At a dinner in the 1840s in Oxfordshire, an aristocratic family showed their guests a silver locket containing the mummified heart of King Louis XIV. By the end of the evening, an Oxford geologist had eaten it.

His name was William Buckland. He was the Dean of Westminster, the first Reader of Geology at Oxford, and the man who in 1824 had become the first scientist in history to formally describe a dinosaur. He named it Megalosaurus. He was also a zoophagist. Zoophagy was Buckland's word for his lifelong personal mission to taste every animal he could lay his hands on. The Buckland family table over the next thirty years served bear, crocodile, hedgehog, giraffe, panther, boiled elephant trunk, mole, sea slug, porpoise, earwig, and bluebottle fly. Two foods topped his list of the worst he had ever put in his mouth: the common mole, and the bluebottle. Other than that, he was open to suggestion.

In the 1840s, Buckland was invited to Nuneham Park near Oxford, the country seat of the Harcourt family. The Harcourts had, over the years, acquired one of the stranger relics in English aristocratic possession: a small ornate silver locket containing a piece of the mummified heart of Louis the Fourteenth. The heart had been removed from the Sun King at his autopsy in 1715, kept in the Jesuit church on the Rue Saint-Antoine in Paris, looted during the French Revolution, and smuggled across the Channel. The Harcourts liked to show it to guests. They showed it to Buckland. He picked it up and, before anyone could react, popped it into his mouth and swallowed.

His recorded reaction was: I have eaten many strange things, but I have never eaten the heart of a king before. Buckland's son Frank inherited the project. On the twelfth of July, 1862, he hosted a famous dinner of the Acclimatisation Society at Willis's Rooms in London, for a hundred guests. The menu featured bird's nest soup, sea cucumber, stewed kangaroo, axis-deer tendon soup, Honduras turkey, and Curassow. Two generations of one English family ate things no one else in Britain has tasted before or since. The heart of the King of France was a single course.

I do one of these a day. Dead serious. Subscribe.