Alec Muffet, redoubtable trencherman that he is despite his dainty frame, pointed me at this splendiferous expression of the manifest superiority of western civilisation:
Multi-bird roasts, where different types of bird are stuffed inside a larger one, have become the thing to carve this year – and the more birds involved the better. One of the top-sellers is the Waitrose four-bird roast: guinea fowl, duck and turkey breast stuffed inside a goose. Demand has soared 50 per cent this year – even though each roast costs an eyewatering £200 [about $400 USD].
The surge in popularity may have something to do with TV chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s creation of a ten-bird roast on his show two years ago. He stuffed an 18lb turkey with a goose, duck, mallard, guinea fowl, chicken, pheasant, partridge, pigeon and woodcock – producing a remarkable Russian doll-like dish. But now his effort, inspired by recipes dating from Tudor times, has been dwarfed by a behemoth containing no fewer than 48 birds of 12 different species. This massive roast, the proud creation of Devon farmer Anne Petch, weighs almost four stone (more than most airlines’ baggage allowance), costs £665, and has enough meat to serve 125 people.
Magnificent! However after reading the comments attached to this Daily Mail article decrying the practice, I could see my enthusiasm was not shared by all. The best comment and a real contender for the Samizdata Pig’s Head on a Spike Award for Thigh Slapping Hilarity was:
See, it’s because of madness like this that the terrorists hate us
– Marcus, Northampton, UK
The man is either a sage-like wag of the very highest order or a deranged Imam in need of an extended holiday in a certain part of Cuba… and an honourable mention also goes out for:
These graceful animals were alive and living a short while ago. Go veggie this Cristmas and let more of gods creatures experience what you do …Life
– James Mills, Nottingham
Naturally I felt the need to leave one of my own, as indeed you might:
This year for Christmas we are having one of these wonderful multi-birds and I am very much looking forward to it. However after reading some of the comments here, next year we are going to eat a PETA activist stuffed inside a Greenpeace activist stuffed inside a Animal ‘Rights’ activist stuffed inside Gordon Brown’s voluminous carcass (with a non-‘Fair Trade’ apple stuffed into his mouth).
Merry Christmas and God Deliver Us All… from priggish activists of all stripes.
Yummy! Nom nom nom!
Ok, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that Alec Muffet is actually a 6′ 4″ bear-of-a-man?
Having lived in Saudi Arabia, and been guest at a feast that featured a camel stuffed with a goat stuffed with seasoned rice, I’d like to offer a perky American middle finger to the author of that moronic comment.
The TurDucken sounds like a real treat,
then there is the warthog stuffed with a duck around a frog, the WhatDuF#@k.
“See, it’s because of madness like this that the terrorists hate us
– Marcus, Northampton, UK”
He’s wagging for sure, and the uncertainty shows that he does it well too boot. Merry Christmas to you and yours Marcus of Northampton.
That was my assumption too, Walter. Of course if not, it is even funnier.
So a camel stuffed with a goat is for real?
Mmm…dinner time.
It’s funny, the only thing I could think is “how do you get the innermost birds in the 48 bird monstrosity to temperature without drying out the one they are all stuffed into?”
Yummy, yes….and the practice is pretty global. See Ashanti Chicken (fowl).
OK,
I saw Hugh Fearnley-Shittingstall commit that travesty on telly. I was completely bamboozled to the sodding point of it all. But there was something glorious in the magnificent obsession sense about it. It gave me an idea…
A multiple vegetable stuffing from a giant pumpkin to a pea. As a spectacular waste of time and effort I think it trumps the River Cottage loon.
One of the things I like about this blog is the full blooded use of the English language without so much as a nod to the inclusive dumbed down Newspeak one sees so much of these days.
Too much of a good thing can be *wonderful*.
[My cardiologist is on standby…]
6’4″ exactly, yes. 🙂
Stuff Brown et al inside pope Gore’s fat ass and you will truely have done a two-fer.
Well, this year I went to a Thanksgiving dinner that included a bacon wrapped Tofurkey. It was quite good.
Does that count?
Alex. You spent 3 years in Aberystwyth??
I almost did too. But I was smarter than that.
The countryside around is fabulous, but what a shabby parochial wind blasted small minded place it is.
Dont you think? I was there a couple of weeks ago.
Nothing has changed.
