Rhinoceros pie, anyone?

Forgotten? Though I can rarely attend their dinners (in Birmingham), I am a proud member of the Buckland Club (motto: Semper in ventrem aliquid novi). Dedicated to the memory and gastronomic exploits of Francis Trevelyan (Frank) Buckland (1826–1880), the Oxford-born surgeon, natural historian and popular writer who aspired to eat a member of every living animal species, the Club’s repasts are unfailingly interesting, if seldom so ambitious.

Frank’s penchant for zoöphagy came from his father, William (1784–1856), a Canon and Dean of Christ Church, where he served up delicacies such as mice on toast, pickled horse tongue, puppies, hedgehog, crocodile and bear. The travel writer Augustus Hare is the source of the oft-repeated tale that while visiting Nuneham Courtenay, William was shown a relic — the heart of the French king Louis XIV, housed in a silver casket:

Dr Buckland exclaimed: ‘I have eaten many strange things, but have never eaten the heart of a king before,’ and, before anyone could hinder him, he had gobbled it up… He used to say that he had eaten his way straight through the whole animal creation, and that the worst thing was a mole — that was utterly horrible.

Frank’s best biographer, G.H.O. Burgess, said William later recanted, as he hadn’t at the time tasted bluebottle.

They lived in Tom Quad, with William’s menagerie of free-range guinea pigs, a bear, a jackal and a monkey or two. Frank caught the personal zoo bug, and as a scholar at Winchester trapped mice and rats, teaching himself anatomy by dissecting them, and only sometimes eating them — though there were complaints about the smell of the dead cat he was keeping under his bed. While still at school he became adept at securing human remains for dissection from the local hospital, though no one has suggested he nibbled any of these.