The Dormouse, literary and culinary

July 16, 2021 a good book around the table rhymes the birds and the trees

When I was a very little girl, my mother often read to me from A.A. Milne’s books of rhymes for children: When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six. Less familiar to most than Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh stories, these books are filled with humorous and whimsical and sometimes lyrical poems about childhood in the 1920s — about Mary Jane, who hates rice pudding, Christopher Robin’s visit to Buckingham Palace, and the fussy king who insists on butter instead of marmalade on his morning toast.

I have always had a good memory for memorizing things (though not always such a good memory for remembering things), and before I was two years old, Mom told me much later, I could recite the whole of Milne’s “The Dormouse and the Doctor.” Reading this poem again after many years piqued my curiosity about dormice, about which I knew only what I had gleaned from Milne — and, of course, from Lewis Carroll. So I did a little digging, and here we are.

Dreaming of delphiniums

Charmingly illustrated by Milne’s regular collaborator Ernest H. Shepherd, “The Dormouse and the Doctor” offers a humorous critique of busybody know-it-alls who want to tell everyone else how to live their lives. At the same time, it has a wistful quality that continues to appeal to me.

It’s the dormouse’s habit of sleeping all the time that causes the kerfuffle in this story. There he is, happily napping amid his favorite geraniums (red) and delphiniums (blue) — and minding his own business, thank you very much — when an interfering doctor comes calling. Deciding that the dormouse’s perfectly normal sleep pattern requires treatment, the doctor orders that the delphiniums (blue) and geraniums (red) be uprooted and replaced with chrysanthemums (yellow and white). The poor dormouse muses:

I suppose all these people know better than I.
It was silly, perhaps, but I did like the view
Of geraniums (red) and delphiniums (blue).

In the end, he manages to escape the chrysanthemums by going back to sleep and dreaming of his favorite flowers:

The Dormouse lay happy, his eyes were so tight
He could see no chrysanthemums, yellow or white,
And all that he felt at the back of his head
Were delphiniums (blue) and geraniums (red).

Here’s a lovely reading of the whole poem:

Alice’s Mad Tea-Party

Perhaps the most famous literary dormouse is the Lewis Carroll character who keeps falling asleep during Alice’s tea party with the Mad Hatter and the March Hare.

There was a table set out under a tree in front of the house, and the March Hare and the Hatter were having tea at it: a Dormouse was sitting between them, fast asleep, and the other two were using it as a cushion, resting their elbows on it, and talking over its head. `Very uncomfortable for the Dormouse,’ thought Alice; ‘only, as it’s asleep, I suppose it doesn’t mind.’

As in Milne, so in Carroll: the dormouse’s principal occupation seems to be sleeping.

‘The Dormouse is asleep again,’ said the Hatter, and he poured a little hot tea upon its nose.
The Dormouse shook its head impatiently, and said, without opening its eyes, ‘Of course, of course; just what I was going to remark myself.’

The drowsy dormouse

So what is a dormouse, anyway? Well, to begin with, the literati have it right: these little animals are big sleepers! They hibernate for six months or more each year, sleeping longer if the weather stays cold, and waking only occasionally and briefly to snack on their stored food. And they’re nocturnal, which likely adds to the perception that they sleep all the time.

ASIDE: In German, the word for dormouse is Siebenschläfer (literally, “seven sleeper”), so named because it is said to hibernate for seven months of the year.

Another ASIDE: I suspect that the dormouse might be Craig’s spirit animal, since they both share a decided fondness for napping!

My best guess was that the dormouse’s name derived in some way from the French word for sleep, dormir — and this does seem to be the case. Probably. After a little research, I learned that one possible etymology (the one I like best) is that the word comes from dormeuse (French for “sleeper”). But it might also spring from the Old Norse word dár, meaning “benumbed” (!), and mous. Or not. The word seems to have emerged in Middle English, but its origins are obscure.

As, apparently, are the origins of the dormouse itself. First, it turns out that dormice are not actually mice. With their furry tails, these adorable little rodents seem more akin to squirrels but, says the Encyclopedia Britannica (which ought to know), their closest living relatives are unknown. We have no dormice in the Americas, but fossil records place them in Europe 30 million or more years ago. Dormice also made their way to Africa and, later, to Asia. The one species of dormouse native to Britain is the hazel dormouse, which is now endangered due to loss of habitat — and protected.

So now you know.

Dormice for dinner

In reading up on dormice, I also learned that the ancient Romans raised them for food, eating them fried or roasted and dipped in honey and poppy seeds (which sounds about as appetizing as most descriptions of Roman cooking I’ve encountered!). Keep in mind that the so-called “edible dormouse” (Glis glis) is quite different from the tiny British hazel dormouse (Muscardinus avellanarius), though both are in the same family: Myoxidae. When fattened, the edible dormouse can weigh as much as 300 grams.

