Self-anointing

Hedgehogs do it:

Hedgehogs are fairly vocal and communicate through a combination of grunts, snuffles and/or squeals, depending on species. Hedgehogs occasionally perform a ritual called anointing. When the animal encounters a new scent, it will lick and bite the source, then form a scented froth in its mouth and paste it on its spines with its tongue. The specific purpose of this ritual is unknown, but some experts believe anointing camouflages the hedgehog with the new scent of the area and provides a possible poison or source of infection to predators poked by their spines.

Looked up because hedgehogs are a Thing on tumblr (see also: here, here). Some other notes:

• In the Middle Ages a hedgehog was also a furze-pig, a hurcheon, an urchin, or (by metanalysis) a nurchin. Wikipedia says the -hog names have to do with snoutedness; wonder if a pig connection is behind the biblical belief that "An vrchon, that chewith kude,‥is vnclene."
• Naturally the hedgehog appears, as "hurcheon," in the extravagant linguistic treasure-house that is Dunbar's Twa mariit women & wedo, "With his hard hurcheone scyn sa heklis he my chekis."
• Hedgehog-roasting appears to have preceded knife-crime as the national British sport (Guardian):

Research suggests nettle pudding may be the oldest known recipe, dating from 6000BC, closely followed by smokey stew, meat pudding, barley bread and roast hedgehog. [...]  Ruth Fairchild, who led the research, said that however off-putting the Neolithic dishes might sound, many were forerunners of the food we enjoy today.

"The way our ancestors cooked hedgehog - wrapped in a casing of grass or leaves to stop the meat burning - is an early version of many modern recipes which involve meat being wrapped or coated, such as chicken kiev, beef wellington or cornish pasties," she said.

[some dishes] have disappeared from the British dining table, including garum and liquamen, sauces made from fish guts and heads; smokey stew, a combination of bacon and smoked fish; meat pudding, a mix of offal, fat and herbs; barley bread, an early form of unleavened bread; and in mitulis, a Roman equivalent of moules marinière.
Roasted meats (Hedgehog)

"Hedgehog should have its throat cut, be singed and gutted, then trussed like a pullet, then pressed in a towel until very dry; and then roast it and eat with cameline sauce, or in pastry with wild duck sauce. Note that if the hedgehog refuses to unroll, put it in hot water, and then it will straighten itself."

From medievalcookery.com/oddities

Also tantalizingly recipe-ish is this excerpt from Reliquae Antiquae: " Tak the grees of an urcheon, and the fatte of a bare." Wherefore? To anoint a hedgehog?

Recreational alchemy

Today's Science has an interesting story (probably gated) about the growing popularity, among historians of science and others, of recreations of alchemy experiments described in papyrus mss. ("chymistry" is the preferred term) -- it is not surprising that the craze for medieval recreations has touched scientists, as there are many in the right demographic, and the trend is consistent with the incentives for historians to rehabilitate various periods of history; the surprise is that it didn't happen sooner.

William Newman, a historian at Indiana University ... also works on chymistry re-creations—some of them with a furnace in his own garage. Considering that even the best post-Renaissance experimenters distilled phosphorus from urine, melted silver from whatever coins they might be carrying, and used inexact heat sources, their results were difficult, if not impossible, for them to reproduce. “You have to back-engineer to understand how the theory integrates with the practice,” Newman says. “There's no better way to do that than to do the experiments themselves.”  

The "alchemists chymists were scientists" line seems a hard sell that the article doesn't really try; it won't do to demonstrate that not everything the alchemists saw was fraudulent -- one can mount a similar defense of "traditional medicine" but it wouldn't follow that witch-doctors were scientists. Not to mention that the Middle Ages were a figment of someone's imagination. Nevertheless, the sporadic wild-haired intellectual stirring a ceramic pot of his own urine would be a useful addition to one's neighborhood medieval recreation group. As, btw, would the woman eating pounds of almonds.

The other article of note in this issue is a genetic study that (purportedly) shows that the mutation responsible for the sooty variant of the British peppered moth -- that classic example of adaptation in the modern era -- happened exactly once (as opposed to happening independently on multiple occasions), possibly "emanating from a single point source in greater Manchester."

"Pork, eggs, egret"

On this morning's Wikipedia ramble [1], I stumbled upon the article about Eleanor of Brittany, who preceded King John [2] and Henry III in the line of succession to Richard the Lionheart, and therefore had to be kept under house arrest all her life and prevented from having children. The conditions of her confinement were not especially restrictive:

While imprisoned by her uncle John, Eleanor was allowed to have 3 maids, and was provided fabric for clothes and bedding, and pocket money as much as 5 mark per quarter.^[20]She also got a saddle with gilded reins and scarlet ornaments from John and another saddle from Henry III, which implied that she might be a horsewoman, and that she could not always be confined in her room.

What caught my eye, however, was this factoid:

Henry himself once sent her 50 yards of linen cloth, three wimples, 50 pounds of almonds and raisins respectively and a basket of figs.^[19]

The mind boggles at the quantity of almonds... A later footnote provides a shopping list that is suggestive of the royal diet of the times:

Saturday: bread, ale, sole, almonds, butter, eggs. Sunday: mutton, pork, chicken and eggs. Monday: beef, pork, honey, vinegar. Tuesday. pork, eggs, egret. Wednesday: herring, conger, sole, eels, almonds and eggs. Thursday: pork, eggs, pepper, honey. Friday: conger, sole, eels, herring and almonds.

Source: 1215: The Year of Magna Carta, by Danny Danziger and John Gillingham. I don't know if Eleanor had a particular thing for almonds or this was standard medieval-royalty food, but she does seem to have gone through them at a shocking rate. NB the list is a shopping list, which is presumably why conger and eels were bought on the same day.

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[1] I think the sequence was Edmund Gosse - Hamo Thornycroft (friend of Gosse's; awesome name) - Hamo the Sheriff (name remembered from Domesday Book) - Humphrey de Bohun (successor of H. the S.) - Henry III - Eleanor of Brittany.

[2] John was apparently referred to as John Lackland or Softsword (!)