What are your family’s top 3 favorite meals?
I found this strange poem inside a copy of a bedraggled book entitled A Forgotten Cuisine: The Wild and Strange Tastes of the Bete-Sauvage Family’: French emigrants in Boston during the early years of the American Revolution by an anonymous author published in 1904 but appearing in no lists of early twentieth century booklets, almost as if it were entirely fictitious. However, the quotation from the book attests to its probable authenticity. I lost the book soon after transcribing the passage that I quote below the poem, which follows:
I know not why many people oft say
They'd rather, any night, dine with the Addams
Family than us,as if they were prey
To some anxious thought that overly fans
Their fear of being consumed by the Bete-
Sauvage family's reputed strange taste
For food that those invited never yet
Eat. As if they had no shame to waste
What might have led to bearing the proud boast
Of having excellent taste like their host.
This is the quotation from that old but lost book. So strange I fear it might be thought fiction.
The Beau-Sauvage menus seemed based on the peculiar tastes of each of the 3 members of the extant family in 1902, for any record of them.after that is buried in the obscurity of time, and even the dusty cookbooks they possessed are now turned to waste that smell like excrement. The three family members had mottos related to their individual taste. Let’s list them:
- Monsignor Zhom Bete-Sauvage wore a ring of unidentified bone, that some felt to be simian. It reads like this though some words are erase by time:
- Sir Zhom Be ‐-‐-‐—- liked his meat freshly killed and raw, not even minced but torn by t—–‐
- Editorial note: the last word presumably refers to an ancient grinder of meat called a terrordent but I can find no evidence for my guess.
- Young lad through be but the youth they liked to call Wolf-Boy for no reason I can find in any record, had his motto on a necklace made of fur with figures pointed in red [paint type unknown]. It read:
- Little Lycan they call me because I pile my plate with more / Than I can eat aa if I Like the look of gor—– feasting through my eyes / things not accommodated by my size.
- Editorial Note: the phrase shortened is likely to be ‘ gorgeous things’. What else could it be?
- Milord Wampyr de Bete-Sauvage clearly was very old and liked his food liquidised. His motto was inscribed on a broach of pure Transylvanian pinewood.
- I live in the dark and liquid is my good / Rich foodstuff though the vulgar call it bl—–
- Editorial Note: the word shortened is likelybtonrefer to blowred, the name of a liquid cheese known for its richness.
There are no.more extant mottos of this kind. Looking through the evidence, which I lost on my research travels they seem like fiction. But truth is oft more strange than li-‐—-.
And then the text ends.
It seems not only fiction but silly, but who am I to judge.
Love
Steven xxxxxxx
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