It was once thought that penguins were the least evolved of
birds — that they were the closest thing we had to living remnants of
dinosaurs. You might think to yourself that’s a bit of a stretch, but this was
back when penguins and dinosaurs were both novelties. The reason men of Science
thought this was because the penguin seemed such a useless, odd and mysterious
bird. It didn’t fly; it had scale-like feathers; it left the fathers to sit on
the eggs for months at a time, and they conducted a great deal of their lives
in the most inhospitable place on Earth — Antarctica.
The Emperor penguin, in particular, was the subject of much
speculation, as it nested in 24-hour darkness in the middle of the Antarctic
winter, where temperatures regularly dip to 70 below. Scientists speculated
that if they could only get their hands on an egg which contained a penguin
embryo, they could prove the link that had eluded them ever since enormous
bones started showing up buried in sandy rocks.
Thus did three intrepid explorers set out in the winter of
1911 to trek from Cape Evans to Cape Crozier, where the penguin rookery was
known to be. Edward Wilson, Birdie Bowers and Apsley Cherry-Garrard set out
with wooden sledges and woolen clothes in the total darkness and encountered
conditions no man had ever experienced, let alone survived. Cherry-Garrard
later memorialized these five weeks of hell in his book The Worst Journey In The World. He was not one to mince words. He
was only 24 at the time and it was so cold his teeth cracked. They returned
with three penguin eggs which, when first presented to the Natural History
Museum by Cherry-Garrard — by then the Crozier journey’s only survivor — were
scoffed at. Now they are among its most treasured possessions.
It turns out that penguins are not the “missing link”
between dinosaurs and birds after all. They just conduct their lives outside
the sphere of mankind’s influence. Penguins don’t taste great and mate for
life. They build nests out of rocks. That Cherry-Garrard's masterpiece of adventure literature was published by penguin books is one of publishing's most delicious ironies.
This one has been lovingly recreated in hard boiled egg and
black olive as a decorative garnish for a plate of cheese sticks rolled up in
slices of ham.
Fast and Fancy
Cookbook, Fawcett Publications, Inc., 1969
Also from this book: Spot The Recipe
