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We received in the following inquiry regarding a purported international cookbook receipt for stuffed camel from a reader back in 2004: We're sorry our correspondent lost a friendly wager on our account, but her message was the first time we'd come across this item. A slight stumbling block was created by the fact that the ISBN provided was apparently assigned to more than one book, leaving some people (including ourselves) quite puzzled about we were so earnestly searching for a copy of Recipe Treasury: 301 Kitchen-Tested Favorites. Nonetheless, it didn't take long to track down a copy of the correct book (International Cuisine) and verify that the Stuffed Camel recipe cited above did indeed appear on the Saudi Arabia page within the Middle East section of the book: Okay, so we verified that the recipe appears in a cookbook, but that doesn't answer the question of whether it's real or just a joke. Even for a dish as exotic as stuffed camel, this recipe looks like something designed for the purpose of pulling legs rather than creating meals. Consider the poor cooks who have to skin, trim, and clean a whole camel (medium size) as well as 20 whole chickens and a large lamb, boil all 22 of these animals (until tender), then stuff the chickens with hard-boiled eggs and rice, stuff the lamb with 20(!) stuffed chickens, and stuff the camel with the superstuffed lamb, finally broiling the whole thing over a large charcoal pit (until brown). Inside jokes abound in this recipe. The preparer is instructed to clean the camel once you get over the hump. The list of ingredients helpfully includes 110 gallons of water, presumably because that's how much liquid it takes to boil a camel. Take a look at a 110-gallon aquarium and imagine trying to boil a whole camel in that small an amount of water. Indeed, try to imagine having a pot large enough in which to boil a camel, or ponder where you might conceivably buy one: While all the other ingredients in the recipe are quantified, the amount of salt needed for this enormous repast is simply left to taste. Other iterations of this recipe perpetuate the same forms of humor, instructing the hapless cook to skin, trim, clean, and boil a whole camel, 20 whole chickens, and a whole lamb, with the helpful reminder to Be sure the pot is large enough. Presumably, though, no chef needs to be alerted to have on hand a tray large enough to hold a stuffed whole camel surrounded by fifteen whole chickens: The Guinness Book of World Records included a similar dish in their listings, but they merely cited the recipe without documenting any instance of someone's actually having used it: In the introduction to his book The Fearless Diner, globe-hopping gourmet Richard Sterling described finally encountering someone who claimed to have cooked up a banquet of roast camel: Although Sterling later wrote of having feasted on camel himself, the preparations he described for that meal were nothing like the infamously extravagant recipe of interest but merely various dishes prepared using camel meat: Actual (non-camel) dishes do exist wherein different types of meat are stuffed into each other. The turducken is one such culinary adventure: a chicken stuffed into a duck stuffed into a turkey, all boneless. As for stuffed camel, it seems to be less a real dish than a tall tale which Middle Easterners delight in foisting off on gullible tourists. We'll close by noting the similarity between the stuffed camel recipe and a joke about how to make elephant stew:
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