Yuck! Did They Really Eat That? Quiz

Answer: Hedgehogs

Hedgehogs were eaten not only in ancient Egypt, but also in Europe right up until the Middle Ages. The Egyptians raised hedgehogs for food, and fattened them up before eating them. There is even a surviving recipe that involves baking a hedgehog in a clay shell; the spines would stick in the clay as it hardened, making them easier to remove.

The Egyptians also raised and fattened hyenas for food.

Answer: Rotten fish guts

There is one thing all ancient writers agree on: garum stank. I mean it really stank. This should come as no surprise, as it was made from rotted fish intestines (mackerel and sardines seem to have been favorites) that were allowed to "ferment" for between one to three months.

The vile odor notwithstanding, Romans were wild about the stuff, and poured it on virtually everything. The best garum was imported from Spain and Portugal. Not every Roman was thrilled with garum, though. Seneca (4 BC - 65 AD) wrote: "Do you not realize that garum, that expensive bloody mass of decayed fish, consumes the stomach with its salted putrefaction?"

Answer: Human excrement

There is some disagreement about what type of creature a licker fish was; most sources describe it as a carp, but some say it was a type of bass. Whatever it was, it lived in the Tiber River near the mouth of the Cloaca Maxima, the great sewer that carried human waste from the city of Rome.

Its unique diet evidently gave it a flavor much prized by Roman epicures. A man lucky enough to catch a good-sized licker fish could support his family for months from the proceeds of its sale. The Roman licker fish should not be confused with the modern lamprey, which is also sometimes called a licker fish.

Answer: Pine resin

The wine was called Retsina, and it is still produced in small quantities today. A legend says that when the Romans conquered Greece in the 2nd century BC, they drank up all the wine in the country, so the Greeks began adding pine resin to their wine so the Romans would find it unfit to drink.

The actual origin is probably the practice of sealing the large clay vessels used to store and transport wine in ancient times with pine resin. This helped to prevent the wine from spoiling, but also infused the wine with a strong flavor and an odor like turpentine.

Some people actually came to acquire a taste for wine treated this way. Retsina is still produced in Greece today, but modern Retsina is supposedly much less pungent than its ancient counterpart.

Answer: Century eggs

Buddha's delight is a vegetarian dish; Mantou is a kind of steamed bun; and Sachima is a sweet pastry. None of these is likely cause even the most delicate diner to bat an eyelash. Century eggs are a different matter.

Century eggs, also called hundred-year eggs (or pídàn in Chinese) are said to date from the Ming Dynasty, about 600 years ago. To make a century egg, you start by brewing some very strong tea, and then add quicklime, salt, charcoal, and wood ash. Boil this down into a paste, and coat your egg (duck eggs are preferred) with the mixture. Then roll the egg in rice chaff. Now, bury your egg somewhere and forget about it for three months. When you dig up your egg and open it, the yolk will have turned green, and the white will have congealed into a brown or black gelatinous mass that smells pretty bad. Bon appetit. I have read that many Chinese consider it disgusting that we eat cheese and butter. To each his own.

Answer: Rotted sea birds sewed into a seal skin

Kiviak may not sound very appetizing to most of us, but it is apparently pretty easy to make. First, during the spring, you kill and skin a seal. Then you kill between 300 and 500 auks (a small sea bird), stuff them into the seal skin, feathers and all, and then sew the seal skin shut being careful to squeeze out all of the air. Bury this package in the permafrost and dig it up around Christmas. By this time the birds will have rotted to the point where they resemble something like meat jelly.

It is said to smell like Stilton cheese and be quite tangy. One does need to be careful about the selection of birds; in 2013 some eider ducks apparently got mixed in with the auks, and two people died of botulism.

Answer: Surströmming

The incorrect choices are all fairly innocuous types of Swedish sausages. Surströmming, on the other hand, is a kind of canned fish. It is made from Baltic herring, which must be caught in April or May, before the spawning season. The fish are gutted and their heads chopped off, and then placed in barrels where they are allowed to ferment for several months.

They are then canned, where further fermentation takes place. Surströmming is not sold in stores until August, by which time the gasses released by putrefaction have caused the cans to swell.

In 2002, Japanese scientists conducted a study which found that Surströmming was the foulest smelling food in the world. One English food critic described it as smelling like "a mixture of old nappies that have been left to linger unsealed at the bottom of a bin, combined with the unmistakable and sharp note of dog faeces.

This was overlaid with a faint vinegary sourness." I have never smelled it myself, but if it smells worse than lutefisk, I don't want to. Surströmming is said to date back to the time of the Vikings.

Answer: Lobster

Lobsters used to be much more plentiful in North America than they are today. So plentiful, in fact, that piles of them would often wash up on New England beaches. Some Native American tribes ate lobsters, but even among them it does not seem to have been a popular food.

As for the European colonists - for the most part, they wanted nothing to do with lobster. Lobster was usually reserved for feeding slaves, prisoners, and the like. Apprentices would often have written into their contracts that they would not be fed lobster more than two or three times a week.

It was not until the latter decades of the 19th century that well-to-do people began eating lobsters. Today, a decent sized lobster can cost the better part of a day's pay.

Answer: Sannakji

Sannakji consists of a small octopus which is cut into pieces while still alive, and dressed with sesame seeds and sesame oil. The pieces are still wiggling when it is served. There is no danger of being poisoned, but the suckers on the octopus' tentacles are still active, and each year several people die when a piece of sannakji grabs hold of their throat, and they choke to death.

Answer: Squirrel

I'm certain that all of these critters were eaten occasionally, but squirrels were one of the major game animals in colonial America. Pioneers even called their long-barreled rifles "squirrel guns."

Today most people would turn up their noses at a plate of squirrel, but having grown up in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains, I can attest to the fact that squirrel is still quite popular in some areas of the country, mainly in the South and the lower Midwest. When I was a boy, we ate it several times a week. Both fox squirrels and gray squirrels are edible; the fox squirrels are larger, but the gray squirrels are more tender and have a better flavor. Squirrel may be boiled, or breaded and pan-fried. There isn't much meat on a squirrel, but very little goes to waste. The heart, liver, and kidneys are often used to flavor boiled dumplings, and the heads are one of the best parts of the animal. Not only can one eat the tongue and cheek meat, but squirrel heads are easily cracked open with the handle of a dinner knife, and the brains are a rare treat. Unfortunately, some scientists have warned that eating squirrel brains could cause Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.