The Baron in the Trees

In his novel The Baron in the Trees, Italo Calvino describes to us the dubious culinary attitudes of our hero's sister, Battista. Here is an excerpt from Chapter One.

Her evil schemes found expression in cooking. She was a really excellent cook, for she had the primary gifts in the culinary art: diligence and imagination; but when she put her hand to it, no one ever knew what surprise might appear at table. Once she made some pate toast, really exquisite, of rats' livers; this she never told us until we had eaten them and pronounced them good; and some grasshoppers' claws, crisp and sectioned, laid on an open tart in a mosaic; and pigs' tails baked as if they were little cakes; and once she cooked a complete porcupine with all its quills--who knows why, probably just to give us all a shock at the raising of the dish cover, for even she, who usually ate everything, however odd, that she had prepared herself, refused to taste it, though it was a baby porcupine, rosy and certainly tender. In fact, most of these horrible dishes of hers were thought out just for effect, rather than for any pleasure in making us eat disgusting food with her. These dishes of Battista's were works of the most delicate animal or vegetable jewelry; cauliflower heads with hares' ear set on a collar of fur; or a pig's head from whose mouth stuck a scarlet lobster as if putting out its tongue, and the lobster was holding the pig's tongue in its pincers as if they had torn it out. And finally the snails; she had managed to behead I don't know how many snails, and the heads, those soft little equine heads, she had inserted, I think with a toothpick, each in a wire-mesh; they looked, as they came on the table, like a flight of tiny swans. Even more revolting than the sight of these delicacies was the thought of Battista's zealous determination in preparing them, of those thin hands of hers tearing the little creatures to pieces.

Italo Calvino--The Baron in the Trees, Harvest Books