the sea cucumber of the Chinese kitchen, which frankly divided the table — kangaroo, and a trio of South and Central American birds, the guan, the curassow and the Honduras turkey. By the standards of Buckland's own home menus it was, as one account dryly notes, quite a modest spread, and he was already eyeing the capybara for future occasions. The dinner was, for all its sea-slug, less a feast than a demonstration: a room of naturalists, sportsmen and journalists assembled so that the morning papers might report that respectable men had eaten kangaroo and lived, and that the British table need not remain the narrowest in Europe. The eland, meanwhile, remained the movement's mascot and its brightest hope, the animal that lent its name to the whole endeavour and to the standard modern history of it.

For all its banquets, the Society was in earnest about the underlying project, and its practical record is the truest measure of how hard that project actually was. It imported and tried to establish a whole menagerie of hopefuls — besides the eland there were kangaroo and wapiti, curassow and Honduras turkey, the prairie-grouse and assorted foreign fish — and almost none of them took. The creatures that survived an English winter would not breed in useful numbers; those that bred would not fatten cheaply; and the plain economics of the farmyard, honed over ten thousand years, defeated every exotic newcomer in turn. Within a decade the London society had lost its momentum, its dinners remembered more fondly than its introductions, and the initiative had passed to the colonies — to Melbourne, which raised its own Acclimatisation Society of Victoria in 1861, to Queensland the year after, to New Zealand and to the United States — where land was vast, native competition looked weak, and the same cheerful confidence would do incomparably more lasting damage than a few uneaten antelopes ever could.

Field Note — The Eland

Of all the creatures the acclimatisers championed, the eland — the largest of the African antelopes, a placid, ox-like beast that a grown man can look nearly in the eye — was the one on which they pinned their highest hopes, and its story is the movement's own in miniature. The eland recommended itself on every count the Victorians cared about: it was enormous, yielding a great deal of meat; it was reputedly docile and herdable, so that it seemed to promise domestication where the deer had always resisted it; and its flesh, tasted at Owen's 1859 dinner and pronounced excellent, sat somewhere between beef and venison in the imagination of the diners. Here, it appeared, was a new farm animal for the Empire, ready to graze the parks of England and the veldts of its colonies alike. The reality was more stubborn than the dream. Elands proved difficult and expensive to keep in any number, the economics never approached those of the cattle they were meant to supplement, and the great acclimatised herds of the Victorian fantasy never materialised. The eland survives in this history less as a triumph than as a perfect specimen of the movement's character: generous, ingenious, faintly absurd, and defeated in the end less by any failure of appetite than by the plain arithmetic of the farm. The dream was not, in the end, entirely mistaken — the eland would indeed be domesticated for milk and meat in the following century, most famously on the steppe reserve of Askania-Nova — but it came too late, and by other hands, to rescue the Victorian scheme from its own arithmetic. The standard chronicle of the acclimatisation societies takes its title, fittingly, from the beast — They Dined on Eland.

