some reduced must to give it color. In the mortar crush pepper, cumin, coriander, laser root, mint, rue, moisten with vinegar, add dates, and the fond of the braised bird, thicken, [strain] cover the bird with the sauce and serve. Parrot is prepared in the same mariner. (231–232)
Never having tried this dish, I can hazard no opinion as to its quality. Nor is it clear just how widely such recipes were made in their own day. But used they were, specifically by the rich and privileged.
We know, for instance, that parrots were a part of the diet of the late Roman boy-emperor Elagabalus (A.D. 218–222). As one historian noted in tight-lipped disgust, he even fed parrots to his lions; as for his palace staff, he regaled them with “huge dishes filled with mullets’ innards, flamingoes’ brains, partridge eggs, thrushes’ brains, and the heads of parrots, pheasants and peacocks” (Lives of the Later Caesars, Elagabalus 21.2; 20.6). Such banquets seem to have earned him little admiration; on the contrary, they survive as evidence of his softness, profligacy, and corruption. Eating parrot and similar things, Elagabalus transforms himself into an emblem of epicurism run amuck.
He makes a lasting impression in the process. Nearly fourteen hundred years after the young emperor’s death, Ben Jonson recalls Elagabalus’ dining habits in his dramatic masterpiece, the comedy Volpone (1606). There Jonson’s depraved, eponymous protagonist attempts to seduce the virtuous Celia in part through a miscalculated appeal to her sense of gourmandise:
The heads of parrats, tongues of nightingales,
The braines of peacoks, and of estriches
Shall be our food. (3.7.200–204)
But Jonson is a latecomer with his loathing of psittacophagy. Within two centuries of Elagabalus’ demise, his eating habits were the stuff of legend, appearing in the verse satire Against Eutropius by the late Roman poet Claudian (A.D. 370–c. 404). This is a venomous political lampoon aimed at its title character, the powerful eunuch, consul, and chamberlain of the eastern Roman emperor Arcadius, whom Claudian imagines summoning his favorites to a council of war as follows: “Their hunger is only aroused by costly meats, and they tickle their palates with foods imported from overseas, the flesh of the many-eyed fowl of Juno, or of that coloured bird brought from farthest Ind that knows how to speak” (2.328–331).
We know, from records like these, that in ancient times parrot was regarded as an upper-class delicacy like caviar, the food of only the highest stratum of Roman society. But the same records also show that even in classical Rome the practice of eating these birds suffered from a very mixed press. Psittacophagy is associated with the effete and idle rich, with jaded palates, and with something like oriental luxury. This last fact is ironic, given Aelian’s insistence that parrots were not eaten in ancient India. Elagabalus, for one, was closely connected with eastern forms of worship and culture, and for Claudian the eating of parrots seems somehow deeply un-Roman: something a degenerate eunuch would do at the court in Constantinople. This most distinctive of Roman dietary practices is already, at least for some Romans, outlandish and loathsome and beyond the pale.
So what should we make of this contradiction? The opponents of parrot-eating are perhaps easy enough to understand. They have no shortage of reasons to regard the parrot as forbidden flesh. Yet the very qualities that should have rendered it exempt from eating seem somehow to have attracted the parrot-eaters, who seized on it precisely because of its scarcity and beauty and association with foreign lands. And perhaps also because of its voice. It is as if some impulse compelled Roman society to kill and consume the very things it found miraculous.
Nor has that impulse disappeared, although it takes different forms in contemporary America. We still consume parrots, at least symbolically. A quick visit to online auctions yields mountains of parrotphernalia on sale to the highest bidder, including items depicting the macaws that have become the mascot for Corona beer. In convenience stores we can slake our thirst with cups of a fruit-slush drink called Parrot Ice. Psittacine-theme taverns and eateries range across the United States, from the Green Parrot Bar, founded in 1890 in Key West, Florida, to the Blue Parrot Restaurant in Avalon, California.
And the urge to kill remains with us too, as illustrated by the case of Chad Alvarez, a twenty-three-year-old senior at the University of Wisconsin. In May 1999, Alvarez, angry at fraternity brother Corey Greenfield for circulating an email at which he took offense, seized Greenfield’s Quaker parrot and placed it in the fraternity’s microwave oven, which he activated with sixty minutes on the timer. The bird, named Iago, exploded before other fraternity members could rescue it. According to Greenfield, the parrot had a vocabulary of about twenty words. When animal-rights activists responded to Alvarez’s deed with outrage, his attorney, Charles Giesen, declared, “Chad has never hurt anybody or anyone before in his life…. He’s a good kid” (Murphy). Two weeks earlier, Alvarez had been arrested on a charge of drunk driving, to which he had entered a plea of no contest. He also pled no contest to charges of theft and animal cruelty for cooking Iago (Chaptman).
Chapter 2
Mysteries and Marvels
The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, avid bird-fancier and leader of the Sixth Crusade, received a diplomatic gift from the Sultan of Babylon that was probably unique in thirteenth-century Europe: an umbrella cockatoo (Cacatua alba) from Indonesia (Streseman 25). Charles IV of France (1322–1328) kept an Alexandrine parakeet in his royal menagerie (Loisel 1:169). By the fifteenth century, parrots inhabited the Vatican.
These were exceptional cases, however. As a rule, living parrots seldom appear in the historical records of medieval Europe. One ornithologist claims that after the glut of Indian parakeets in Roman times, “all trace of them disappears until the fifteenth century” (Streseman 25). No medieval naturalists complain about the birds’ abundance. No accounts of royal processions involve them. There is, of course, no sign of them being eaten. The story of parrots in medieval Europe is in large part the story of their absence.
Yet, paradoxically, as they grow less available in the feather, they loom larger in the cultural imagination, often in ways that bear no discernible relation to biological reality. So the story of medieval parrots is one of art, literature, and the birth of a marvelous fiction. Where the ancient Greeks and Romans viewed these birds as somehow both sublime and ridiculous, in the Middle Ages they become less commonplace, less servile, and more magical.
Of course, it’s easy to overstate the changes that occur from classical times to the Middle Ages. Parrots remained available in medieval Europe and were still prized as pets, although their availability diminished. Likewise, the Middle Ages preserved classical parrot culture but also reinterpreted it in the process, so that the birds of India come increasingly to figure as emblems of the mythic and supernatural.
For a good example of this process, consider the medieval legacy of Pliny’s Natural History. This is partly what we would now call a work of zoology, but partly also a work of geography. In the Middle Ages, these two aspects of Pliny’s history split into separate literary forms: the bestiary and the travel-narrative. In the process, Pliny’s remarks about parrots undergo embellishment at the same time that they are preserved and repeated.
On the whole, the bestiaries remain quite faithful to what Pliny wrote, given their complicated history. In design, they served as zoological encyclopedias, dealing with animals both real and imaginary. In the typical bestiary, entries on the hedgehog and weasel and frog stand side by side with those on the parander, monoceros, and manticore, and the parrot’s scarcity in medieval Europe tends to ally it with these latter, fantastic creatures. In derivation, the bestiary is a compendium of beast-lore without identified authors, developing by transmission of material from one copyist to another. The main sources for the form were the great classical works of natural history, especially those by Aristotle and Pliny,
