December 19
Cockentrice
If you're fed up of the usual Christmas turkey and roast goose is just too boring for you, you could try serving up a cockentrice as your Christmas dinner centre-piece. I can guarantee that it will cause a stir.
What's a cockentrice?
Well, it was a creature created by sewing the front of a pig onto the legs of a capon, and you could make a second one by sewing the head of the capon onto the back end of the pig.
Here's the 15th century recipe, from Harleian MS.279:
“Take a Capoun [capon], & skald hym, & draw hem clene, & smyte hem a-to in the waste [waist] ouerthwart; take a Pigge, & skald hym, & draw hym in the same maner, & smyte hem also in the waste; take a nedyl & a threde [needle and thread], & sewe the fore partye of the Capoun to the After parti of the Pygge; & the fore partye of the Pigge, to the hynder party of the Capoun, & than stuffe hem as thou stuffyst a Pigge; putte hem on a spete [spit], and Roste hym: & whan he is y-now, dore hem with yolkys of Eyroun [egg yolks], & pouder Gyngere & Safroun, thenne wyth the Ius [juice] of Percely [parlsey] with-owte; & than serue it forth for a ryal mete.”
Wow!
If you'd like to have a go at making one, you can find out how to at http://www.godecookery.com/cocken/cocken03.htm
Chef Heston Blumenthal had a go at making a cockentrice for a Tudor inspired menu:
Source: Two fifteenth-century cookery-books. Harleian ms. 279 (ab. 1430), & Harl. ms. 4016 (ab. 1450), with extracts from Ashmole ms. 1429, Laud ms. 553, & Douce ms. 55 ed. Thomas Austin (1888), p. 40. Available to read online at https://archive.org/details/twofifteenthcent00aust