<figure> <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="100%" viewBox="0 0 640 640" role="img"><title>THE ZOOPHAGIST'S CABINET — specimens of the Acclimatisation Society</title>  <rect x="11" y="11" width="618" height="618" fill="none" stroke="#43331f" stroke-width="1.3"/> <rect x="18" y="18" width="604" height="604" fill="none" stroke="#43331f" stroke-width="0.6"/> <path d="M28 28h18M28 28v18M612 28h-18M612 28v18M28 612h18M28 612v-18M612 612h-18M612 612v-18" fill="none" stroke="#b5502a" stroke-width="1.3"/>  <g fill="none" stroke="#43331f" stroke-linejoin="round"> <rect x="48" y="84" width="544" height="464" stroke-width="1.4"/> <path d="M229 132V548M411 132V548M48 340H592" stroke-width="0.9"/> </g> <path d="M48 132H592" fill="none" stroke="#b5502a" stroke-width="1.1"/> <text x="320" y="114" text-anchor="middle" font-family="'Liberation Sans','DejaVu Sans',sans-serif" font-size="9" letter-spacing="3" fill="#6f5a40">ACCLIMATISATION SOCIETY · MDCCCLXII</text>  <g fill="none" stroke="#43331f" stroke-width="1.2" stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round">  <path d="M170 190C158 184 148 183 139 183C127 183 121 174 115 166L108 169L101 179L110 183L118 181C123 190 127 198 129 207L129 214L166 214C173 207 175 198 170 190Z"/> <path d="M124 214L122 250M133 214L134 250M158 214L156 250M166 214L168 250"/> <path d="M112 166C119 150 126 141 134 133M108 168C115 153 121 144 129 136"/> <path d="M104 170L96 166L104 174"/> <path d="M170 190C177 202 177 214 172 224"/>  <path d="M330 150C322 150 316 156 312 164C306 176 300 190 298 202L300 214C304 220 312 220 318 215L322 208C332 204 340 196 340 184C340 168 338 156 330 150Z"/> <path d="M330 150L328 136L338 148"/> <path d="M332 150C346 158 352 176 356 196M336 152C348 162 354 180 352 200"/> <path d="M318 171C320 169 323 170 323 173M301 200C303 198 306 199 305 203"/>  <path d="M456 214C470 206 486 204 502 205C522 206 536 208 544 212C536 218 520 220 502 220C486 220 470 220 456 214Z"/> <path d="M468 206C466 196 466 192 469 188M480 204C478 194 478 190 481 186M492 205C490 194 490 190 493 186M504 205C502 194 502 190 505 186M516 206C514 196 514 192 517 188M528 208C526 199 526 195 529 192"/> <path d="M538 206C540 197 541 193 543 190M544 208C546 200 547 196 549 193"/>  <path d="M150 360C158 360 166 364 168 370C166 376 160 378 156 382L150 392C154 392 158 394 158 398L150 400L146 420C146 432 148 442 152 448L172 456L150 458L142 450L140 432C130 432 122 436 116 442C104 448 92 454 84 452C92 446 104 440 114 434C124 414 132 392 140 376C142 368 146 362 150 360Z"/> <path d="M148 360C146 350 146 344 149 342C151 344 151 352 150 360"/> <path d="M157 367C159 366 160 368 158 369"/>  <path d="M300 430C296 414 306 402 320 402C334 402 342 414 336 430C330 442 310 444 300 430Z"/> <path d="M308 406C302 398 298 390 300 382C302 376 308 374 312 378L306 384M300 388C298 392 298 396 301 398"/> <path d="M314 442L312 458M324 442L324 458M312 458L308 460M324 458L328 460"/> <path d="M334 418L332 368M334 418L348 372M334 418L361 382M334 418L370 398M334 418L374 414"/> <path d="M332 368C348 370 364 384 374 414"/>  <path d="M534 406C534 390 520 378 504 378C486 378 474 392 474 408C474 422 486 432 500 432C512 432 520 424 520 414C520 406 514 400 506 400C500 400 496 404 496 410"/> <path d="M468 440C480 446 500 446 520 440"/> <path d="M470 432C462 428 455 422 453 414C452 410 454 406 458 404"/> <path d="M456 406C452 398 450 392 452 388M462 406C460 398 459 393 461 389"/> </g>  <g fill="none" stroke="#a9906c" stroke-width="0.7" stroke-linecap="round"> <path d="M136 206L152 206M139 210L156 210"/> <path d="M326 180L336 180M324 186L338 186M326 192L334 192"/> <path d="M472 213L474 213M484 214L486 214M498 214L500 214M512 214L514 214"/> <path d="M128 432L140 438M126 438L138 444M132 428L142 432"/> <path d="M308 424L322 424M310 430L326 430M312 418L324 418"/> <path d="M451 388L452 388M460 389L461 389M520 406C518 414 512 420 504 420"/> </g>  <g font-family="'Liberation Sans','DejaVu Sans',sans-serif" font-size="11" letter-spacing="2" fill="#43331f" text-anchor="middle"> <text x="138" y="322">ELAND</text> <text x="320" y="322">HORSE</text> <text x="501" y="322">SEA-SLUG</text> <text x="138" y="530">KANGAROO</text> <text x="320" y="530">TURKEY</text> <text x="501" y="530">SNAIL</text> </g> <text x="320" y="606" text-anchor="middle" font-family="'Liberation Sans','DejaVu Sans',sans-serif" font-size="13" letter-spacing="3" fill="#43331f">THE ZOOPHAGIST'S CABINET</text> </svg>