As to the food. Well I’ll give it a go. But it seems a hell of a hassle for a bit of scoff. Especially if you find out that pheasant and chicken taste disgusting together. Not to mention the cock robin at the centre. Rather like the sixpence in the Christmas Pud.
Who got the Robin this year! Came the cry.
– I don’t think I’ll EVER be THAT hungry……
On the subject of over-the-top Medieval feasting, Alec’s dad (by whose side Alec did indeed appear dainty) could produce, to order, a stuffed boar’s head for New Year’s, complete with carved coconut tusks, marbles for eyes and an apple in its mouth. Trust me, with respect to ‘trencherman’ status, the fruit didn’t fall far from the tree . . . Don’t forget to have a few shaggy dogs wandering around to eat the bones and wipe your fingers on.
Great post Perry. We indulged in a fabulous cajun turducken for Thanksgiving this year.
These animal rights folks are batty, When I was in undergrad a bunch of them showed up to protest scrappie sheep being brought in for research at the USDA research lab here in Ames, because apparently researching diseases is animal abuse. My fellow students and I brought our trucks and grilled sausages and hamburgers in counter protest. They were not pleased, especially because we had three times the number of people they did.
Dusty
“They were not pleased, especially because we had three times the number of people they did.”
I imagine your side of the protest smelled a whole lot better, too.
Back in college my bio adviser was working at the animal lab when the PETA crew showed up. After an hour or so he goes out to see what they want and of course they want his “subjects” released. Being an agreeable sort he immediately went into the lab and came out with a big bucket full of the leeches he was working on.
They weren’t so hot to take care of THEM, you see if you’re not willing to fill up sausage casings with warm fresh cow blood you have to give ’em your arm. No more chanting and marching.
Do a google search for ‘stuffed camel recipe’ and you’ll find not only a common recipe but a snopes.com page indicating that it’s the real thing. As Bear Grylls recently demonstrated on his show “Man vs Wild” (that’s “Bear Grylls: Born Survivor” for the UK audience), a grown camel has a massive internal cavity once the organs are removed, big enough for Bear himself. So adding a sheep (or goat), 20 whole chickens, 5 dozen eggs, 70 pounds of rice and nuts, 5 pounds of pepper– no problem. Sign me up!
It all sounds delicious to me. In fact, I emailed my sister that we might order a turducken (stuffed with jambalaya) as an easy-to-fix Christmas dinner.
Alas, her response to me was “that sounds gross, let’s cook.”
We’re losing our heritage.
Hm. This post makes me wonder what manbearpig (aka Al Gore) would taste like. Probably greasy.
there is someone named Shittingstall who has a cooking show on the bbc? geez.
And I can tell you that Alec, redoubtable indeed, does not quail at rattlesnake in cream cheese dip or fried bull’s testicles.
The key to the roast turducken (besides lots of basting) is this: when you’ve completed the stuffing and are ready to roast, wrap the whole thing in buttered aluminium foil and roast it breast-down for the first couple hours. That way all the juices run down into the breast of the largest bird.
I’d probably recommend against the PETA activist … they don’t have much meat on their bodies. Though I suppose as an outter shell for decoration they might be ok.
Joel, his name is actually Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
Yep. Someone finally managed to top John Madden’s Six-legged Turkey.
And in response to James Mills the Animal Rights Clownshoe: I’m taking a mental health day tomorrow, and going hunting. Every bunny I get, I’ll think of you.
No, Joel, he’s called Whittingstall but I feel my rendering of his name is apt. He’s into organic stuff and though, admittedly, some of it looks OK it’s always an unmitigated faff. If I want a nice bit of fish, I go to the fishmonger. Hugh Feanley-Shittingstall wants the same he gets his scuba gear out… We could all eat fresh, local produce except some of us have other things to do. And I quite like the fact that I can get whatever I want irrespective of season. Tomatoes in December – unpossible! If I hop my fence I’m right into a deer park but the last time I had venison it came from NZ and yet managed to be (considerably) cheaper! I know I’m killing the planet but I don’t fucking care.
Grilled is more like it. Nick: I am into organic stuff, so what?
The multiple birds thing is indeed an oldie. Brother (who is a chef, currently feeding the boys in Kabul) has recalled learning how to do it as part of the advancd City and Guilds thing a couple of decades ago.
