A taste for strange meats and husbands’ buttocks
Women can experience intense food cravings in pregnancy. They plough through pickles, gorge on eggs, fantasise about mustard, and devour entire tubs of ice cream. And if early modern writers and medical practitioners are to be believed, some have been known to hanker after human flesh.
Our predecessors in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries were keenly aware of the link between pregnancy and food cravings, and devoted a great deal of time to analysing these urges – whether they were for traditional sources of sustenance or something altogether more unusual.
It was widely accepted that, in the words of the popular medical writer Nicholas Culpeper, cravings were one of the “chiefest sign[s] of conception”, and that what followed, according to the author John Sadler, would be “a longing desire for strange meats” (“meats” being a term to describe a range of foodstuffs).
The author of a satirical piece published in 1682, entitled suggested that cravings were so common that “all women when they are with child; do fall commonly from one longing to another”. He complained to his readers –
