For centuries, a rite of passage for French gourmets was the eating of the Ortolan. These tiny birds—captured alive...

For centuries, a rite of passage for French gourmets was the eating of the Ortolan. These tiny birds—captured alive, force-fed, then drowned in Armagnac—were roasted whole and eaten that way, bones and all, while the diner draped his head with a linen napkin to preserve the precious aromas and, some believe, to hide from God.

Where can I try Ortolan?

I'm happy to travel to France to do it, I'm just aware that they've decided to enforce an EU prohibition on the dish.

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junglefowl
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

Trips confirm this was the original meme food.

Sounds like quail fois gras. I'd eat it.

Drowning is pretty easy way to go. Why would it be inhumane?

Tbh they're not really force fed. They just cover the cage making the bird think it's night and the bird keeps eating. The Romans used to poke the birds' eyes out to achieve the same result.

>Where can I try Ortolan?
>I'm happy to travel to France to try it.
Just answered your own question, retard.

I guess if you can manage to catch a finch or sparrow where you live, you can make this dish at home pretty faithfully. They're pretty similar birds.

It's illegal in France and they've been cracking down on sales as of late.

Why do they go out of their way to be dicks and drown the birds? You could just decapitate them like chickens and then soak the carcass in Armagnac and get the same result.

Who said it was?

Why the fuck would you decapitate them like a savage fucking mud hut dwelling nigger?

Just drown them in liquor where they die from the fumes, like civilized people.

>enforce an EU prohibition on the dish.
Why else would they prohibit it?

I would imagine the idea is to keep the skin intact so no juices leak out when you roast them. It might also have to do with keeping the blood in the carcass too. I know that for some dishes, like "pressed duck" the duck is killed by breaking its neck rather than cutting its head off because the goal is to retain the blood so that it can be used to make the sauce for said dish.

Also: a bird that small drowned in strong booze? It would be dead the instant it took a breath. You're imagining a poor little birdie flapping around for several minutes--that wouldn't happen.

>no mention of the fact that you're not just eating bones, but shitter and intestines

Yes, we've all seen that episode of American Dad.

You forgot about the bird CPR part though.

There's worse ways to go besides drowning in Armagnac. Hell, if you drowned in Armagnac, you'd be a legend around the al/ck/ threads.

Supposedly it's because the Ortolan is an endangered species.

It could also have to do with food safety/hygiene laws. I don't know enough about EU law to comment on that specifically, but in the US that kind of thing would be an issue. It is illegal in the US to sell or serve meat or poultry that hasn't been USDA inspected. That means that meat from wild animals cannot be sold, but a hunter can consume it themselves. I'm sure something similar exists in the EU, and it's entirely possible that the ortolan falls foul of that law because wild-caught birds wouldn't have the same safety inspections as farm raised.

>drowning in Armagnac
That's how I want to go, sobriety is a cunt.

>Why else would they prohibit it?

Because it's the EU. They create a bunch of ridiculous laws for no other reason than to be dicks to their citizens.

And the only way for it to never get extinct is to forbid it from being profitable and making sure no one will ever feed, raise and protect them...

If they're endangered, nature is already rejecting them, this is the worse thing you could do if you want to keep them around.
You know chicken woudn't survive in the wild if not for humans, right?

I hate leftist so much, they are oblivious to economy. The EU is an abomination, they think they can change the market with "just the right amount of intervention and prohibitive laws" and end up only hurting the very things they try to protect.

(You) have to go back to your containment board.

>You know chicken woudn't survive in the wild if not for humans, right?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junglefowl

It's a fucking bird, you complete pussified faggot.

>torturing small birds makes me a tough guy
You don't need to be so insecure. I'll still think of you as a man even if you aren't torturing small creatures that can't properly defend themselves.

I've always thought that the one way to keep any animal/plant/mineral from going extinct is to make it profitable to farm and then devour.

>people this dumb think their opinion matters on anything

Something being profitable and wild makes it more likely to become extinct. You don't need to look very far to find species that went extinct due to overhunting.

>minerals go extinct
American education ladies and gentlemen

Way to prove my argument, that's not even close to the Chester's we eat, dumbass.

You realize that the only reason chickens, cows, etc. wouldn't survive in the wild is because we took an animal that did survive in the wild and bred it until it couldn't?

