Live Birds in a Pie

            On Tuesday morning during song practice my ear didn’t bother me very much at all. It was as if the vibrations of my voice dulled the earache.

I finally finished memorizing “Le bras mécanique” (The Mechanical Arm) by Serge Gainsbourg and started working out the chords. The song is basically a chant with very little melody and so the music will be a lot less work than the memorization was.

            I weighed 88.6 kilos before lunch. How did it go up by a whole kilogram in one day? I didn’t eat that many French fries.

            I had more French fries for lunch and three falafel balls with tahini.

            I had a very heavy siesta but only slept fifteen minutes longer than usual.

            I finished answering all of the short questions, some of which would be on my exam on Monday. Next I started looking at the first of the six essays, two of which would be in the test.

            I fried ginger and onions and added miso and lima beans and spices. I had a bowl the stew with potato chips while watching the last of the animated Noggin the Nog stories. This story was inspired by the nursery rhyme “Sing a Song of Sixpence” and Noggin has very little to do with it. The main character of this tale is Noggin’s son Knut. Noggin’s birthday is approaching and the entire kingdom is preparing for the party and the feast. Meanwhile Nogbad the Bad is watching covetously from the edge of the forest, accompanied by his crow minions. When he hears the children singing, “Sing a Song of Sixpence” Nogbad gets an idea. That night Nogbad pushes a large cart through the empty streets. The next day Knut comes down to the kitchen to get a snack but the chef tells him he is too busy preparing Noggin’s feast and so he will have to find something to eat on his own. In a pantry Knut finds an enormous pie on a cart. The crust is perfect but he is curious as to what kind of pie it is. He lifts a corner of the crust and sniffs only to find that the inside does not smell like food at all. In fact the pie has a nasty odour. He goes to tell his mother Nooka and finds her in the parlour feeding bread and honey to her canary, which relates to the line from the nursery rhyme. “The queen was in the parlour eating bread and honey.” She thinks it’s nice that there is such a big pie and tells him he’ll find out what’s in it when it is opened. He goes to see Noggin and “The king was in the counting house counting up his money.” Thor Nogson tells Knut he can’t disturb his father because he tends to lose count so easily. So Knut must figure something out on his own. He finds the big pie disturbing but he doesn't know why and so he organizes a meeting of all the other palace children and he says they will put on a play. They get musical instruments and things to bang on and begin making noise outside of the castle. Then two children stand next to the pie and say, “Oh look, the party has already started but someone has forgotten to wheel this lovely pie into the great hall!” They wheel the pie out of the castle and it is announced that Noggin is about to cut the pie. Suddenly Nogbad and his crows burst out of the crust. “Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie/ When the pie was opened the birds began to sing.” While crows are not blackbirds they are black birds. Nogbad is surprised that he is no longer inside the castle. The pie on its wagon begins rolling down the hill and falls into a pond with Nogbad in it. One of the crows attacks a maid and pecks off her nose. "The maid was in the garden hanging up the clothes / when along came a blackbird and pecked off her nose.” Nooka sees this from her window and sends the canary down to put the maid’s nose back on. "There was a such commotion that little Jenny wren / flew down in the garden and put it back again.” Nogbad escapes through the back gate but Noggin’s party goes on.

            Apparently baking live birds into a pie was considered a delightful party trick back in medieval times because the birds would fly out when the pie was opened. There was a recipe for it in an Italian cookbook in 1549. I think we can safely say we are not as nasty as our ancestors were. I'm thinking they could not possibly survive conventional baking in order to fly afterward. Maybe the crust was pre-baked and placed on top of the birds. I see now there was wooden scaffolding built under the crust with a trap door on the side into which the birds were put after the pie was baked.