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Some of the strangest culinary habits arose in England during the eighteenth century, when bored city dwellers became fascinated by sadism, sorcery, and a dungeon-and-skeletons sense of fun. The idea arose that torturing an animal made its meat healthier and better tasting and even though Pope, Lamb, and others wrote about the practice with disgust, people indulged in ghoulish preparations that turned their kitchens into charnel houses. They chopped up live fish, killing them, because they said the meat would otherwise be unhealthy; they tenderized pigs and calves by whipping them to death with knotted ropes; they hung poultry upside down and slowly bled them to death; they skinned living animals. Recipe openers from the era said such things as: "Take a red cock that is not too old and beat him to death…." This was all sponsored by the peculiar notion that the taste of animal flesh could be improved if the poor thing were put through hell first. Dr. William Kitchiner, in The Cook's Oracle, cites a grotesque recipe, by a cook named Mizald, for preparing and eating a goose while it is still alive.
-- Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses
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