<figcaption><em>Plate 4. The zoophagist's cabinet: a specimen-case of the Victorian acclimatisation table — eland, kangaroo, sea-slug, curassow, Honduras turkey and their companions, from the menus of Frank Buckland and the Society for the Acclimatisation of Animals.</em></figcaption> </figure>

The Horse on the Table

Running alongside the exotica was a campaign for a far more ordinary animal, and it exposes the movement's mixed motives with unusual clarity. Continental reformers, particularly in France, had for some years been urging hippophagy — the eating of horseflesh — not as a curiosity but as a practical and humane measure: a cheap, wholesome meat that might feed the urban poor and give the worn-out cab-horse a more dignified end than the knacker's yard. The argument had a genuine moral edge that its comic reputation tends to hide. Every great city ran on horses, and every one of those horses, its working years spent, ended as carrion or dogs'-meat; to bring it instead to the human table, the reformers held, was at once to feed the meat-starved poor and to give the animal a reason to be well kept to the last. It was welfare and social reform braided together, argued with as much earnestness as any temperance tract. The most tireless of them, the French military veterinary surgeon Émile Decroix, spent a fortune of his own promoting the cause, and it was his chef who cooked the British movement's most famous set-piece.

That set-piece was a banquet held at the Langham Hotel in London in February 1868, at which some hundred and fifty gentlemen worked through course after course of horse. The scale was in earnest — three geldings went into the meal, one of them a carriage-horse of four and two elderly cart-horses of twenty and twenty-two — and so, unmistakably, was the mockery, for the menu was a cascade of schoolboyish puns designed at once to flatter the diners' French and to defray the ogre's-feast anxiety of the whole enterprise. There was clear horse broth and a "purée of warhorse"; there were fillets of sole cooked in horse-oil, and a potted horse liver that the reporter from The Field found to carry "the strong and unmistakable flavour of horse sweat"; there was a roast "fillet of Pegasus," a horse sirloin "stuffed centaur-style," horse-tongues "à la troyenne," and, from the buffet, a baron of horse weighing some two hundred and eighty pounds, carried in by four men to the strains of "The Roast Beef of Old England." Only the hoof-jelly, set with cherry liqueur, seems genuinely to have defeated the guests, who found it rather strong.

The whole affair was theatre as much as dinner, and knew it. The reporters had been invited for the express purpose of telling the nation that gentlemen had survived the experiment; survive it they did, and pronounced the sirloin excellent — but the reading public drew the opposite moral to the one intended. Where a Frenchman saw thrift and mercy, the English reader saw Black Beauty on a spit, and no quantity of Pegasus fillet could carry him across that line. The banquet is remembered now less as the turning-point its organisers hoped for than as the high-water mark of a tide that never came in, for it never caught on in Britain, where the horse was too firmly fixed as companion and servant to be admitted to the plate. The Continent felt no such compunction: Paris had licensed its first horse-butchers' shops, the boucheries chevalines, in 1866, and hippophagy took quiet root across France, Belgium and beyond as a cheap and respectable meat — so that the very reform the Langham diners had been mocked for proposing succeeded almost everywhere except the country that had staged its grandest banquet. The campaign is a useful reminder that zoophagy was not only about elephant trunk and rhinoceros pie: at its most serious it was a genuine argument about food security and animal welfare, dressed in the confident Victorian faith that a rational nation could simply decide to widen the range of what it ate.

The Banquet Hippophagique — Langham Hotel, London, February 1868

A documented menu, not a modern recipe: the British hippophagists' set-piece dinner for one hundred and fifty guests, cooked by Émile Decroix's chef and reported in the sporting press. The puns are the diners' own; the courses are given as served.

