Fordyce Maxwell: ‘Who decided that bloated duck livers beaten to paste were good to eat?’

MONIQUE is a good-looking woman with strong forearms and hands like a bricklayer. It’s astonishing to see some of the delicate embroidery she produces with those hands when not working with her husband Serge on their farm in the Midi-Pyrenees. Less astonishing to watch her matter of factly pen ducks behind a corrugated iron sheet to machine-gun that day’s food ration down their throats from a battery-powered dispenser, whether they wanted it or not.

Judging by the quacking I guessed they didn’t. But without that force-feeding there’s no foie gras and Monique’s part in the process was until recently an important item of farm income. They’ve now stopped force-feeding ducks, not on moral or welfare grounds, but because it became unprofitable at about the same time as returns from grain and beef cattle improved.

I hope it became unprofitable because sales of foie gras are declining. Who decided that bloated duck livers beaten to paste were good to eat? Probably the same type who catch and fatten ortolans – finch-size buntings – to roast and eat whole, traditionally with a napkin over their head. The French eater, that is, not the ortolan, which is past caring.

Almost as gruesomely for our modern stomachs, except in those parts of Scotland where mutton singed with the wool on and skuas are still in demand, was the use of any food that was available and cheap, such as sheep’s head broth. Years ago I found the Rikki Fulton sketch on sheep’s heid funny; recently I read the recipe for it in a Scotland on Sunday article with eye’s a-goggle:

“Get a singed head and trotter… Take out the brains and rub the head and feet well with them… soak… put in four quarts of water with a good teacupful of barley… cook for one-and-a-half hours and add carrot, onion, turnip and two leeks… add tablespoonful finely chopped parsley.”

It’s the parsley that cracks me up. What a difference that must have made. But as someone who gave up after one spoonful the time my mother experimented with jugged hare, doesn’t care much for anything with a gamey flavour and turns pale at the thought of dog, snake or sheep eyeballs, perhaps I’m not the best person to judge what’s edible.

Yet I’ve eaten crocodile, and chain-outlet burgers; like haggis, tripe and shellfish; ate jellied eels in a London docklands pub where the rising tide of broken glass and sawdust indicated that refusal might tend to offend; and don’t mind black pudding.

All of which proves that there is no limit to what humans can and will eat, by necessity or from choice. That’s up to and including other humans, as the briefest historical review of sieges, famines and shipwrecks will confirm. Where most of us are lucky is in having so much choice and availability of food that we can stuff ourselves daily at historically low cost. And why foie gras and Heston Blumenthal still have a market.