Seventy-four hotdogs in ten minutes. Eighty-one mutton sandwiches in ten minutes. Fifty-four brain tacos in eight minutes. These are just a few of Joey Chestnut’s Major League Eating records. Impressive and disgusting as they may be, they don’t quite match the voraciousness of Charles Domery, eater of cats, rats and candles.
Domery was a 21-year-old Polish soldier imprisoned in Liverpool back in 1799 who ate just about anything. But it wasn’t the bad prison food that inspired his grotesque gluttony. His peculiar cravings began long before, at the age of 13. It was around this age that he joined the army and discovered that his two rations a day were not nearly satisfying enough.
Some see rats. Charles Domery saw dinner. (Illustration from Jean de La Fontaines fables by Gustave Doré), via Wikimedia Commons.
The young soldier made up for his skimpy portions of bread and meat by eating four or five pounds of grass a day. Grass, however, isn’t filling either.
“In one year, [Domery] declares he devoured 174 cats, (not their skins) dead or alive,” reported Dr. Thomas Cochrane, Inspector and Surgeon of the Prisons, in a letter printed in The London Medical and Physical Journal. “He had several severe conflicts in the act of destroying them, by feeling the effects of their torments on his face and hands. Dogs and rats equally suffered from his merciless jaws.”
When grass and animals weren’t available, Domery turned to cannibalism. Cochrane described an incident that occurred when his ship surrendered. “Finding himself, as usual, hungry, and nothing else in his way but a man’s leg, which was shot off, lying before him, he attacked it greedily, and was feeding heartily, when a sailor snatched it from him, and threw it overboard.”
Domery was imprisoned with his fellow soldiers, where he ate everything but the walls restraining him:
“Since he came to this prison, he has eat one dead cat and about twenty rats. But what he delights most in, is raw meat, beef or mutton, of which, though plentifully supplied by eating the rations of ten men daily, he complains he has not the same quantity, nor indulged in eating so much as he used to do, when in France.
“He often devours a bullocks liver, raw, three pounds of candles and a few pounds of raw beef, in one day, without tasting bread or vegetables, washing it down with water, if his allowance of beer is expended.
“His stomach never rejected any thing, as he never vomits, whatever be the contents, or however large.”
Despite his extraordinary diet, Domery maintained a thin figure and was said to be well tempered. Like Joey Chestnut, without any of the prize winnings.
