John Wecker

(1528 - 1586)

John Wecker was a Swiss physician and the author of The Secrets of Art and Nature, which included a recipe for cooking a goose alive. When this curiosity was republished in a nineteenth-century compendium featuring a “complete system of cookery for Catholic families,” it was followed by the observation that the recipe “might have been one of the dishes the devil ordered when he invited Nero and Caligula to a feast.”