The Daily Mail, not my usual read, has the occasional blinder… this week’s has been the auction of a collection of antique cookery books and lifestyle guides that go on sale at Bloomsbury Auctions in London on September 22. Follow this link if you are really bored.
One of the collection boldly titled ‘A Perfect School of Instructions for the Officers of the Mouth‘, was published in 1682 and includes this bizarre recipe for a tart containing the entire body of a tortoise. Perfect for those late summer dinner parties you were all planning. Now, where did I put my tortoise net…
PS. 20/Sept. I have been re-reading Robert Byron’s Road to Oxiana. If you have never read it, go and buy a copy now. Its brilliant. No really, it is… anyway, more on that later, but when discussing the Turcomans and anti-Bolsheviks fleeing Russia (the book was published in 1937) he mentions that of the 25,000 a year crossing the boarder into Persia most were not fleeing political repression, but were simply fleeing from starvation: “If their accounts are true of the heaps of empty tortoise shells that surround the workmen’s houses in some places, tortoises being their staple food, it is no wonder what foreigners are discourages from visiting Russian Central Asia!”
Tim Myatt 