Eating dormice was actually illegal in ancient Rome, outlawed by a sumptuary law passed by Emilius Scaurus in 115 BCE. But wealthy Romans apparently paid no heed to this rule and, in fact, had a special technology for fattening dormice. Food writer Declan Henesy explains:

Special outdoor pens were used to raise edible dormice, where they’d be fed acorns, chestnuts and walnuts. When it was time to fatten the rodents, they’d be moved to terracotta containers called dolia. These jar-like vessels were specially designed to replicate the hollow of a tree, with limited space to discourage movement and encourage the storing of fat. (The edible dormouse can double in size before hibernation.) 

Nerd NOTE: The word dolia (singular: dolium) does not refer specifically to dormouse-fattening jars but more generally to the large round jars used for storage and transport in ancient Rome. The type of dolium used specifically to fatten dormice is a glirarium, from the Latin word for dormice: glires (singular: glis).

Recently, I saw an exhibition at the Legion of Honor Museum entitled Last Supper at Pompeii: From the Table to the Grave, and they actually had a  glirarium on display. The below photo (bottom right) gives an idea of the internal structure of the glirarium.

The exhibit label explained:

Kept in a jar like this, with ridges to run around, the rodent would be fattened with acorns and chestnuts. The dark jar encouraged the dormouse to eat and accumulate fat as if it was preparing for hibernation. When nice and plump, it would be pulled out and roasted…

Or possibly stuffed, according to a recipe in the Roman cookbook Apicius, which dates to the late 4th or early 5th century:

Dormice: Stuff the dormice with minced pork as well as the flesh from all of the dormouse’s limbs, together with ground pepper, pine nuts, laser and liquamen and place them sewn [side] up on a clay tile in the oven or cook them in a roasting pan.

NOTE: Liquamen or garum is a salty fermented fish sauce ubiquitous in Roman cooking. Laser is a condiment made from silphium, an herb which is thought to be similar in flavor to asafoetida and now appears to be extinct — just in case you were thinking of trying this recipe yourself.

One last note from Declan Henesy to bring things up to date:

Today, the edible dormouse is still eaten in Slovenia and Croatia, where it’s part of the traditional peasant diet, as well as in Calabria, Southern Italy, where dormice are smoked out of their hollows at night, so they can be shot and eaten. 

ASIDE: My friend and fellow folklorist Joan Saverino, who grew up in an Italian-American community in West Virginia, wrote a short piece about the squirrel spaghetti sauce she remembers from childhood. Knowing that her maternal family hails from Calabria, I can’t help wondering whether this recipe is a carryover from the old country. Or, at least, whether the tradition of eating dormice in Calabria made eating squirrels in Appalachia more imaginable. I’ll have to ask her.

Darling dormice

A note about the other images in the above postcard: A couple of years ago, while staying in Chipping Campden, a delightful village in the Cotswolds, I visited the Court Barn Museum of Art and Design. In their exhibit of the work of artist William Simmonds, I spotted this tiny carved dormouse, along with this drawing of a dormouse from Simmonds’ sketchbook. The exhibit flyer and label tell us more:

The sculptor, carver and puppet master William Simmonds (1876-1968) was central to the revival of the Arts and Crafts movement in Gloucestershire after World War I… Some of his finest works are his carvings of animals, often studied and sketched for hours in the wild… Simmonds produced a few carvings for sale every year — they were sought after by collectors and highly prized.

This minuscule dormouse is carved from a scrap of pine salvaged from the Chalford stick mill. The simplicity of the little animal’s squat form, its tail curving round onto its stomach, the almost human fingers clasping an oversize nut, the expressive eyes peering out, has the delicacy and shining polish of a netsuke ivory carving. 

There’s no doubt that dormice are cute little critters! David Profumo notes that the hazel dormouse

was once more widespread and, in Victorian times, was often tamed as a pet; Beatrix Potter kept one and the naturalist Thorburn had a dozing-mouse that established its dormitory in his canvas sketching umbrella.

Here is Archibald Thorburn’s painting of dormice.

Deanna Raybourn’s Lady Julia Grey mysteries — set in the Victorian era — feature a pet dormouse, though it doesn’t appear until later in the series. The heroine lets her dormouse sleep in her décolletage!

Though physicians may order what they think is best,
Even dormice can choose to defy their behest.
Here’s to knowing and doing what means most to you:
Geraniums (red) and delphiniums (blue)!

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Our fine-feathered friends