Some bravery as a side dish

5) Ortolan. This small songbird, part of the bunting family and found in southwest France, among many places, doesn't seem much less palatable than other small birds like squab.

Even in the pages of the Larousse Gastronomique, one of France's cooking bibles, the ortolan receives straightforward treatment.

“They can be prepared in any way suitable for Garden Warblers or Larks,” it says, as though either bird were regularly packaged by Perdue. “Gastronomes hold the opinion that the only way to cook this bird is to roast it in the oven or on the spit and insist that it should not be cooked in anything but its own fat.”

Hmm ... what could they be hiding?

The other half of the ortolan story isn't much talked about nowadays since France outlawed the eating of the increasingly rare bird in 1999. (When the French outlaw a food, you know something's up. This is the country trying to preserve foie gras as a legally sanctified culinary tradition.)

Once captured, the ortolan would traditionally be left in a dark box, where the lack of light would prompt it to gorge itself.  When plumped up to three or four times its normal size, the bird would be drowned in a snifter of armagnac, then quickly roasted for six or eight minutes and served hot. 

It's the brandy part that usually raises eyebrows; in an era of bolt guns and humane slaughter, drowning your food seems a tad gratuitous.  The only obvious corollary is drunken prawns, found on some Singaporean and Indonesian menus, drowned in rice wine. Drowning a rare songbird somehow seems more sadistic than dunking a shrimp in booze.

The traditional means of eating the ortolan is whole — bones, innards and all, except the head or beak, which is bitten off — with the diner's head covered by a napkin.

The upfront explanation of the ritual?  This impromptu headgear allows the diner to inhale all the roast bird's earthy, rich aroma. So claimed chef Jean-Louis Palladin in Stewart Lee Allen's book, "The Devil's Garden: A Sinful History Of Forbidden Food."

"It is really like you are praying, see?" Palladin apparently said. "Like when you take the Mass into your mouth from the priest's hand in church and you think about God."

The alternate explanation is that a priest developed the custom to shield his gluttony, and shame, from God. You decide.

The ortolan's most recent brush with fame came in 1998, when it was revealed to have been a pivotal course in former French President François Mitterand's last meal.  A week before dying of cancer, Mitterand ordered a grand feast for 30 that included oysters, foie gras and a long row of two-ounce ortolans. By some accounts, Mitterand polished off two, bones and all.