12564. Food Facts

The Japanese dish shiokara is made by fermenting squid in old fish guts.

12565. Food Facts

Henry V of England once held a Christmas feast at which the menu included carps' tongues, roasted dolphin and flowers set in jelly.

12566. Food Facts

Honey is bee vomit. Bees drink nectar from flowers which they turn into honey before sicking it back up to store in the hive.

12567. Food Facts

Argentinian Gauchos keep a piece of beef under their saddles so that it is pummelled until tender as they ride around all day. It's said that the dish steak tartar came from Mongolian warriors doing the same and then eating the steak raw.

12568. Food Facts

The Roman emperor Nero kept a ‘glutton' – an Egyptian slave who ate everything he was given to eat, including human flesh.

12569. Food Facts

To make especially tender beef, the Japanese shut cattle in the dark, feed them beer and employ special cattle masseurs to massage them by hand three times a day.

12570. Food Facts

Stink-heads are a traditional Alaskan dish. Fish heads – often from salmon – are buried in pits lined with moss for a few weeks or months until rotten. They are then kneaded like pastry to mix up all the parts and eaten.

12571. Food Facts

Flavours of icecream available in Japan include octopus, ox tongue, cactus, chicken wing and crab.

12572. Food Facts

In 1919, a tidal wave of treacle swept through Boston, USA. A storage tank burst, spilling 7.5 million litres (2 million gallons) of it into the streets. It poured over houses, knocking them down, in a wave two storeys high.

12573. Food Facts

The Spanish eat the cheese cabrales when it is ‘con gusano' – crawling with live maggots.

12574. Food Facts

In India, ants are roasted, ground to a paste and served as chutney.

12575. Food Facts

A stew eaten at a funeral in Stone-Age Wales was made from shellfish, eels, mice, frogs, toads, shrews and snakes.

12576. Food Facts

An eighteenth-century recipe for making an enormous egg suggests sewing 20 egg yolks into an animal bladder, then dropping it into another animal bladder filled with 20 egg whites and boiling it all together.

12577. Food Facts

In Sardinia, cheese is left in the sun for flies to lay their egg in.When the maggots hatch, the swarming mass is spread on bread and eaten.

12578. Food Facts

In 1971, a man found the head of a mouse in a bar of chocolate.

12579. Food Facts

Condemned prisoners are traditionally allowed a delicious last meal. In some US states, it's not actually their last meal, but is served a day or two before the execution and is called a ‘special meal'.

12580. Food Facts

Odd crisp flavours available around the world include octopus, seaweed, banana, and sour cream and squid.

12581. Food Facts

During the Second World War, people in the UK were urged by the government to make the most of wild foods, and were given recipes for cooking roast squirrel, rook casserole, stewed starlings and baked sparrows.

12582. Food Facts

The Insect Club, a restaurant in the USA, serves only dishes made with insects. The menu includes cricket pizza, insect chocolates and ‘insects in a blanket' – crickets, mealworms and blue cheese in puff pastry.

12583. Food Facts

Roman banquets often featured hummingbirds cooked in walnut shells and roasted stuffed dormice, sometimes rolled in honey and poppy seeds. The Romans even had farms producing dormice because they were so popular.

History Facts
Roman prisoners condemned to fight to death with each other or wild animals often tried to kill themselves before the fight. One man pushed a wooden spike down his throat – it was used for holding the sponge people cleaned themselves with in the lavatory.      .. More >>