More than 1.23 billion chicken wings will be devoured as football fans watch the San Francisco 49ers take on the Baltimore Ravens in the Super Bowl... Just five wings have more calories, fat, and cholesterol than a Big Mac. Sickening, but more nauseating: Most chicken products people eat are tainted with feces.

A typical large processing plant may slaughter more than a million birds per week. There, chickens are stunned, killed, bled, and sent through scalding tanks, which help remove feathers but also act as reservoirs that transfer feces from one carcass to another. After scalding, feathers and intestines are mechanically removed. Intestinal contents can spill onto machinery and contaminate the muscles and organs of the chicken and those processed afterward.

One of the first things any novice cook is taught is that when working with chicken, we must blast it with heat to lay waste to every last microbe. We cure pork and call it ham, order duck breast medium-rare, savor lamb chops served blue, but we won't serve an Oven Stuffer Roaster whose juices aren't running clear. I thought that maybe pink chicken might not only taste better but eliminate an item from my list of things to fear while cooking.

But first, there was the small matter of salmonella. I spoke with a number of poultry scientists and discovered that while it's plausible that salmonella (a bacterium that, by the way, is hardly unique to chickens) could show up on a chicken's skin and contaminate cutting boards, the chances that it works its way inside a muscle, like the breast, all by itself? Very, very slim, and really no different from the odds of E. coli camping out in a medium-rare steak. The Centers for Disease Control has documented five salmonella outbreaks this year, none of which involved eating chicken.

To be clear: ingesting almost anything involves a certain level of risk. But if you've ever eaten supermarket cold cuts, potato salad at a steamy August cookout, or any food while vacationing in Mexico, pink chicken should rest squarely within your food-safety comfort zone.

amongst the dishes herein enumerated we may find hot-pots of cow-heel, pickled broom buds, and Tetrapharmacon, of which latter delicacy we are told that it was made of pheasant, peacock, a wild sow's hock and udder, with a bread pudding over it.

The work is divided into ten books, beginning with soups, pickles, and sauces, and proceeding through the whole art of cookery, with hundreds of recipes, the very reading of which makes one's mouth water. For instance, who could resist "virgin sow drest with broth made of pepper, wine, honey, oyl, and stew'd damsons"? Or dormouse sausages? ...

There are many recipes in the book to dress "cramp-fish, that numb the hands of those that touch them; the cuttlefish, whose blood is like ink; the pourcontrel, or many feet, the sea-urchin or hedgehog." ...

Then, again, we are given minute instructions for the carving of beasts whose flesh was esteemed by the ancients. "In partes of Asia and Africa," we are told, "the oliphant is eaten, not as the Romans and Egyptians were wont to do, sparingly and only as pertain'd to his feete, trunk, and tayle all of which were great delicacies, but his entire carcase is carved and consumed." For the benefit of those who might happen to possess an elephant and be tempted to eat him a chart of carving instructions accompanies the text.