One of the most engagingly off beat books come across recently, arose out of a Channel Four TV series you may have seen. "A Cook on the Wild Side". The book has the same title. A friend says he saw one recently in which the author and chief figure on the television, cooked and ate slaters, or woodlice, fried and mixed into some sort of mash. Are they not, after all, crusta ceans? The index of the book doesn't, at first glance, give us the woodlice recipe but has much to say about rooks - young rooks - as a dish that is at least palatable.
At one time, he tells us, country folk who could not afford a gun, would shin up the trees to remove the young, known as "branchers" just before they were ready to fly the nest. So our bold author, Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall, with the aid of a professional tree climber, and all tackled up with ropes, did so too. "Exhilarating and mildly terrifying," he said it was, to be swaying in the spindly treetops. He got his young rooks. (In Victorian England, he tells us, young ladies and boys would gather on May 12th with their specially made rook rifles "for a little genteel sport.") He didn't say if they ate the birds.
There is not much meat on them, he admits. The traditional recipe is rook pie, which he didn't make. What he presented on TV was pan fried rook breasts, served faintly pink, on a salad of hedge garlic and dandelion dressed with the juices from the pan, deglazed with elderberry wine. He thought it was delicious. Most of us will take his word for it and not try any of his other recipes for rook.
And then comes Dr Thomas Stuffaford who tells us in the London Times that "the large Southern Greek snail contains the most health giving fats in just the correct proportions, and its regular consumption, after being cooked in oliveoil, may be one of the many factors that makes Cretans the longest living people in Europe." Enough about food for the day.