One of the first things any novice cook is taught is that when working with chicken, we must blast it with heat to lay waste to every last microbe. We cure pork and call it ham, order duck breast medium-rare, savor lamb chops served blue, but we won't serve an Oven Stuffer Roaster whose juices aren't running clear. I thought that maybe pink chicken might not only taste better but eliminate an item from my list of things to fear while cooking.

But first, there was the small matter of salmonella. I spoke with a number of poultry scientists and discovered that while it's plausible that salmonella (a bacterium that, by the way, is hardly unique to chickens) could show up on a chicken's skin and contaminate cutting boards, the chances that it works its way inside a muscle, like the breast, all by itself? Very, very slim, and really no different from the odds of E. coli camping out in a medium-rare steak. The Centers for Disease Control has documented five salmonella outbreaks this year, none of which involved eating chicken.

To be clear: ingesting almost anything involves a certain level of risk. But if you've ever eaten supermarket cold cuts, potato salad at a steamy August cookout, or any food while vacationing in Mexico, pink chicken should rest squarely within your food-safety comfort zone.

amongst the dishes herein enumerated we may find hot-pots of cow-heel, pickled broom buds, and Tetrapharmacon, of which latter delicacy we are told that it was made of pheasant, peacock, a wild sow's hock and udder, with a bread pudding over it.

The work is divided into ten books, beginning with soups, pickles, and sauces, and proceeding through the whole art of cookery, with hundreds of recipes, the very reading of which makes one's mouth water. For instance, who could resist "virgin sow drest with broth made of pepper, wine, honey, oyl, and stew'd damsons"? Or dormouse sausages? ...

There are many recipes in the book to dress "cramp-fish, that numb the hands of those that touch them; the cuttlefish, whose blood is like ink; the pourcontrel, or many feet, the sea-urchin or hedgehog." ...

Then, again, we are given minute instructions for the carving of beasts whose flesh was esteemed by the ancients. "In partes of Asia and Africa," we are told, "the oliphant is eaten, not as the Romans and Egyptians were wont to do, sparingly and only as pertain'd to his feete, trunk, and tayle all of which were great delicacies, but his entire carcase is carved and consumed." For the benefit of those who might happen to possess an elephant and be tempted to eat him a chart of carving instructions accompanies the text.

The sensory properties of fresh durian combine a pleasant creamy consistency, a pronounced sweet taste, and a strong, penetrating odor, not comparable to that of any other kind of fruit. The aroma profile can be best described as a combination of an intense sulfury, roasted onion-like odor with fruity, sweet, caramel-like, and soup seasoning-like notes. In Southeast Asia, durian is deeply appreciated and often referred to as the “king of fruits”, whereas some people in the Western hemisphere regard the durian odor as offensive and nauseous. The unique odor properties of durian have repeatedly attracted the attention of chemists... Despite the quite high number of studies on durian volatiles, it is still unclear which odorants predominately contribute to its aroma. Therefore, our aim was to systematically assess the odor contribution of individual durian volatiles.

The sniffing port consisted of a cylindrically shaped aluminum device (105 mm × 24 mm diameter) with a beveled top and a central drill hole (2 mm) housing the capillary. It was mounted on a heated (200 °C) detector base of the GC. During a GC-O run, the panelist placed her/his nose closely above the top of the sniffing port and evaluated the odor of the effluent. If an odor was perceived, the retention time was marked in the FID chromatogram printed by a recorder and the odor quality was noted.