Only on pre operations research days (before WW2), when the animal was already about to get extinct or had some fucked up mating habits that wasn't known at the time, oh, and on socialist coletivised shit holes (where economic calculus isn't possible).

>"But the amerindi-"
Yes, those were neither capitalists or had the level of science and globalized capitalism we have, not even close, and I'm sure if you proved to them those Buffalos were getting wiped out and gave them the scientific knowledge and a plan to keep them, they would follow it.

Hence, becoming ANOTHER animal, in these cases.
Another example to my first argument is the Panda, it's only still around because we think it's cute and that's profitable, and it's still a pain in the ass to make it so.

Lots of species today are dropping at unsustainable rates. Bluefin tuna populations, for example, have dropped by like 80% since like 1970.

Yeah, that's true. But it's not like the panda was threatened before all of its habitat was deforested and converted to farmland.

The core of the argument is Extinction, not #. When we put our hands on wild animals (that in this case wasn't endangered to begin with, hence has nothing to do with what I was talking about), they drop in numbers but don't get extinct, they drop to a point of stability in accordance to the supply and demand law.

Are you dense? Drowning is one of the most horrible deaths.

They were, and you act like those farmlands weren't feeding millions of starving Japanese children.
The very food you eat comes out of farmlands. You can't have this lifestyle you have (you're here posting on Veeky Forums, aren't you?) without exploration, but you guys act like it's unsustainable from pure ignorance, the actual foundation of capitalism (private property, relative pricing and profit) and applied mathematics in the environment makes it stable.

A bird that size would die in 1 second in a bottle of Armagnac, maybe with a strong whiff.

You never know, and the only way to make sure is to eat it, then you have a market driven incentive to keep them around.

It is unsustainable you fucking fig

But also the tastiest.

No it isn't.

This is why they're importing Muslims, because French culture is dead and they need a new one.

I guess the whole "fucking little girls" thing is the same in both.

How do you know?

Then get out of here, quick.

I've drowned unwanted puppies, they didn't suffer.

You deserve to be lynched.

No way.

A carcass soaked in a fluid is not going to be the same as a carcass of an animal that died trying to breathe it in.

even worse for birds because they live in the air. it's like drowning a human in earth. much worse.

Drowning is horrible. It hurts.

>even worse for birds because they live in the air.

Why would that matter at all?

What makes you think that a tiny little bird is going to live more than a literal second when immersed in very strong liquor? Do you think the bird has some kind of magical protection that's going to stop that massive shot of alcohol straight into the bloodstream from knocking it out instantly?

It seems to me that your head is filled with a lot of hyperbole yet very little logic and reason.

You're right. We should have made bald eagles into livestock here in the states. That was the only way to save them. Putting them on an endangered species list and protecting them and their environment was never going to work out.

Now we'll only know what they look like by the tattoo you have on your back of one in front of an american flag...

You seem to have a terrible sense of humor my friend

>inb4 I was only pretending to be boring

but if you eat a bird whole you're eating its shit

Birds don't shit.

Motherfucker, do you think there's an invisible hand directing Nature too? Commercial fish are dying out because we're hauling them out of the sea faster than they can reproduce; you don't need a doctorate in marine biology to understand this. Scientists are doing all they can, but it doesn't amount to more than hand-wringing because the commercial fishing industry by and large doesn't give a shit about sustainability.

And as to the bison, it was driven to near extinction not by Native Americans, but by the exploitative butchering and hunting policies in the 19th century, and they were thriving extraordinarily well before that happened. Most of the bison you see today are hybrids between wild bison and domestic cattle; there are only 12,000-15,000 pure bison left in the world today.

No amount of science can fix or excuse the ravages of exploitative agriculture and development, short of reforming the system. Like it or not, the graveyards are filled with species that died because humans, and humans alone, destroyed them.

>but by the exploitative butchering and hunting policies in the 19th century

Keep in mind that those policies were specifically intended to wipe out the buffalo. It wasn't an accident that they nearly went extinct, it was a deliberate act that was part of the war between the US and the native Americans. Plains Indians depended on the buffalo for their very survival. Take out the buffalo and you deny your enemy food, building materials, and so on.

Why do people like this separate humans from nature? We are nature too, we came out of the same biological goo we just evolved better.

