Witch Cakes.
Watched The Crucible tonight.
Now, researching (so to speak) the Salem Witch Trials.
From wikipedia:
At some point in February 1692 … a neighbor of Rev. Parris, Mary Sibly … instructed John Indian … to make a “witch cake”, using traditional English white magic to discover the identity of the witch who was afflicting the girls. The cake, made from rye meal and urine from the afflicted girls, was fed to a dog.Soon to be the subject of the next Top Chef Masters challenge.
According to English folk understanding of how witches accomplished affliction, when the dog ate the cake, the witch herself would be hurt because invisible particles she had sent to afflict the girls remained in the girls’ urine, and her cries of pain when the dog ate the cake would identify her as the witch. This superstition was based on the Cartesian “Doctrine of Effluvia”, which posited that witches afflicted by the use of “venomous and malignant particles, that were ejected from the eye”, according to the October 8, 1692 letter of Thomas Brattle, a contemporary critic of the trials.
