Got Jackalope?

Food is serious and grown-up--a source of nutrients, possibly a gourmet experience, but not a mere arena of play. That’s what we believe today, anyway, so when we make foods look like, say, animals, they’re kid food: cookies, candies, molded gelatin. (We might make an exception for frosting, of course. We’re all kids again on our birthdays.)

It was a different matter in the Renaissance and the Middle Ages, and one reason was that people were kids back then. Life expectancy was so short that a lot of the big shots were scarcely out of their teens.

And when they had a banquet, they reveled in fun food: a small roast chicken mounted on a larger one like a rider on a horse; a roast pig with fire spitting out of its mouth (from a candle with its wick wrapped in brandy-soaked cotton). If we still had the medieval spirit, the Rocky Mountain states would have a gourmet specialty of roast jackalope--that mythological rabbit crowned with antelope horns.

People also used to marvel at “impossible” foods, and so did Americans until about the 1960s, when the baked Alaska (ice baked in meringue, hot outside and frozen in the middle) was last in vogue. Baked Alaska might be remotely descended from the “fish whose head is roasted, whose middle is baked and whose tail is fried” found in medieval European cookbooks and also a 9th century Baghdad cookbook. The trick was to stick the fish in the oven with the middle wrapped in several layers of cloth and the tail wrapped in canvas soaked with oil.

Amazing! It might not be the best roasted, baked or fried fish you ever had, but gosh!