My car disagrees.

Literal brainwashing has turned people like him insane.

Jesus fucking christ you could sell anything to the french if you tell them the cool kids are doing it

>bones and all
Why?

This looks stupid as fuck

So they don't cut out the guts, and the unwanted shit? Ewww

Cuz it's fucking metal dude

Fun Fact:

The Ortolan delicacy was actually a dying trend throughout Europe before Ozzy Ozbourne famously bit the head off of an ortolan on stage in Sabbath's famous Nassau Colliseum concert.

Immediately after that concert, ortolan sales exploded 10 fold in Europe.

Could you elaborate on what made the species not viable if it wasn't a massive change in the environment? It's not like something stayed alive for millions of years and then just stopped being viable for no reason. I couldn't find anything that didn't point to habitat loss.

>It's not like something stayed alive for millions of years and then just stopped being viable for no reason

This literally happens ALL THE FUCKING TIME in the natural world.

And just because you don't fucking understand the reason, doesn't mean there is no reason.

Not him but I don't think he was. So put that "argument" aside. Do you think we, with our intelligence and gift of forethought, should continue to destroy habitats and whip out other species? We could wipe out the entire rainforest if we wanted. Do you see any reason we should not?

Please give me a single example where there was absolutely no change and the species died.

Ah, so I misread the last part of your post which contradicts the rest of your post. Instead, please give me the alternative to why the pandas became endangered then. Your claim was it was not due to deforestation.

I hope someone drowns you when you inevitably become unwanted.

Not him but fuck off. He wasn't even being at all right wing you sad cunt.

They remove the eyes of the bird at one point, for feeding reasons.
Drowning is the best part for the bird.

>Take plane to France
>When exiting the airport, you're at France's central place
>Go to France's tavern
>Ask France's innkeeper where to eat Otorlan
Etc.

It's illegal to hunt and kill protected/endangered species, the dish isn't technically banned, only it's main ingredient.
Idk if they could make it with another small bird.

Find a way to raise otorlans then, they would sell like brioches. Look at OP, he's ready to buy a $1000+ plane ticket for one.
Oh, right, you can't and that's why we had to protect the bird from hunting.

The panda is the example of animal protection done wrong. All the money went to a useless animal because it's cute, while useful species receive no funds. Could be used as an argument against pure capitalism, since the invisible hand doesn't care about real value of animals, only how they look like in TV ads.

They did. Why didn't you hit them on the back of the head with a shovel, like any civilised human would do?

The 12-15000 bison are pretty much all cousins too, since they grew this population from a very small number of animals. We'll never have a real specie with genetic diversity back.
>inb4 nigger bison

Doesn't give us the right to destroy the planet. We pretty much have a duty to use our extraordinary capacity for planing to keep the planet liveable for future generations.

>he can't tell the difference between wild and domesticated animals

What is it about Veeky Forums that attracts such a high concentration of smug morons?

While your head is filled with literal shit.

Drowning is still drowning. The fucking fumes don' t exist "underwater" and - please elaborate - since when does taking a sip of alcohol go STRAIGHT into your bloddstream?

>alcohol go STRAIGHT into your bloddstream?
Alcohol isn't digested, it really does go from stomach/small intestine into the bloodstream.

>since when does taking a sip of alcohol go STRAIGHT into your bloddstream
Not him.
You get high from a joint almost instantaneously, not the same as digesting alcohol.
Drowning puts alcohol in the lungs, where transmission is very fast.

So it's an alcoholic pigeon/crow? Why bother?

...

>The fucking fumes don' t exist "underwater"
You're right. Liquid alcohol does.

>>since when does taking a sip of alcohol go STRAIGHT into your bloddstream?

Drowning has nothing to do with sipping. Drowning means the little bird's lungs fill up with strong booze. The alcohol enters the bloodstream via the lungs. The blood-alcohol concentration would go from zero to well beyond lethal in literally a second or two.

>The blood-alcohol concentration would go from zero to well beyond lethal in literally a second or two.

No, it would not.
There would certainly be an increase but you wouldn't hit poisoning levels in the time it takes to drown.
Imbibed alcohol does go straight into the bloodstream, though; a little of it anyway is absorbed in the oesophagus. Especially the hard liquor will hit very quickly in part because of this.