Documented · one hundred and fifty covers · three geldings

Potages

Consommé de cheval — clear horse broth
Purée de destrier — puréed "warhorse" soup

Poissons

Saumon à la sauce arabe — salmon in Arab sauce
Filets de soles à l'huile hippophagique — sole in horse-oil

Hors-d'œuvres

Terrines de foie chevaline — potted horse liver
Saucisson de cheval aux pistaches — dry horse sausage with pistachios

Relevés & Rôts

Filet de Pégase rôti — roast "fillet of Pegasus" with cream potatoes
Aloyau de cheval farci à la centaure — horse sirloin stuffed "centaur-style"
Langues de cheval à la troyenne — horse tongues "Trojan-style"

Buffet

Baron of horse (two sirloins uncut at the backbone), some 280 lb, borne in to "The Roast Beef of Old England"
Gelée de pieds de cheval au marasquin — horse-hoof jelly with cherry liqueur

Cook's note: Reproduced from the period record for its historical interest only. Horsemeat is a legal, ordinary food in much of continental Europe and beyond to this day; the point of the 1868 dinner was never novelty but the feeding of the poor, and its failure in Britain was a failure of sentiment, not of the meat.

<figure> <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="100%" viewBox="0 0 460 640" role="img"><title>THE ACCLIMATISATION FEAST — a bill of fare of the Victorian zoophagists' table</title>  <rect x="11" y="11" width="438" height="618" fill="none" stroke="#43331f" stroke-width="1.3"/> <rect x="18" y="18" width="424" height="604" fill="none" stroke="#43331f" stroke-width="0.6"/> <path d="M28 28h18M28 28v18M432 28h-18M432 28v18M28 612h18M28 612v-18M432 612h-18M432 612v-18" fill="none" stroke="#b5502a" stroke-width="1.3"/>  <rect x="44" y="64" width="372" height="508" fill="none" stroke="#6f5a40" stroke-width="0.9"/>  <text x="230" y="100" text-anchor="middle" font-family="'Liberation Sans','DejaVu Sans',sans-serif" font-size="18" letter-spacing="1.5" fill="#43331f">THE ACCLIMATISATION FEAST</text> <text x="230" y="120" text-anchor="middle" font-family="'Liberation Sans','DejaVu Sans',sans-serif" font-size="10" letter-spacing="3.5" fill="#6f5a40">THE ZOOPHAGISTS' TABLE</text> <text x="230" y="134" text-anchor="middle" font-family="'Liberation Sans','DejaVu Sans',sans-serif" font-size="7.5" letter-spacing="1.5" fill="#6f5a40">SOCIETY FOR THE ACCLIMATISATION OF ANIMALS · U.K.</text> <path d="M120 146H340" fill="none" stroke="#b5502a" stroke-width="1.2"/>  <g fill="none" stroke="#a9906c" stroke-width="0.7" stroke-dasharray="1 4"> <path d="M250 190H322M250 208H322M250 226H322M250 244H322"/> <path d="M250 298H322M250 316H322"/> <path d="M250 370H322M250 388H322M250 406H322"/> </g>  <text x="230" y="172" text-anchor="middle" font-family="'Liberation Sans','DejaVu Sans',sans-serif" font-size="9" letter-spacing="2.5" fill="#6f5a40">AT WILLIS'S ROOMS · MDCCCLXII</text>  <text x="230" y="280" text-anchor="middle" font-family="'Liberation Sans','DejaVu Sans',sans-serif" font-size="9" letter-spacing="2.5" fill="#6f5a40">THE ELAND DINNER · MDCCCLIX</text>  <text x="230" y="352" text-anchor="middle" font-family="'Liberation Sans','DejaVu Sans',sans-serif" font-size="9" letter-spacing="2" fill="#6f5a40">HORSE-FLESH BANQUET · MDCCCLXVIII</text>  <g font-family="'Liberation Sans','DejaVu Sans',sans-serif" font-size="10.5" fill="#43331f"> <text x="68" y="194">Eland, roast haunch</text> <text x="68" y="212">Kangaroo Steamer</text> <text x="68" y="230">Sea-Slug Soup</text> <text x="68" y="248">Honduras Turkey</text> <text x="68" y="302">Eland, from Regent's Park</text> <text x="68" y="320">Prof. Owen presiding</text> <text x="68" y="374">Consommé de Cheval</text> <text x="68" y="392">† Filet de Cheval</text> <text x="68" y="410">† Gelée de Pieds</text> </g> <g font-family="'Liberation Sans','DejaVu Sans',sans-serif" font-size="8.5" fill="#6f5a40" text-anchor="end"> <text x="392" y="194">the mascot</text> <text x="392" y="212">New S. Wales</text> <text x="392" y="230">China Sea</text> <text x="392" y="248">C. America</text> <text x="392" y="302">London Tavern</text> <text x="392" y="320">Jan. 1859</text> <text x="392" y="374">Langham</text> <text x="392" y="392">aux champignons</text> <text x="392" y="410">à l'orange</text> </g>  <path d="M68 424H392" fill="none" stroke="#a9906c" stroke-width="0.7"/> <text x="68" y="440" font-family="'Liberation Sans','DejaVu Sans',sans-serif" font-size="7.5" letter-spacing="0.4" fill="#6f5a40">† dish-name reconstructed. Bills of fare after period sources, 1859–1868.</text>  <g fill="none" stroke="#43331f" stroke-linejoin="round"> <circle cx="230" cy="506" r="26" stroke-width="1"/> <circle cx="230" cy="506" r="16" stroke-width="0.7" stroke="#6f5a40"/> <path d="M230 500L224 520L230 525L236 520Z" stroke-width="1"/> <path d="M224 502C221 497 226 494 230 494C234 494 239 497 236 502" stroke-width="0.9"/> <path d="M224 501C216 497 211 499 212 503C216 506 222 505 225 502M236 501C244 497 249 499 248 503C244 506 238 505 235 502" stroke-width="0.9"/> <path d="M227 495C224 489 224 485 227 486M233 495C236 489 236 485 233 486" stroke-width="1"/> <path d="M226 492l3 -1M234 492l-3 -1" stroke="#6f5a40" stroke-width="0.7"/> <path d="M228 517C229 519 231 519 232 517" stroke="#6f5a40" stroke-width="0.7"/> </g> <circle cx="226" cy="505" r="1.1" fill="#43331f"/><circle cx="234" cy="505" r="1.1" fill="#43331f"/> <circle cx="230" cy="480" r="1.8" fill="#b5502a"/>  <text x="230" y="596" text-anchor="middle" font-family="'Liberation Sans','DejaVu Sans',sans-serif" font-size="9" letter-spacing="3" fill="#43331f">THE ACCLIMATISATION FEAST</text> </svg>

