Friday Squid Blogging: Squid in Byzantine Monk Cooking

This is a very weird story about how squid stayed on the menu of Byzantine monks by falling between the cracks of dietary rules. > At Constantinople’s Monastery of Stoudios, the kitchen didn’t answer to appetite. > > It answered to the “typikon”: a manual for ensuring that nothing unexpected happened at mealtimes. Meat: forbidden. Dairy: forbidden. Eggs: forbidden. Fish: feast-day only. Oil: regulated. But squid? > > Squid had eight arms, no bones, and a gift for changing color. Nobody had bothered writing a regulation for that. This wasn’t a loophole born of legal creativity but an oversight rooted in taxonomic confusion. Medieval monks, confronted with a creature that was neither fish nor fowl, gave up and let it pass...