5 July 2024, @mariannewest's Freewrite Writing Prompt Day 2424: Four And Twenty Blackbirds

This post was inspired by today's 5-minute writing prompt in the Freewriters Community - 5 July 2024, @mariannewest's Freewrite Writing Prompt Day 2424: I love pie

Enjoy !

Image by G.C. from Pixabay

There was a time when the English weren't fussy eaters. As a nation, we were famous for eating pretty much anything that had protein in, and eating it (as the saying was) "from teeth to tail".

Nowadays, we're lot fussier, eating only the best cuts of meat and rejecting food if it's past it's sell-by date or best-before date, rather than using the old-fashioned sniff test to see if it smells fresh enough to eat. I'm not convinced our wasteful ways are such a good thing, but on the other hand it probably cuts down the hospital bill for food poisoning.

One characteristic of medieval and renaissance English cuisine is that we ate a huge variety of fowl, as birds were called back then. Not just chicken and the occasional goose or duck, as now. Any bird that could be caught and eaten was, and they were considered a great delicacy. Compered to chewy old mutton, that's probably not far off the truth ! Swans, of course, were a Royal bird (still are) and could only be eaten by the King or with his permission.

But this is how (in a very roundabout way) we get to pies. Remember that old nursery rhyme about "four and twenty blackbirds, baked in a pie". That was literally a thing. A favourite way to eat birds was to make a pie with them.

For especially lavish feasts, a pie could be cooked with the top cooked separately, then the birds (blackbirds or doves, usually) put inside so that when the lid was taken off, the birds would all fly up into the feast hall as a spectacle. So that is why the image for this post is a particularly indignant blackbird.

People were strange back then.....