<figcaption><em>Plate 5. The acclimatisation feast — an engraved menu-card of the Victorian zoophagists' table, from the 1859 Eland Dinner and the 1862 Willis's Rooms bill to the 1868 horse-flesh banquet, the documented dishes set in roman.</em></figcaption> </figure>

Science, Appetite, and Empire

It is worth pausing to ask what the whole strange enthusiasm actually was, because it was never quite the one thing. Three currents ran together in it, and the acclimatisers themselves could seldom have told you where one ended and the next began. The first was science: the genuine conviction, inherited from Buckland's fossils, that the world yielded its secrets to the man who examined it without squeamishness, and that a flavour was a fact like any other. The second was appetite, plain and unashamed — these were men who liked a good dinner and a better story, and who found in zoophagy an inexhaustible supply of both. The third, and the most consequential, was empire. Victorian Britain governed a quarter of the globe and its fauna, and the acclimatisation dream was in part an imperial audit: a belief that the eland of the veldt and the kangaroo of the bush were unclaimed assets, waiting to be entered in the ledger of British agriculture and set to work on British soil.

That confidence is exactly where a modern reader must hold two thoughts at once. The impulse produced real charm and real knowledge, and it is easy to like the men who felt it. But it also treated the living world as a warehouse to be reorganised for the convenience of the reorganiser, and it treated the cuisines of other peoples — the sea cucumber of the Chinese kitchen, the kangaroo of the Aboriginal table — as raw novelties for a London club to sample and grade, stripped of the cultures that had prized and perfected them for millennia. Even at the time the spectacle drew as much mockery as applause; Punch made sport of the sea-slug, the public declined to follow the diners' lead, and the grander introductions mostly failed. This volume keeps the pleasure of the history and refuses the premise beneath it: curiosity about the world's tables is a fine thing, and treating those tables as an empty larder to be requisitioned is not. The distinction will sharpen with every chapter that follows.

The Reckoning to Come

It is easy, and pleasant, to treat the acclimatisers as harmless comedy, and much of what they did was exactly that. But the same confident impulse that produced the eland dinner had a darker second act, and honesty requires that this chapter name it plainly, because the bill for it is still being paid. The conviction that the world's fauna could be shuffled at will — moved from continent to continent, released into new lands to enrich the local table or the local hunt — was not an eccentric sideline of the movement but its very logic, and applied on a larger scale and with less thought it loosed some of the most destructive biological invasions in recorded history.

