And speaking of things stuffed inside other things, I don’t know about
you but I find I’m invited to fewer and fewer parties at which people leap out
of cakes. Dita Von Teese apparently does
it quite often, including at the Hugh Hefner’s 80th birthday party,
but I wasn’t invited to that.
However I do see a couple of disadvantages with the “burlesque
performer” in the cake scenario. First, when
you arrive at a party and see a large, wooden thing in the shape of a cake
sitting in the corner you can be pretty sure somebody’s going to jump out of
it. The second disadvantage is that
since the “cake” is indeed made of wood, you’re not going to be able to eat the
thing.
How very
different from the home life Sir Jeffrey Hudson (1619
– 1682) also known as Lord Miniumus, a pituitary
dwarf who when he was seven years old became part of the household of the Duke
and Duchess of Buckingham where he was regarded as a "rarity of
nature." He was, as the saying
goes, small but perfectly formed. Whether
he was quite as perfect as he appears in the portrait above, painted by Van
Dyle in 1633, I’m not sure, though he obviously had appeal. Perhaps less so as he got older.
When Charles I and his wife Queen Henrietta visited the Buckinghams the hosts threw a banquet,
and at the highpoint the king and queen were presented with a large game pie, out
of which young Jeffrey emerged. Now that
must have been a surprise, and of course you couldn’t actually have eaten the contents
of the pie, i.e. Jeffrey, but you could at least have eaten the crust, though
you have to imagine that an aristocratic banquet would have offered more
interesting fare than pie crust.
In The Accomplisht
Cook Or the Art and Mystery of Cooking,
written by Robert May, first published in 1660, there’s a section headed “Triumphs and Trophies in Cookery, to be
used at Festival Times, as Twelfth-Day, &C.” containing instructions for a
feast that involves making a ship out of pastry, complete with working cannon,
a stag made of pastry, with an arrow in the side of him, and his body filled up
with claret wine and an arrow in his chest so that “some of the Ladies may be persuaded
to pluck the Arrow out of the Stag, then will the Claret wine follow as blood
running out of a wound.” The best image I can find of a pastry stag is
this one from Neues Saltzburgisches Koch-Buch by Conrad Hagger from 1719. It
doesn’t seem to have an arrow or any claret but I’m sure something could be
arranged.
Surrounding
the stag, were more ordinary looking but some were to contain live frogs, others
live birds; “you may suppose they (the guests) will desire to see what is in
the Pies; where lifting first the lid off one pie, out skips some Frogs, which
makes the Ladies to skip and shreek; next after the other Pie, whence comes out
the Birds; who by a natural instinct flying at the light, will put out the
Candles; so that what with the flying Birds, and skipping Frogs, the one above,
the other beneath, will cause much delight and pleasure to the whole
company.” Well yes, it might go that
way. Though arguably a pie containing a
live pig might be even more fun.
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