Consuming a Muslim-shaped pastry performed ritualistic dehumanization of the enemy.

Evidence

The Turk’s Head pie functions as a symbol of Richard’s fictitious cannibalistic meal, a retelling of “the spectacle of severed Saracens’ heads, stripped of hair, cooked, and laid out, face up and grinning, on serving platters.” This imagery says something meaningful about the ways in which Muslims are dehumanized. In the case of the Turk’s Head pie, the subject is figuratively decapitated, chopped up, cooked, and eaten, reducing him to a pastry that displays a deformed image of the creature he once was. Cannibalism was not totally unheard of during this era. Some Londoners practiced medicinal cannibalism and preferred that the cadavers they consumed came from Libya. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 338

Categorization

• XREF: The flip side — actual cannibalism in London with preferred Libyan cadavers — grounds the symbolic dish in a real, if marginal, practice. Connects to ‘On Sacrifice’ theme of real corpses grounding symbolic ritual.
• SEED: Article angle: ‘Eating the Enemy’ — a history of symbolic anthropophagy from medieval Turk’s Head pies to modern Islamophobic consumption metaphors.