Unfortunately they had to fake it a bit. The original recipe has a swan on the outside so you can really only get that now in a Royal Palace or St John’s (either Cambirdge or Oxford).
Well I’m into organic food too. I once saw organic salt for sale which (from a chemical PoV beggars belief) so… screw it. I believe organic food to be decadent. I go out of my way not to buy it. It’s evil rot concocted by men with stroking beards like that ass-clown Porritt.
Yes, I saw organic salt as well, but was it certified?
Seriously though, you are making too much of it. It may be decadent, but then there are lots of other things that can be considered decadent, including some things you might fancy to indulge in. I don’t see why it bothers people so much, it’s not as if someone is forcing anyone to buy it.
See, it’s because of madness like this that the terrorists hate us
– Marcus, Northampton, UK
Of course, it could be real. The loony left will reach for the unlikeliest reasons to blame America first. The problem is that line between lefty positions and comedy is so blurry, you can never really tell if they’re dead serious or having a flashback from all that LSD they took.
It’s interesting the Daily Mail didn’t eventually approve and publish your comment yet the other ones got through. of course the joy of blogs means that more people probably get to read it here than would have on the Daily Mail’s own site regardless.
Reminds me of a recipe we used as a boy back home in Alamaba. Tack one possum to a wooden plank and marinate it in one gallon of Jack Daniels for two days. Then drink the Jack Daniels, throw away the possum and eat the plank.
Such glorious, wanton, unbridled excess is indeed the sign of a successful civilization – when the last however-many-million years of human existence have consisted in the main of a desperate struggle for adequate calories, often at the point of a spear or a knife, the easy availability, not only of plenty of calories but also such pleasant ways of consuming them, is a sure sign of a civilization which has mastered the basics and can move on to higher things.
It is, however, unfortunate that only Western civilization seems to suffer from the incessant urge to self-flagellation that causes some morons to see this as a failure and not a success.
I recall, a couple of years ago, that one of the major US fast-food chains – I think it was Arbys, I could be wrong – offered a truly stupendous hamburger combination that came in at something like 1800 calories and cost less than $5. Stupendous was the wailing and ganshing of teeth – how wasteful, this would feed starving people in Africa for a day and was being (essentially) given away to a population that had too much already! All of these complaints, of course, coming from well-fed, warm people on the Left and Right coasts, who had never in their lives had to hump a stick of irrigation pipe or a balky heifer in -23°C weather, and could not even conceive that there are millions of people in the nation who need that kind of calorie intake to make a living. The opinions of such blinkered societal recluses need not concern a thinking person too much.
On balance, a nation whose major issue is having too much food is far better off – and better able to help others – than a nation whose major issue is not having enough food.
llater,
llamas
Vegetarianism is *so* unnatural for humans, an abomination really, but there is also the fact that at some time, unlike cats and most mammals that eat mostly just meat, we cannot make our own Vitamin C (thus scurvy on Renaissance era ships until the English after about 200 years of warning, started carrying limes, and thus got called “Limeys”). So you gotta add some veggies to your turkey dinner (and potatoes don’t count), like spinach or, surprise, surprise, cranberries!
On the political side, I see here too much generalization about how Westerner’s are not immune to self-hatred. First of all, it’s only literal losers who vote for more wealth re-distribution (despite data that shows that the top 10% already pay 90% of taxes), and is it any surprise that power (status) hungry leaders pander to these lowly folk? Yet, also, our DNA is not yet immune from a great aversion to being envied, for in the past (10K-30K years ago), anybody who *was* richer than average usually did so by nefarious means, and so had to invoke things like divine rights of kings to avoid being lynched. This to some extent (50% of all personality traits are genetic) explains why a person who finds themselves to be a celebrity suddenly starts running around like a chicken with its head cut off to loudly support all manner of socialist and “environmentalist” causes. Children of rich parents make up the majority of “Bush = Hitler” protest types. Envy aversion explains a lot of the reason environmental/socialist/extreme-leftist leaders can gather so much energy behind their movements.
Yet this post, like a warm campfire, and cooking things on sticks sharpened with a Swiss Army Knife (another extreme example of a wonder of Western Civilization), warmed my heart, for I now live on the Upper West Side, but was raised by summers spent on long distance camping journeys from cold and flat Minnesota to places that looked like Mars, out west, and huge local ranch steaks cooked on sanitary yet black gunk encrusted grills, over hot coals.
