While on his way to the Lonely Mountain to burgle the hoard of the great dragon Smaug, Bilbo Baggins, hero of J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1937 novel The Hobbit, encounters the wild but benevolent Beorn, a “skin-changer” who divides his time between the man and bear forms he assumes at will.
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Serve an American horse-meat and you’ll be ushered out of the kitchen and into a psychiatric institution, no doubt. But serve it to folks from Central Europe or Asia and you’ll find yourself praised for your culinary discernment. In his 1859 compendium The Curiosities of Food, Peter Lund Simmonds writes that the “ancient Germans and Scandinavians had a marked liking for horse-flesh. The nomadic tribes of Northern Asia make horse-flesh their favorite food. It has long been authorized and publicly sold in Copenhagen.”
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A dinner in which each dish features the humble tomato? Sounds excessive. But that’s exactly what one housewife hosted, according to an 1894 edition of The New England Kitchen Magazine. Known for her “delightful little dinners,” she was eager to prepare one her guests would not soon forget. Only five invitations were sent; her “home was small but dainty and cosey.” Her guests she chose carefully: “Five friends that she knew to be very fond of tomatoes.”
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The Austerity Kitchen 