>do you think there's an invisible hand directing Nature too?
You mean Natural Selection?

>Imbibed alcohol does go straight into the bloodstream, though

Alcohol will enter the bloodstream far faster though the lungs than it will through the GI tract.

This ought to be immediately obvious since the lungs have a much higher density of blood vessels, a much higher surface area, and no mucus lining to interfere with absorption. Compare alveolar sacs vs. the lining of the stomach or small intestine.

Because the entire point of drowning them is that their lungs pop like little sacs of brandy when you bite into them.

>chinese people can't eat anything without torturing it first
>"fuckin' soulless chinks goddamn"
>frenchies do it with some nice booze
>"oh how cultured, I must try this"

you lads would eat dogshit if someone with a funny accent told you it was a delicacy

I don't see how cultural attitudes to cruel preparation of a dish relates to yet another lazy metaphor based around eating literal shit.

id love to hear why

>Natural Selection
>Natural
Artificial extermination is natural now?

Also it doesn't reach the intestine before minutes or hours, so compare mass of alveolar sacs with just the oesophagus...

Small amount of blood I guess also plays a role.

so it holds it breath, or gets literally under regular water and its fine for around a minute maybe, but it dies in a single second if it whiffs liquor

Well, it dies the moment it inhales liquid alcohol. That leaves some time for apnoea of course. And months living with its eyes poked out.
I didn't say it was cool for the bird at any time in the process, hiding from God makes sense after you did all this shit to His creation for a few seconds of fancy taste in your mouth.

>Well, it dies the moment it inhales liquid alcohol

Drowning is one of those funny ones you can experience and then come back from. It's frightening but then peaceful as white fuzzyness fills your vision, you stop giving a single fuck, and then darkness creeps in from the borders.

>Alcohol will enter the bloodstream far faster though the lungs than it will through the GI tract.
True. But while you need milligrammes of for example THC or meth to get high you need many grammes of alcohol. I think a glass of wine has about 10 cc of pure ethanol in it.
Do you you can absorb, say, 60 cc of ethanol from your lungs in a second?

Ortolan is illegal, isn't it?

>blinded so they would become confused and consume more
>force-fed with a high-sugar diet to become fat, as desired by their masters
>in the end killed off for the amusement of secretive society hiding from curious eyes
goyim are ortolans!

birds feathers are waterproof. and they need gravity to swallow so while in the booze they would be unable to ingest it. even if some went in their beak it is hard and not like a mouth.

It sounds nothing like foie gras

>It was Claude Souvenir who told us about the ortolan, a toe-sized bird that was eaten by the Romans, then the French—a tiny, sweet songbird sadistically tortured and consumed in one bite.

>The ortolan does not exactly taste good. It is more art than nourishment. One does not eat it for the simple pleasure of flavor; one eats it to experience something transcendent—to commune with life, suffering, and death in one mouthful. It is said to be the final course ingested by French President François Mitterrand at his legendary, opulent last supper. Mitterrand, dying of cancer, drifted in and out of consciousness during the meal. He died eight days later.

>You catch the ortolan with a net spread up in the forest canopy. Take it alive. Take it home. Poke out its eyes and put it in a small cage. Force-feed it oats and millet and figs until it has swollen to four times its normal size. Drown it in brandy. Roast it whole, in an oven at high heat, for six to eight minutes. Bring it to the table. Place a cloth—a napkin will do—over your head to hide your cruelty from the sight of God. Put the whole bird into your mouth, with only the beak protruding from your lips. Bite. Put the beak on your plate and begin chewing, gently. You will taste three things: First, the sweetness of the flesh and fat. This is God. Then, the bitterness of the guts will begin to overwhelm you. This is the suffering of Jesus. Finally, as your teeth break the small, delicate bones and they begin to lacerate your gums, you will taste the salt of your own blood, mingling with the richness of the fat and the bitterness of the organs. This is the Holy Spirit, the mystery of the Trinity—three united as one. It is cruel. And beautiful.

>According to Claude Souvenir, chewing the ortolan takes approximately 15 minutes.

you know that you drown by inhaling, not swallowing, right?

you don't put air inside your tummy when you breathe, dumbass

well, sometimes you do, but then you just belch it out

You can just put it in a box, there's no need to poke the eyes out