No Alisa the Soil Association aren’t threatening me with compliance or Death but… they are still creepy fuckers who ought to be put in their place. Our own beloved Prince Charles bigs it up for them and he is an unmitigated cock. He operates out of Highgrove which is a sodding mansion and following the death of the Queen Mum he requested (and got) Clarence House (gotta be worth fifty mil) because, as he said, he didn’t want to live “above the shop”. A circus performs an array of cunning stunts, our own dear Royal Family appears to possess an array of… But enough of his chuckiness already. Whilst I am sure there is much to be learned from medieval agriculture it stuns me that people pay more money for ropey-looking carrots that were farmed under primitive conditions. Name me another industry where deliberately doing things as inefficiently as possibile is a feature, not a bug.
Ah, our old chum the “fixed wealth fallacy“.
Nick: screw his highness, what does he have to do with what you or I might want to eat? Buying organic may be stupid, but it seems to me it would be just as stupid not to buy it because of him.
I don’t know what the produce (organic or conventional) is like in the UK, but here in Israel my carrots look and taste just fine, thank you very much (and so they did in the US, BTW). As to price, the difference these days is minuscule for most produce, and where the difference is more significant, there is also a significant superiority in flavor (tomatoes are a good example). Inefficiently? I am not sure you are really up to date on organic farming techniques. Not that I am an expert either, but the very small difference in prices that I mentioned is the best indicator as far as I can tell. Anyway, the devil is yet again in the details.
Alisa wrote:
‘I don’t know what the produce (organic or conventional) is like in the UK, but here in Israel my carrots look and taste just fine, thank you very much (and so they did in the US, BTW). As to price, the difference these days is minuscule for most produce, and where the difference is more significant, there is also a significant superiority in flavor (tomatoes are a good example). Inefficiently? I am not sure you are really up to date on organic farming techniques. Not that I am an expert either, but the very small difference in prices that I mentioned is the best indicator as far as I can tell. Anyway, the devil is yet again in the details. ‘
Concentrated nonsense. Sorry.
In the US, at least, ‘organic’ groceries (fruits & vegetables) typically cost between 60% and 100% more per pound than their ‘conventional’ counterparts in the same store. Miniscule? Not by my pocketbook.
Funnily enough, the ‘better flavour’ that’s often claimed for ‘organic’ food is generally only discernable by those who are trying to sell it to you. Whenever these claims are put to a side-by-side comparison – they disappear. Here’s an example, from a hard-core foodie magazine
http://www.thenibble.com/reviews/nutri/matter/2007-01.asp
but you can find hundreds more just like it. Even Consumers Union, who sets the standard for testing consumer products, could find no taste advantage in ‘organic’ foods over ‘conventional’.
I think the truth of the matter is that more better-tasting food happens to be ‘organic’, but the better taste has nothing to do with the ‘organic’ process – it’s because it was made with or fed better, more-expensive ingredients, or by less-efficient or more-costly processes. ‘Organic’ is primarily a marketing tool, which attempts to persuade the customer that the product is better and therefore worth its higher price. You can buy superbly-flavoured, non-organic ‘heirloom’-variety tomatoes in the US all day if you have a mind to – it’s just that they cost the same per pound as ‘organic’.
As to the efficiency – well, I wrote for years for the largest paid-circulation magazine for farmers and ranchers in the US. I do know something about this. But don’t believe me – here’s an excellent overview
http://www.reason.com/news/show/34820.html
which reflects the current state of the game – ‘organic’ agriculture yields between 50% and 70% per acre vs ‘conventional’. Which is why it costs more. And why it contains a larger proportion of smaller and imperfect products – when it costs so much more per pound to grow, you have to lower your standards in order to sell as much of what you’ve grown as you can.
More troubling (to me) and often-overlooked is that ‘organic’ agriculture depends heavily on cultivation and manual labour. In practice, this means that the tendency is more-and-more to produce ‘organic’ foods in nations with low labour costs, which means – in effect – that your lovely ‘organic’ food was gotten by the endless stoop-work of millions of poor, brown-skinned people far, far away. It’s the new colonialism.
