Christians enacted symbolic cannibalism by eating pastries shaped like Turkish heads

Evidence

The Turk’s Head is also the name given to a savory pie popular in Britain and France during the Elizabethan period that represented a cannibalistic feast of Turkish flesh. Typically, this pie was a grotesque caricature of a Turk or Saracen’s face. By eating it, Christians consumed the enemy in an act of symbolic cannibalism. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 330

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s own imagery of the Muslim monster manufactured in material culture — the body, not just texts, as a site of monstrous consumption.
• SEED: Angle: ‘Eating the enemy’ — the Turk’s Head pie as an edible form of ritualized anti-Muslim violence, a thread from medieval romance to Elizabethan dinner tables.
• FICTION: A grotesque image that could seed short fiction — a household where the symbolic cannibalism of the head pie becomes literal, or where a child realizes what the family’s celebratory dish actually depicts.