How to react to Nigel Farage’s suggestion that immigrants are killing and eating swans? You can react like LBC’s Iain Dale, who said that ‘Reform UK might have peaked in the polls’. You can react like Times Radio’s Adam Boulton, who said that Farage was ‘in danger’ of repelling voters by ‘copying memes’ from Donald Trump. You can react like Reform’s Andrea Jenkyns, who said that swan eating was a ‘serious issue’. Or you can think, as I did: ‘Mmm, I wonder what swan tastes like.’
‘Quite fishy’ is the surprising answer. I don’t know that from experience, but because of Americans, who can eat swan but choose not to. You would expect swan to taste like goose – gamey and fatty – but, apparently, it’s disgusting unless you kill one very young or fatten it with oats.
Britons did eat swans once. There’s a recipe for them in The Forme of Cury, a 14th-century collection of medieval English recipes supposedly written by Richard II’s cooks. If you got home from a hard day’s toil in the fields and had a hankering for ‘Chawdon for Swann’, you would have to ‘take þe lyu and þe offall of the Swann and do it to fee þe i gode broth’. In other words, you would boil the swan and serve it with a thick sauce made from its own giblets.
Swan eating was effectively outlawed in 1482, when Edward IV prohibited the keeping of swans from anyone who was not a nobleman. However, recipes persisted should the law ever be repealed. Victorian household manuals advised readers to separate cygnets from their parents, fatten them up with grass and barley and then roast them on a spit.
Technically, killing a swan was stealing crown property (unmarked swans still fall under royal protection: one of Charles III’s more flamboyant titles is ‘Seigneur of the Swans’). Supposedly, the fellows of St John’s, Cambridge were the only group permitted to eat swan. That might be why in Tom Sharpe’s satire of Cambridge, Porterhouse Blue, academics eat swan stuffed with wigeon.
Several outlets have got into trouble for swan-eating stories over the past three decades. The Sun was forced to publish a retraction in 2003 for wrongly reporting that police had arrested asylum seekers preparing to roast a swan in Beckton. However, the newspaper stood by anecdotal reports from residents. There was one definite case, however, in 2013, where a swan was found barbecued by the Thames near Windsor Castle.
Personally, I’m in favour of London becoming an open hunting ground. It would be a good test of manliness and make me feel like less of the city pansy that I am. I could march up Whitehall from The Spectator’s offices to Trafalgar Square with a Swiss army knife, ready to have a go at some of those pigeons. I could stalk around Richmond Park like an assassin. Even now, I’m looking out of the windows at St James’s Park lake with slightly crazed eyes.
Several commentators suggested that, following Farage’s comments, the nation was appalled. The truth is probably more anodyne. I suspect that the nation was curious.
Join us for drinks to celebrate the launch of Best of Notes on… on Thursday 30 October. Go to www.spectator.co.uk/tastings to book.
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