https://www.esquire.com/food-drink/food/a9453/black-swan-recipe-0311/Why Not Eat a (Black) Swan on Oscar Night?
People eat all kinds of birds — why not swans? They're huge, so I'd think there's quite a bit of swan meat to be had.
Answer Fella is astonished — and more than a little sad — that so few folks recall that Colonel Harland Sanders, late founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC), got started in the state of his birth with a little café he named Indiana Cooked Goose & Broasted Swan (ICG&BS), where he also created a hush-puppy recipe using polypropylene instead of cornmeal. A noble, if commercially doomed, effort, but the point is that people do eat swan.
Take superchef Mario Batali, please. "I have a lot of friends in Michigan who hunt, and we once ate a swan at Christmas nine or ten years ago," he tells AF. "It was delicious — deep red, lean, lightly gamey, moist, and succulent," an eerily perfect description, as it happens, of John Boehner's liver.
"But I've never seen swan on a market list," Batali adds. "Swans seem a bit more regal and untouchable than a common chicken — not to mention that the trumpeter swan was close to being an endangered species for several decades."
Cathy Kaufman, who teaches culinary history at the Institute of Culinary Education, notes that "menus from the medieval period were replete with game birds such as swans, herons, and peacocks. They were food for the elite, prized for their beauty and seeming nobility, but fell out of favor in the 15th and 16th centuries. The culprit was the turkey, a more flavorful, tender bird."
Which explains the origin of the French phrase cherchez la dinde.
