Performing Meat

John Wecker’s Secrets of Nature offers a recipe for roasting a goose alive. Advising the application of a ring of fire to some “lively Crea-ture,” the recipe includes pots of water to slake the dying goose’s thirst, while it “fl[ies] here and there” within the fire-ring.2 The cook should baste the goose’s head and heart so that “her inward parts” will roast before she dies: “when you see her giddy with running, and begin to stumble, her heart wants moisture: she is Rosted, take her up, and set her upon the Table to your guests, and as you cut her up she will cry continually, that she will be almost all eaten before she be dead.”3 Recipes like this one have attracted only a limited range of scholarly analysis: Wecker’s recipe appears, for instance, in the introduction to Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt’s collection Renaissance Culture and the Everyday, where it serves as a reminder of the casual cruelty of Renaissance practices that estrange everyday early modern culture for a generation of historicist critics. Culinary historians might situate the recipe as an example of the new interest in food’s aesthetic complexity during the Renaissance. To animal lovers and vegetarians, the recipe would speak for itself, highlighting the intol-erable suffering of living creatures rendered as mere meat for the table: animal studies scholars like Simon Estok and Erica Fudge have discussed early modern resistance to, and rare embrace of, vegetarianism based on the dehumanizing influence of meat-eating exemplified by cases of ani-mal torture like that in Wecker’s recipe.