Poularde en Vessie is a chicken cooked in a pig's bladder. It’s a technique aimed at enveloping the chicken in steam and infusing it with the flavors of black truffle, white wine, and foie gras that also occupy the bladder as it sits poaching in chicken broth.
The Belle Poule was a French frigate of the Dédaigneuse class, designed and built by Léon-Michel Guignace, famous for her duel with the English frigate HMS Arethusa on 17 June 1778, which began the French involvement in the American War of Independence. One of the most fashionable hairstyles of the eighteenth century, À la Belle Poule, commemorated the victory of a French ship over an English ship in 1778. À la Belle Poule featured an enormous pile of curled and powdered hair stretched over a frame affixed to the top of a woman's head. The hair was then decorated with an elegant model of the Belle Poule ship, including sails and flags.
A Katzenklavier is a musical instrument with polyphonic aftertouch described by Athanasius Kircher. It consists of a line of cats fixed in place with their tails stretched out underneath a keyboard. Tails would be placed under the keys, causing the cats to cry out in pain when a key was pressed. The cats would be arranged according to the natural tone of their voices.
The most notable characteristic of bowerbirds is their extraordinarily complex courtship and mating behaviour, where males build a bower to attract mates. There are two main types of bowers. One clade of bowerbirds build so-called maypole bowers that are constructed by placing sticks around a sapling. The other major bower-building clade builds an avenue type bower made of two walls of vertically placed sticks. In and around the bower the male places a variety of brightly colored objects he has collected. These objects — usually different among each species — may include hundreds of shells, leaves, flowers, feathers, stones, berries, and even discarded plastic items, coins, nails, rifle shells, or pieces of glass. The males spend hours arranging this collection.
Apicius is the title of a collection of Roman cookery recipes, usually thought to have been compiled in the late 4th or early 5th century AD. the recipes are geared for the wealthiest classes and a few contain what were exotic ingredients at that time, e.g. flamingo.
After mating, the female cicada cuts slits into the bark of a twig, and into these she deposits her eggs. She may do so repeatedly, until she has laid several hundred eggs. When the eggs hatch, the newborn nymphs drop to the ground, where they burrow. Most cicadas go through a life cycle that lasts from two to five years. Some species have much longer life cycles, such as the North American genus, Magicicada, which has a number of distinct "broods" that go through either a 17-year or, in the South of the USA, a 13-year life cycle. These long life cycles both happen to be prime numbers, perhaps developed as a response to predators such as the cicada killer wasp and praying mantis.
Situated some 20 miles west of the city of Lubango, the road is totally paved. It’s called Estrada Nacional 280 (EN280). Legend has it that the Serra da Leba pass is named after a Portuguese woman who designed and built the road, who died after she viewed it on the very day the project was finished.
Elie Nadelman was Polish-born sculptor whose mannered curvilinear human figures greatly influenced early 20th-century American sculpture.
Simon Mann is a British mercenary and former British Army officer. He had been serving a 34-year prison sentence in Equatorial Guinea for his role in a failed coup d'état in 2004, before receiving a presidential pardon on humanitarian grounds on 2 November 2009.
Mary Ellen Mark was an American photographer.