Cheat’s Culinary Companion #3: More Mole Vicar?

“Trench arrived to find that his house, still known today as Dean’s Yard, was – according to a grumble from his wife Mary – filled with ‘dead things’ bones’.

“The previous Dean had been William Buckland, later to be the first professor of geology at Oxford, and an insanely eager paeleontologist. Buckland was notorious also for trying to eat specimens of every living thing, in his later years declaring mole to be the nastiest, followed by bluebottle.”

(from Simon Winchester “The Meaning Of Everything: The Story Of The Oxford English Dictionary” paperback edition 2004 – page 49, footnote. This book concerns the history of the Oxford English Dictionary and ‘Trench’ is Richard Chevenix Trench, Dean of Westminster, who was instrumental in the birth of the OED. Apparently.)