The clearest case wears a date almost contemporary with the Eland Dinner. In 1859 an English settler named Thomas Austin had two dozen wild rabbits released on his estate at Barwon Park, in south-eastern Australia, so that he might enjoy the familiar sport of shooting them; "the introduction of a few rabbits," he is supposed to have reasoned, could do little harm and might provide a touch of home. Within a decade they were a plague, and within a few they had begun the fastest invasion by a mammal ever documented, spreading across a continent, stripping its pastures, and driving native species toward extinction on a scale no shooting-party could have imagined. By the 1920s the descendants of those two dozen animals were reckoned in the hundreds of millions; the rabbit-proof fences, the poisons, and at last the disease myxomatosis, loosed in 1950 to kill back ninety-nine of every hundred, are all, in a sense, the invoice for one man's afternoon of nostalgia.

Nor was the folly confined to the Antipodes. In 1890 a New Yorker named Eugene Schieffelin, an enthusiast of the American Acclimatization Society, released some sixty European starlings in Central Park — by the tradition long attached to him, part of a scheme to introduce to America every bird named in the plays of Shakespeare, though the sweetness of that story has lately been questioned by historians. Whatever his motive, the birds thrived beyond all checking: their descendants now number in the hundreds of millions across North America, out-competing native songbirds and fouling crops from coast to coast. And when, in 1935, Australian growers imported the South American cane toad to control a beetle in the Queensland sugar fields, they repeated the whole error in miniature — the toad ignored the beetle, bred without limit, and poisoned the native predators foolish enough to eat it, marching across the north of the continent to this day.

Britain did not escape its own version of the folly, and the proof is in its parks. The native red squirrel that once had the island's woods to itself was undone by a fashion among Victorian and Edwardian landowners for the larger American grey — a pair turned loose at Henbury Park in Cheshire in 1876, ten more imported from New Jersey to Woburn by the Duke of Bedford in 1890, and release after release besides, all in the same improving spirit that had roasted the eland. The greys carried a pox that scarcely troubled them and killed the reds outright; they were bigger, bolder and hungrier; and within a century the red squirrel had been driven back to a few northern and island refuges while the grey, now formally an invasive alien, held the rest. The gentleman who loosed a handful of pretty squirrels for the pleasure of the view was the acclimatiser in miniature, and the red squirrel's long retreat is his monument. The dining clubs had, in the end, taught the world the hard lesson now written into every quarantine law: that a living country is not a larder to be stocked at will, and that the cost of moving a creature into a place with no defence against it may take generations to fall due.

The acclimatisation societies of the 1860s were the genial, dining-club face of an idea whose reckless version became one of the modern world's most lasting ecological mistakes. This volume will return to that reckoning directly in its sixth chapter, where curiosity is made to answer for its consequences. For now it is enough to have met the explorer-gourmands on their own terms — as men of real appetite and real learning, whose faith that the whole animal kingdom lay open to the fork was as sincere as it was, in the end, unwise.

One last honesty rounds the story off. The acclimatisers did, in a sense, get the widened table they wanted — only not by the route they expected. The British diet of the later nineteenth century broadened, and broadened for good; it simply did so by importing dishes and foodstuffs rather than by naturalising live beasts in English parks. Curry reached the ordinary table, and turtle soup, and tinned meats from the colonies, and fruits that had been luxuries a generation before. The eland never grazed Surrey and the kangaroo never fattened in Kent, but the Empire's larder arrived all the same, carried not on the hoof but in the tin, the jar and the recipe. It is a quiet correction to the whole zoophagous dream: the world's flavours did come, and stayed, but they came as other people's cooking rather than as other people's animals turned loose on English soil — which is, when one thinks of it, exactly how the flavours of the world have always travelled.

The acclimatisers went looking for the world's untried flavours as though no one had tried them before. But the peoples of those distant coasts had been eating, prizing and perfecting the very foods a London diner called outlandish for centuries — and it is to those living cuisines, met at last on their own ground, that the next chapter turns.

บทถัดไป · 6 / 15Chapter 3 — Foods at the Edge of the World