2017 Anne Boleyn Files Advent Calendar

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