"Go and suck eggs" is the basic experimental method in a series of studies done by Hugh B Cott, of Cambridge University, in the early 1950s.
The titles are pretty self-explanatory:
The Palatability of the Eggs of Birds - Illustrated By Experiments on the Food Preferences of the Hedgehog (Erinaceus europaeus).
The Palatability of the Eggs of Birds: Illustrated by Three Seasons' Experiments (1947, 1948 and 1950) on the Food Preferences of the Rat (Rattus norvegicus).
The Palatability of the Eggs of Birds - Illustrated by Experiments on the Food Preferences of the Ferret (Putorius furo) and Cat (Felis catus) - With Notes on Other Egg-Eating Carnivora. Those other carnivora are numerous, and include civets, mongooses and meerkats, hyenas, dogs and dingoes, otters, aardwolves and foxes.
Egg palatability experiments are potentially of great practical value. Britain, like all island nations, was and is vulnerable to enemies who would block food shipments from overseas. One could counter that danger by discovering unknown or unappreciated edible native foodstuffs. A simple way to begin: collect bird eggs and test their palatability.
Egg collecting, like other research activities, is not without hazards. Cott relates an incident that's documented in an 1882 monograph: "The victim, having collected a basketful of the first eggs of the season, and wishing to procure more, had sent his wife to empty the basket in the village. In her absence, he fixed his rope to the clifftop and made a second descent. Meanwhile, a fox ran up and gnawed the rope till it severed, at the place where the man had previously rubbed his yolk-smeared hands."
Cott's experiments mainly addressed a scientific question - demonstrating that, usually, the most conspicuous eggs taste terrible to whatever might want to eat them. (Cott's parallel research programme on the comparative palatability of different birds themselves was described here last week.)
Cott also used human egg taste-testers. In 1946, he entered a six-year collaboration with the Cambridge Egg Panel, one of many similar bodies formed during second world war to help regulate the nation's food supply. Under Cott's direction, panelists tasted the eggs of 212 bird species. This resulted in a 129-page report called The Palatability of Eggs and Birds: Mainly Based upon Observations of an Egg Panel. It has raw data, supplemented with colourful highlights from the tasters' own notes and from other sources, including Cott's coterie of egg-collecting correspondents.
For the egg panellists, "samples were tested in the form of a scramble, prepared over a steam-bath, without any addition of fat or condiment". Each taster assessed each sample on a scale dropping from "ideal" way down to "repulsive and inedible".
The paper concludes with a list of the different egg types "in descending order of acceptability". Keep in mind that these are the aggregate preferences; individual tastes may vary. Most acceptable: chicken, then emu, coot and black-backed gull. The eggs of last resort, as rated by official British egg-tasting persons: green woodpecker, Verreaux's eagle owl, wren, speckled mousebird and, dead last, black tit.
• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize