Large Fierce Mammal

May I offer you some guga? THE original, accept no substitutes, “stinking bird” of reknown! (Source: http://home.bt.com/news/odd-news/glasgow-man-crowned-king-of-the-gannet-eaters-11363862949493

“From generation to generation, some recipes and cookbooks have become treasured family heirlooms.

“The Nova Scotia Archives has scores of them in its personal collections, and has created a digital exhibit featuring hand-written and early printed recipes, some dating as far back at the 1700s.” ~ Hand-written recipes featured in Nova Scotia Archives online exhibit

The Archives of Nova Scotia recently launched a project to seek out and consolidate all the recipes, many hand written, that were known to exist in general distribution throughout its extensive collections. The result of bringing them all together, and trying to recreate — one might even say reverse engineer — a few is an exhibit called “What’s Cooking? Food, Drink and the Pleasures of Eating in Old-Time Nova Scotia”. For those of you who aren’t in a position to visit the Archives in Halifax, and of course as an ongoing resource, Archives team have created an “… online treasury of cookery ….” built from, “… finding and digitizing approximately 1000 old handwritten or early printed recipes.” All that mouth watering wonderment can be yours right here … provided you can overcome the language barrier.

You see the problem, as described by Archives Director Lois Yorke, is a generational, linguistic, and culinary disconnect between the people who lived those recipes, and anyone trying to interpret and use them now —

“Fully 1,000 recipes have been posted on the archives’ website, many with ingredients and cooking directions that would mystify the modern cook. Some recipes call for pearlash (baking power), saleratus (baking soda), or a “gill” of milk, which is about half a cup.

“Cooking, at the time, was intuitive and many of the women who were cooking could not read, … So it was learned, it was passed down from mother to daughter. There were no written directions for many of them.

“You simply make something, you stir it up, you add ingredients that are strange today. You add them in strange amounts because it’s not given in modern measures and when you have everything in the pan or the bowl, you mix all and you bake in a large cake on tin plates.”

Of the recipes selected for recreation by the intrepid team of archivist cooks, much trial and error was called for. As one of two excellent cooks in this house, and in deference to Mrs. LFM in her capacity as “Mistress of All Thinges Bayked”, the assumption might be that it should be easier to reverse engineer something baked as opposed to, say, a meat and vegetable based dish on the grounds that baking is chemistry, and hence subject to specific expectations of conduct among the ingredients. That being said, Mrs. LFM cautions that such an achievement would lie far beyond the kenning of the average household baker, veering more into the ethereal Alton Brown area of expertise. Ms. Yorke would appear to agree when she reports, “Chocolate cake, I remember, was tried three times … and they finally said, ‘It won’t work. I’m not bringing it in. You are not having it!'”

By comparison, other areas of cookery would be very much subject to local, even household, tastes, adjustments due to availability and quality of ingredients, and desperate times calling for desperate measures. There may come a point or ten when all of these influences, and more as yet unspoken, may coalesce to form a signpost to a very strange place indeed. Ms. Yorke:

“Perhaps the strangest recipe is one from 1849 about how to cook and preserve a “stinking bird.” Yorke says no one at the archives has quite figured out what it’s all about.

“You sort of put them in water and I think you boil them for quite some time and then you put some butter over them …. It doesn’t sound at all appetizing, and again, you can never tell from these recipes.”

The description put us in mind of a Hebridean delicacy called “guga”, or pickled baby Gannett.

“For at least 400 years, men from the district of Ness have travelled to the remote island of Sùla Sgeir for two weeks every summer to cull 2,000 young gannets.

“The birds are killed, pickled in salt and sold for as much as £20 a pair.  Demand is so high that sales are generally rationed.

“Hebrideans say the taste of the bird is very difficult to describe, but are somewhere between a kipper and a steak. According to local website Homeschool on the Croft, “almost nobody outside of Ness can bear the sight of it, the smell of it, and certainly not the taste”.” ~ Glasgow man crowned king of the gannet-eaters

Believe it or not Goode Reader, this mouth watering culinary tease is offered tonight to put you in the mood for something that is yet to come.