In short, ‘organic’ food is a comfortable delusion for the scientifically-challenged who have excess disposable income. It’s like the person who sports a Rolex – it’s not about telling time, it’s about projecting a certain image. And it’s a marketing tool for those who want to charge you a higher price for food with no measurable nutritional or flavour advantages.
llater,
llamas
llamas,
I agree with most of what you said about organic flavor. Its superiority (where it exists) is a consequence of other things that the organic producers are doing right. A good example is grass fed milk based cheese. As a sometime farmer and dairy farming employee, I can assure what the cows eat has a HUGE effect on the product’s taste. Any thing from delicious craving to looking for somewhere to spit. Commercial dairies want milk that is devoid of flavor. Conventional farms feed foods that have no taste and pass none through. That’s why the products are bland.
I quit a dairy farm once for two reasons, the key one being their handling of insecticides. They fog was so thick in the barn during milking that you couldn’t see the length of the barn. The farmer died a few years later of lung cancer. Coincidence? Probably.
My dad an I grew organic musk melons for several local stores briefly during the eighties. My grandfather had been a produce farmer and my dad wanted to try it again when he retired. The reason he chose to make the operation organic had nothing to do with flavor or food safety. He (and I) just plain didn’t want to be wading through all of the insecticides, fungicides and herbicides. Yes, the cost of production is greater. You just price it into the product. Either you have a market at the higher price, or you don’t. We always had a market.
BTW, I would like to find your source for tomatoes. Around here heirlooms cost a lot more except during their local season. They just don’t ship well. And was the mag FJ? I subscribed to that for very many years.
I have basically zero experience with livestock, but Mid’s comments bear out with wild game. Deer taste like what they eat. Cornfield whitetails from back east taste that much different from muleys that live off of sagebrush.
Interestingly, elk (preferential grazers, unlike deer) taste more like grass-fed beef than they taste like deer.
As for tomatoes: I think the strain or breed has a lot more to do with flavor than farming technique. Store-bought are usually bred to retain texture and appearance even after being transported and subjected to temperature variations. Flavor gets lost somewhere: it’s just not a priority.
And Hiz Royal Highnessness…well, I could care what he does or doesn’t eat. But I don’t. He’s a moron of the first order.
Llamas: I did not say all organic produce is the same price as regular, but most. I could be wrong about the US (it’s been more than 4 years), but that’s what i remember, at least in FL.
That makes sense. still it is more expensive anyway, so why not organic, because Charles likes it?
Sorry, but I don’t find that troubling at all. I don’t buy organic “to save the planet”, or as a status attribute. I buy it because I want to minimize the amount of pesticides/herbicides in my food. And I would happily sport a Rolex if it was, in fact, a superior watch for the price (it isn’t). I do sport other, just as expensive watches, however, and get this: I am very much brown-skinned as well.
Brewing: Belgian ‘Lambic’ styles (an unhopped, spontaneously fermented in open vats, strong ale frequently fermented over fruit: all things that a devotee of English/West Coast ales like would consider sloppy technique and wrong) command a premium in the market. They take 2-5 years from start to finish and are insanely easy to screw up (say, an infection from a wild yeast or bacteria that produces some really weird kind of formaldehyde rather than ethanol), and cost the same drop-for-drop as a midrange wine.
Gunsmithing: Some people will pay a premium for a hand-fitted custom Perazzi or Holland and Holland engraved with dogs and chickens, driving the cost up to roughly what I spent on a pickup truck a few years ago. And yet, they offer no real performance or reliability advantage over a $200 beater shotgun from Super MegaloMart.
Crafts: compare the scented candles from Target or the UK equivalent to the ones from corner shops and Renaissance Faire stalls, run by septagenarian hippies. Both burn the same. Both have the same chokingly-sweet aromas. And yet, one costs more than the other.
Hell, some people would pay double for imported status-symbol cigarettes over what I spent on the Camel Lights that I poisoned myself with for 15 years. (And why I didn’t save a buck a pack by switching to Ghetto Pimp Classics, now I’ll never know)
Deep in my heart I may be a little too puritanical to fully understand. (Hah, says the guy who almost emptied a gun into the TV over being tired of Christmas advertising. Thank god we live in a world where people can prosper enough to buy plasma TVs and game consoles and are free to do so, but I don’t think Jesus said “Celebrate ye my birthday through the accumulation of crap.”)
Okay, I’ll stop ranting and go to bed now.
