How'd He Come Up With THAT?

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How'd He Come Up with THAT?

        For the royal salad recipe on page 9 (errrp, GOOD!), I got 500-year-old recipes and translated them into modern English from difficult-to-read middle English. But ancient recipes don't give very good instructions.
        When I found a recipe for "Vyolette," I thought it was for a kind of candy flavored with violet flowers. So I went into the yard and picked as many wild violets as I could and tried to follow the recipe. What I got was a big mushy purple spitwad! I double-checked the recipe and discovered that it was for violet pudding, not candy!
        Then I tasted it. EEEEE-YUCK! I quickly dug into a pile of books about cooking with violets and found that the English violets used in the pudding have a wonderful sweet taste but that American wild violets have almost no taste at all. So I had to go back to my pile of recipes. After trying a 2,000-year-old recipe for ostrich stew (delicious!) and a horrible cheese recipe from the same era, I hit on a salad recipe so strong I burped till my eyeballs hurt.
        It was fun finding material for the book. I telephoned people all over the world and talked to people who had moved to the U.S. from other countries. Here are a few:

• a woolly mammoth expert in Alaska
            who has eaten 36,000-year-old bison found frozen in mud
• an Australian expert on wild foods eaten by Aborigines
            (including long white worms dug from logs and eaten raw!)
• the editor of Food Insects Newsletter, who instructed me
            on the proper way to cook grasshoppers and mealworms

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James Solheim

This page was last updated: August 30, 1998