Dormouse Beats Rat

The dormouse, best known to Americans for dozing off at the Mad Tea Party in “Alice in Wonderland,” is a rodent, but it’s not a mouse. The name comes from dormeuse, a French word meaning sleepy. Many dormice (there are 20 species in Europe and Asia) hibernate for a couple of months in the winter and grab all the sleep they can during the rest of the year.

They’re quite cute. With their long, often bushy tails, they look rather like squirrels with big eyes and rounded ears. They usually live in trees and shop in the immediate neighborhood, living on fruits, nuts, birds’ eggs and the like. Cuddly-looking though they may be, dormice are considered a nuisance by European orchardists because they customarily nibble on several fruits, rather than just finishing one of them, so they destroy more of the crop than they need.

Since dormice hibernate, they eat voraciously in the fall to fatten themselves up. The Romans took advantage of this by fattening dormice in special dormouse jugs called glilaria, which had a cozy, rounded, nest-like shape and plenty of ventilation holes.

And why did they fatten them? For dinner. Here’s a 2nd century Roman recipe for roasted glis, as the Romans called the dormouse (participants in the show “Survivor” might want to copy this one down):

“Stuff dormice with chopped pork and dormouse meat pounded with pepper, pine nuts, asafoetida [a garlicky spice] and fish sauce. Sew them up, put them on tiles and bake them in a bread oven or portable oven.”