I am a little puritanical on some products, too (those watches I mentioned in the comment that is being held for spam inspection are Mr. Alisa’s idea, and i don’t sport them all that often anyway). However, one cannot be puritanical on everything, and one has to have the freedom of choosing when to be puritanical, and when not, if at all.
1. I like Sunfish. He smart & practical.
2. Not Farm Journal but Successful Farming. I was in thrall to the Emperor Meredith.
3. Heirloom tomatoes are not hard to find around here (SE Michigan) if you have a mind to – in season. The Westborn Market chain carries several good varieties, Eastern Market in Detroit, the Pontiac and Brighton farmer’s markets, Colasanti’s in Milford – and that’s just off the top of my head. As said, it’s not in how they’re raised (organic vs conventional) because that doesn’t make any difference to the flavour – ions are ions – it’s the variety that makes the difference. And many of the older, better-tasting varieties – as said – do not ship well. The price you pay for having fresh tomatoes at the market 365 days per year is that they’re not the best tomatoes that there are. Does that beat having excellent tomatoes, but only for 40 days a year? You tell me.
4. I’m no different than anyone else, and I have my own wierd, non-rational tropes. I tell time on an all-mechanical Breitling wristwatch. Is it rational? Of course it isn’t – a $30 Timex does a better job. It’s not about telling time. The difference between me and those who swear by organic food and think we should all eat it is that I don’t try and persuade anyone that my irrational choice has merit when there is none.
llater,
llamas
I like Sunfish too:-)
I certainly don’t swear by it, and I couldn’t care less what everybody else eats, as long as they don’t take a seat and a half on an airplane while only paying for one.
OK, I was a little off-colour about organic produce. I agree with Mid that it can be better because more care is put into it. My real beef though is with the SA’s bizarre hatred of GMO and I suppose with the perversification of the language. All food is organic. Alisa, in the UK organic costs a lot more. Our labelling is also a joke. I once saw “Free range lamb” on sale. I once flew transatlantic wedged between two West Indian ladies of generous build. ’twas awful.
Problem with “free range”, “natural” etc. is that there is no certification, which makes these labels meaningless.
If costs more in the UK, then don’t buy it, just as you don’t have to choose a Rolex over Timex.
Personally GMO does not bother me half as much as pesticides etc. AFAIK, it is not allowed under organic labels, but if it was up to me, I would allow it.
As to ladies on the plane: see what I mean? They should have bought 3 seats for the two of them:-O
I only eat tomatoes 40 days a year. Actually a few more than that. The local growers start them indoors and we have a pretty long ‘real’ tomato season.
There is an easy test of a tomato’s future flavor. Orange. Commercially shippable tomatoes turn from green to light green to greenish white to pinkish to red. Real tomatoes turn from green to yellow to orange to orange-red. This is a pretty reliable indicator.
Incidentally, at some point during our operation (we also grew tomatoes) we came across the specifications for tomato bouncibility. Commercial processors apparently want them to meet a bounce specification. Dad and I had a good laugh and enjoyed our ‘splat’ tomatoes all that much more. Here is an interesting article I found while trying to find the bounce specifications. And here (PDF) is some research into ameliorating the consequences of mechanical stress on tomatoes during handling. You may have to force your system to use a PDF reader for that link, it is not suffixed properly.
The origin of the term ‘organic’ food came from the chemistry of the fertilizer. If the fertilizer contained carbon, it was ‘organic’ fertilzer. If the fertilizer was chemically pure, it was ‘inorganic’ fertilizer. Originally, all ‘organic’ meant is that the farmer used shit to fertilize his crops. The meaning has been expanded since then. Words often do that.
What, no Spotted Owl?!?!!! Pikers.
This does not bother me all that much either.
There was this bloke up in court for contravening the Endangered Species Act and poaching.
Seems he had shot a Golden Eagle.
The Magistrate asked him what had happened and he said that he was out shooting pigeon and the unfortunate bird had flown in front of his gun.
Oh dear, said the Magistrate. Yes these accidents can happen. I’m of a mind to fine you only 5 shillings. This is a protected species after all. By the way what did you do with it?
Well it seemed a shame to waste it, poor thing. So I took it home and ate it.
Really said the magistrate. Logical I suppose.
What did it taste like?
Rather like Swan…
(Link)