6) Rôti Sans Pareil
If you thought this list had moved away from animals being stuffed inside one another, think again. Literally meaning “roast without equal”, the Rôti Sans Pareil makes the American turducken look like deeply disturbed child’s play. As the name might suggest, the Rôti Sans Pareil was a French creation. And as an engastration, it was frankly insane: consisting of no less than 17 birds stuffed inside one another.
Its bourgeois inventor, Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de la Reynière (1758 – 1837), was a man whose depth of character was matched only by the length of his name. Alexandre’s father once returned home to find his son hosting a magnificent banquet at which a costumed pig sat at the head of the table. Later in life Alexandre even faked his own funeral to see who would turn up. But it was as the founding father of modern food criticism and the publisher of several works about good taste that Alexandre is best remembered.
He published the ridiculous recipe for the Rôti Sans Pareil in his 1807 publication L’almanach des Gourmands. In order from smallest to largest the birds the recipe proscribed be stuffed inside one another were: a warbler (stuffed with an olive stuffed with an anchovy stuffed with a lone caper) > a bunting > a lark > a thrush > a quail > a lapwing > a plover > a partridge > a woodcock > a teal > a guinea fowl > a duck > a chicken > a pheasant > a goose > a turkey > and finally a giant bustard.
And that’s not all. In addition to 17 avians, the recipe also called for a pig to provide salted pork fat, forcemeat, and chopped ham. Only when the engastration had been layered with this forcemeat, as well as with Lucca chestnuts and breadcrumbs, could it be left to slow cook over a fire in a pot of onions, cloves, carrots, celery, and pretty much as many fresh herbs and spices as were available.
If you think creating this dish would have been hard, imagine trying to source its ingredients. Of all the weirdest food delicacies in history, this one would be the most difficult to recreate. Some of the 20 or so animals that would have to meet their maker, the bustard for example, are simply are on the brink of extinction. And the fact that it’s illegal to hunt them would dissuade any professional chef from cooking up a storm.