— Sir Richard Burton, Personal Narrative of a
Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah (1853)
A Slave in Gabon for His Evening Meal
Then [Remandji, king of the Apingi] said, "Be glad, oh spirit! And eat of the things we give thee."
Whereupon, to my astonishment, a slave was handed over to me bound, and Remandji said, "Kill him for your evening meal; he is tender and fat, and you must be hungry." It took me a moment to recover from my astonishment. Then I shook my head, spat violently on the ground, and made Minsho tell them that I abhorred the people who ate human flesh, and that I and my people never did so.
To which Remandji replied, "We always heard that you white people eat men. Why do you buy our people [as slaves]? Why do you come from nobody knows where, and carry off our men, and women, and children? Do you not fatten them in your far country and eat them? Therefore I give you this slave, that you might kill him and make your heart glad."
It was a difficult matter to explain to the king that he was much mistaken.
— Paul Du Chaillu, Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa (1861)
Many Eat the Hedgehog
SCOLDED BY BEDOUINS at the Teyma oasis for eating "swine's flesh,"
C. M. Doughty lost his temper, and raged:
If God have commanded you anything, keep it; I see you eat crows and kites, and the lesser carrion eagle. Some of you eat owls, some eat serpents. The great lizard you all eat, and locusts, and the spring-rat; Many eat the hedgehog; in certain (Hejaz) villages they eat rats, you cannot deny it! You eat the wolf, too, and the fox and the foul hyena. In a word, there is nothing so vile that some of you will not eat it.
— Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888)
Cats, Camels, Foxes, Owls, and Others
Andalusians do not eat cats and dogs even when they are very hungry, but in Estremadura they're regarded as delicacies. A woman from Alcantara who is fond of cats and would never kill one herself, tells me that she has eaten cat stew and that it is tastier than either rabbit or hare. The Estremadurans also eat martens and weasels and foxes, and declare, though I do not believe it, that a fried leg of fox is the best thing imaginable. But then they are a race of cattlemen and hunters, ancestors of the Argentine gauchos, and put in a pot whatever the gun brings down. The only animal they bar is the wolf. Gypsies eat frogs, snakes and lizards as well as farmyard animals that have died a natural death, while there is a whole village nearJerez which till a few years ago spent its night hunting the camels that ran wild in the marshes at the mouth of the Guadalquivir. As for birds, they are all eaten in the south of Spain and the list includes eagles, owls and hawks. The only ones rejected are seagulls, crows and vultures, and the sacred swallow and stork.
— Gerald Brenan, South from Granada (1957)
Mr. Black, the Blood Drinker in Tangier
There was the somewhat sinister Mr. Black, whom I never met, but who, I am told, kept an outsize electric refrigerator in his sitting room, in which there was a collection of half-pint glass jars. Occasionally he would open the refrigerator door, inspect the labels on the bottles and select one. Then in front of his guests he would pour its contents into a glass and drink. A lady I know, who was present one day when he did this, innocently inquired if what he had in the glass were a combination of beet and tomato juice. "This is blood," he said. "Will you have some? It's delicious chilled, you know." The lady, who had lived in Tangier for many years, was thus determined to show no astonishment at anything, replied, "I don't think I will right now, thank you. But may I see the jar?" Mr. Black handed it to her. The label read Mohammed. "He's a Riffian boy," explained Mr. Black. "I see," she said, "and the other jars?" "Each one is from a different boy," her host explained. "I never take more than a half pint at a time from any one of them. That wouldn't do. Too debilitating for them."
— Paul Bowles, "Tangier," Gentleman's Quarterly (1963) (Note: Bowles
based his 1985 short story "Hugh Harper" on this man's tastes.)
Evelyn Waugh on Tasso in British Guiana
Tasso is prepared in this way. The killing of a beast [pig in this case] is an event of some importance in the immediate neighbourhood. Indians get news of it and appear mysteriously like gulls round a trawler when the catch is cleaned. A few choice morsels are cut away and cooked and eaten fresh. The Indians carry off the head and the entrails. The rest is sliced into thin slabs, rolled in salt and hung up to dry. A few days of sun and savannah wind reduce it to a black, leathery condition in which it will remain uncorrupt indefinitely. Even the normally omnivorous ants will not touch it. It is carried under the saddle above the blanket to keep it tender and protect the horse from galling. When the time comes to eat it, it is scrubbed fairly clean of dust and salt and boiled in water. It emerges softened but fibrous and tasteless.
I can conceive it might be possible for a newcomer to stomach a littlefarine with a rich and aromatic stew; or a little tasso with plenty of fresh vegetables and bread. The food of the savannah is farine and tasso and nothing else.
— Ninety-two Days (1934) (In A Handful of Dust, Waugh's
captive hero Tony is given "tasso at noon… farine and
tasso and sometimes some fruit for supper.")
For a Sharecropper in Alabama, Hardly a Crumb
"Sometimes it don't seem possible that we're living at all, especially when I wake up in the morning and see the children getting up and dressing and walking around in the kitchen where there's hardly a crumb of food. They make a fire in the cook-stove and I scrape together a little corn meal, when there's any to scrape, and I cook it with salt and water. Once in a while we have some molasses, or maybe just some sugar-water to eat with it. When noontime comes, they start another fire, and I cook some more cornbread. A lot of times lately I've just sat and wondered if there's anything else in the world to eat. I know there must be other things in the world to eat, because the rich wouldn't eat cornbread, and I wouldn't if I could help it. Not just cornbread and nothing else. Once in a while we have some store-bought canned beans, just one or two cans among us, and that don't go far when there's nine hungry children besides me. The two oldest boys manage to earn a little money somehow, and they bring home all they make. Altogether, what money there is comes to two or three dollars a week. We eat on that, except for the twenty-five cents a week house rent I pay the landlord. We've been getting along somehow for three years since my husband died. Every time it rains hard all of us have to crawl under the house to keep from getting wet, because I don't reckon there's a landlord in the country who would patch a roof for only twenty-five cents a week rent."
— quoted in Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White,
You Have Seen Their Faces (1937)
In Tibetan Cuisine, Meat Is a Rarity
The staple food in this region is tsampa. This is how they prepare it. You heat sand to a high temperature in an iron pan and then pour barley corns onto it. They burst with a slight pop, whereupon you put the corns and the sand in a fine meshed sieve through which the sand runs: after this you grind the corn very small. The resulting meal is stirred up into a paste with butter tea or milk or beer and then eaten. The Tibetans make a special cult of tsampa and have many ways of preparing it. We soon got accustomed to it, but never cared much for butter tea, which is usually made with rancid butter and is generally repugnant to Europeans. It is, however, universally drunk and appreciated by the Tibetans, who often drink as many as sixty cups in a day. The Tibetans of Kyirong, besides butter tea and tsampa, eat rice, buckwheat, maize, potatoes, turnips, onions, beans, and radishes. Meat is a rarity, for as Kyirong is a particularly holy place no animal is ever slaughtered there. Meat appeared on the table only when it had been brought in from another district or, more often, when bears or panthers left part of their prey uneaten.