"Pie" is also an antiquated term for the European magpie, a type of crow. Another dish likely to be served with humble pie is rook pie (rooks being closely related to crows). Early references in cookbooks such as Liber Cure Cocorum present a grand dish with exotic spices. Pies made of this were said to be served to those of lesser class who did not eat at the king's/lord's/governor's table, possibly following speculation in Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable but there is little evidence for this. The English phrase is something of a pun-"umbles" were the intestines, offal and other less valued meats of a deer. Ī similar British idiom is to eat humble pie. In 1854 Samuel Putnam Avery published a version called " Crow Eating" in his collection Mrs. The story ends with the farmer saying: "I kin eat a crow, but I be darned if I hanker after it." Although the humor might produce only a weak smile today, it was probably a knee slapper by 19th-century standards, guaranteeing the story would be often retold in print and word of mouth, thus explaining, in part, the idiom's origin. The boarders take him up on the challenge but also secretly spike the crow with Scotch snuff. All tell a similar story: a slow-witted New York farmer is outfoxed by his (presumed urban) boarders after they complain about the poor food being served, the farmer discounts the complaint by claiming he "kin eat anything", and the boarders wonder if he can eat a crow. The OED V2 says the story was first published as " Eating Crow" in San Francisco's Daily Evening Picayune (3 December 1851), but two other early versions exist, one in The Knickerbocker (date unknown), and one in the Saturday Evening Post (2 November 1850) called " Can You Eat Crow?". In the modern figurative sense of being proven wrong, eating crow probably first appeared in print in 1850, as an American humor piece about a rube farmer near Lake Mahopack, New York. Along with buzzards, rats, and other carrion-eating scavenging animals, there is a tradition in Western culture going back to at least the Middle Ages of seeing them as distasteful (even illegal at times) to eat, and thus naturally humiliating if forced to consume against one's will. Scavenging carrion eaters have a long association with the battlefield, "They left the corpses behind for the raven, never was there greater slaughter in this island," says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
^ Mossad HaRav Kook edition of Gaon's commentary to Genesis.Literally eating a crow is traditionally seen as being distasteful the crow, if understood to be a type of raven, is one of the birds listed in Leviticus chapter 11 as being unfit for eating.Before the Capitol the Senate sitting above. ^ The Life and Death of Julius Caesar."Low temperature episodes in development of blowflies: implications for postmortem interval estimation". Insects abroad: Being a popular account of foreign insects their structure, habits and transformations. NYS Department of Environmental Conservation April 2006 ^ "San Diego Zoo's Animal Bytes: Tasmanian Devil".
The Encyclopedia of Tracks and Scats: A Comprehensive Guide to the Trackable Animals of the United States and Canada. ^ "San Diego Zoo's Animal Bytes: Striped hyena".
The Carrion Eaters Archived 1 June 2010 at the Wayback Machine.