Do I really taste like chicken?
Cats are delicious! He maintained, and gets canned.
Bigazzi, a consumer affairs journalist and author of Cooking with Common Sense, has been one of the stars of La Prova del Cuoco for the past ten years. He is noted for his exuberant style and previously caused uproar by boiling lobsters live on the show. Yesterday he said that he had only been joking about the recipe, and he had been misunderstood.He added: “Mind you, I wasn’t joking all that much. In the 1930s and 1940s, when I was a boy, people certainly did eat cat in the countryside around Arezzo.”
Food historians said that Italians in cities such as Vicenza devised cat recipes in times of economic hardship. Inhabitants of Vicenza are still nicknamed magnagati (cat eaters), and in some butchers’ shops rabbits are sold with their heads to assure buyers that they are not cats.
My own* cat Henry would not be amused at being included in a casserole, but if this guy got in trouble before for boiling a lobster (instead of what, singing it to sleep?) I guess his days as a TV cook were numbered.
* house guest? King of William Street?
For What It's Worth 
So, what’s the problem? Did he suggest that the cats be deep fried while still alive?
Dude –
How can anyone object to eating pussy? It’s been going on since the dawn of time. Although I think there may be some sort of Italian cultural problem with this. Remember Uncle Junior on the Soprano’s?
As far as boiling lobsters? If they had the opportunity, they would boil you. So I say, lets just go with it. By the way, the bravest man ever born was the first guy to eat a lobster. Think about it.
Your Pal,
Walt
Back in the ’50s and ’60s it was “common knowledge” that Chinese restaurants often substituted cat for other types of meat. It gave their dishes a certain “je ne sais quoi.”
Also, after a famous incident in the ’80s when a wayward deer burst through the front window of a popular Chinese restaurant near the top of Greenwich Avenue, startling patrons at high dinner hour, there was talk about the moo-shu pork’s acquiring a pleasantly gamey flavor for a while.
I think that deer went through a natural foods restaurant, which would certainly be appropriate. My tree-hugger most-beloved-daughter Kate is at peace with my deer hunting since I explained that the poor things I shoot are chemical-free, free range chickens with hooves, who never hear the bullet that takes the out. A better fate that that deer on the Avenue, wherever she trespassed.
No one got fired for the guinea pig idea. Shows that cat people are high-strung and testy, just like their pets. (Moderate that one, CF.)
On second thought, don’t print that. Some of my best friends are cat people.
(No worries, I guess I waited too long to recant.)
Red, I sympathize – some cat owners are … odd. But MY cat ….!