Squid Beak

Unappetizing as it may look, this decontextualized lump is a food object in more ways than one. Members of James Cook’s Endeavour expedition, which circumnavigated the globe from 1768 to 1771, reportedly found the massive squid that this beak once belonged to floating in the ocean somewhere at the edge of the world between Cape Horn and Australia. And they did what many a naturalist would do when faced with a specimen: they ate it.

By the end of the meal, only a few stray body parts of the squid remained—including this beak, made of a hard substance called chitin—which the voyagers ferried back to London to quench the curiosity of the anatomist John Hunter. But these humans were not the only beings with a taste for squid. When Cook’s men discovered the specimen on March 3, 1769, seabirds busily feasted upon its flesh. Joseph Banks, the larger-than-life English naturalist aboard the expedition with a penchant for eating the scientific specimens he encountered across the Pacific, wrote of the squid: “I found also this day a large Sepia cuttle fish laying on the water just dead but so pulld to peices by the birds that his Species could not be determind; only this I know that of him was made one of the best soups I ever eat.” (Terms like “squid,” “sepia,” “cuttle-fish,” and even “polypi” could be used somewhat interchangeably in the early modern period, although this specimen belonged to what we’d now term a large squid.)

While the appetites of birds confounded the squid’s species identification at the time of its collection, no such identification was required to test it as a meal—one likely prepared by John Thompson, the Endeavour’s one-handed cook. Severed from the animal body it nourished, this singular beak embodies the tangled trajectories of food and natural history in the early modern period, as the consumption of human stomachs and minds, the gullets of birds, and the squid itself—which ingested food using this parrot-like beak—congeal in one specimen.

Tellingly, this beak’s association with food would persist over time. In an 1881 article, the paleontologist Richard Owen reassigned the Latin name of the specimen to one of his own devising (Enoploteuthis cookii, now recognized as a synonym for Taningia danae). And, he still could not help but consider the squid as a culinary curiosity more than a century later. Owen celebrated that portions of the animal were “rescued from the cooking-galley” of Cook’s ship and “put into spirits for the anatomist at home,” allowing him intimate contact with “such débris of this remarkable Cephalopod.” He proceeded to paint a picture of the lost animal as a thoroughly hungry being through thick descriptions of its powerful mandible, tongue-like radula, salivary glands, esophagus, and remarkable retractable hooks on its arms which, in lieu of suckers, allowed it to snare prey like a submarine cat. Owen even used the specimen’s fate as food to reverse engineer the absent animal’s basic anatomy, writing: “Considering that so much of the fleshy part of the great hooked Squid was cooked as to serve the appetites of at least three, and perhaps four, of those at table in the Commander’s cabin, I infer that a goodly proportion of the body anterior to the fins went to the culinary galley, and that the basal attachments of the fins did not extend…to the fore margin of the mantle.”

Throughout the early modern period, squid and other cephalopods appeared in Pacific, Mediterranean, and other regional cuisines. A. van Doeff’s seventeenth-century painting Stilleven met vissen (Still Life with Fish) features a hanging squid, its body centered as the image’s focal point and set perpendicularly to the other specimens of sea foods and sea textures on the table to emphasize the cephalopod’s elongated form and draping tentacles, all while two otherworldly eyes stare squarely at the viewer.

But squid occupied a precarious space in English food taxonomies, showing the pliable cultural meanings that could be ascribed to certain animal foods. In fact, not all squid were seen as equal: cephalopod diversity became a barometer of cultural status in the Anglophone world. Peter Lund Simmonds, the author of an 1859 tract called The Curiosities of Food, noted that cephalopods did not form a standard part of British fare, though he claimed: “In recent times, and in some parts of the Levant even now…the cuttle-fish of different species were used as articles of food; and we know from the works of travellers, that in other parts of the world, when cooked, they are esteemed as luxuries.” Simmonds gave one larger species high marks when he wrote of it: “This fish is of a delicate taste, but is not very common.”

Simmonds then created a hierarchy of cephalopods that mirrored a hierarchy of people. He claimed that Barbados was “frequented by a species of the order Cephalopoda, which is used as an article of food by the lower classes of the inhabitants, namely the bastard cuttle-fish, or calmar,” while in England he had himself “seen the poor people collect assiduously the Sepiæ and employ them as food.” Simmonds conceded that squid entered the diets of a large portion of the globe—he referenced its consumption in the Caribbean, India, China, Polynesia, the Mediterranean, and England itself—yet he still deemed it “as indigestible and unnutritious as it is certainly tough and uninviting.” As his comment reveals, texture and touch recurred in English assessments of squid, often explaining such aversions.

And yet, amidst the ravages of maritime food scarcity, even the most privileged in English society could find themselves consuming slippery squid. As Joseph Banks wrote while aboard the Endeavour in November of 1769, “Hunger is certainly most excellent sauce.”

Image: Squid beak from 1769 at the Royal College of Surgeons (RCSHC/308). © Museums at the Royal College of Surgeons of England.

---

This article was written by Whitney Barlow Robles. For more information about her work and her other contributions to The Kitchen in the Cabinet click here.

---

References

Albala, Ken. Eating Right in the Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

Banks, Joseph. The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, 1768–1771. Edited by John C. Beaglehole. Sydney: 1962. Vol. 1, 236 and 430.

Owen, Richard. “Descriptions of Some New and Rare Cephalopoda.” Transactions of the Zoological Society of London 11 (June 1881): 152, 147, and 155.

Simmonds, Peter Lund. The Curiosities of Food: Or the Dainties and Delicacies of Different Nations Obtained from the Animal Kingdom. London: 1859. 351–353.