Let no one say that cookbooks are necessarily boring reading. The Georgian Feast by Darra Goldstein contains reams of the fascinating ethnographic tidbits with which the Caucasus seem so abundantly blessed. The following is a description of a very peculiar custom, both funerarily and culinarily, in seventeenth century Georgia, by the Turkish traveler Evliya Çelebi (Efendi):

[They] have a strange mode of burying their Begs [lords]; they put the body into a wooden coffin, which they nail onto the branches of some high tree and make a hole in the coffin near the head, that the Beg, as they say, may look up to Heaven: bees enter the coffin and make honey, entirely wrapping the body up in it; when the season comes they open the coffin, take the honey and sell it, much caution, therefore is required to be used in purchasing the honey of [these people].
--From Narrative of Travels in Europe, Asia and Africa in the Seventeenth Century