In the Devil's Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food (10 page)

“He’s not dead,” I said.

One of the ladies picked him up.

“I thought they absorbed the disease and it killed them,” I said. “That’s part of what makes me better, no?”

The ladies conferred. It seemed that my illness had been so mild that the packet containing the coca leaves and pink cookies had ameliorated it. This would be burned and since the pig had survived the ordeal (save for a possible hangover), it would be released into the wild. Or so they said. When I indicated I wanted to escort it to freedom, I noticed some hesitation. Indeed, I suspect they were secretly planning to recycle my pig on the next patient. A special fee took care of the problem, however, and I was soon walking with the hunchback boy to the fields beyond the village. We watched the pig stagger off, its colorful ribbons flashing bravely in the brown stubble. He seemed headed for the snowy mountains that ringed the valley. Won’t all those ribbons about make him easy prey for hunters? I asked. Peruvians consider guinea pig a delicacy and eat about 60 million a year.

“No, señor, he is safe,” the boy replied. “Any person who sees those ribbons will know he is possessed by bad spirits. He will live to be the oldest guinea pig in Peru.”

A Prophetic Chicken

One of the more popular snacks in Tuscany is called
Crostini di Fegato
, made of chicken livers, a dish that is believed to have evolved from the Etruscan method of divination. Religious chicken livers might seem like a stretch, but it turns out Imperial Romans had whole cadres of prophetic roosters. Before every major battle they’d offer some poultry a bowl of grain. If the birds ate with good appetite, victory was assured; if not, defeat was inevitable. Before one famous battle a couple of chicken oracles who’d lost their appetite were thrown into the sea to drown by P. Claudius Pulcher, an irate general who remarked, “May they drink if they won’t eat.” Pulcher went down to defeat.

The following recipe comes from the grandmother of writer Giuseppina Oneto of Rome, who writes:

“My grandmother, Faustina Ciampolini, was born in a little Tuscan town south of Florence, Certaldo—Etruscan area. Truthfully she didn’t look like an Etruscan, and looking like an Etruscan in Italy means that you are not very beautiful, and probably she didn’t know much about them either. She was afraid of mysteries and ancient tombs. But she did like mummies. Anyhow, she taught her daughter this recipe and added, ‘You cook this only during Christmastime!’ No explanation about that, but in Italy modern sacrifices appear to happen only at Christmastime. She had her own chickens, and she used to add their precious livers to the ones bought at the local butcher’s—‘a malicious man,’ she used to add.”

2 tablespoons olive oil
2 bay leaves
1 clove of garlic, crushed (optional)
7 ounces (200 grams) chicken liver
3.4 ounces (
¹
⁄10 liter) red wine
2 cloves (optional)
Black pepper
Salt

Put olive oil and bay leaves (and garlic, if you like it) in a clay pot and heat. Add the chicken liver cut in pieces, and salt and pepper. Heat. Add the red wine (and the cloves, if using) and let mixture cook at high flame for four to five minutes. Take the bay leaves out (and garlic and cloves, if added). Crush the rest with a fork; while still warm, spread on a
crostino
(small slice of bread dried in the oven).
Buon appetito!

Impure Indian Corn

Native Americans revered corn above almost anything on Earth. They believed the first humans were made from the plant and considered it so sacred that when the first Europeans fed it to their horrible monsters (horses), they almost attacked them for blasphemy. Not that the white men were being consciously disrespectful. In fact, Columbus quite liked corn, although he believed it was a curiously large ear of wheat. That changed as Europeans went from being guests to invaders and felt compelled to demonize the enemy’s favorite snack. “The barbarous Indians which know no better are constrained to make a vertue of a necessitie, and think it a good food,” wrote the author of the influential Gerard’s
Herbal
of 1597, “whereas we may easily judge that it nourisheth but little and is of hard and evil digestion.” Others claimed “Indian wheat” caused scabs and burned the blood. When they grew bored with blaming those red-skinned barbarians for the stuff, Europeans renamed it “Turkish wheat” after their archenemies in Istanbul and many nineteenth-century Irish preferred starvation to eating “brimstone yellow” corn bread.

European colonials in America were too reliant on corn to completely snub it, so they assigned it to the lower classes. “Gentlemen’s houses,” noted Robert Beverley in 1705, “usually had bread made of wheat,” while corn bread was “mostly reserved for the servants,” an observation borne out by the African-American adage, “we grow the wheat and they give us the corn.” It was so déclassé that no American cookbook bothered to print a single corn recipe until the eve of the nineteenth century. It’s an attitude still reflected in corn’s relative scarcity at the dinner table. Maize’s primary solo role is as “junk food,” like popcorn and chips, or as animal feed. The prejudice against it is so pervasive that we’ve made “corny” synonymous with “trite.” The message seems clear enough. Pig food, junk food. This is hardly food at all. It’s garbage.

It is impossible to definitively identify the cause of social attitudes and taboos. But psychologists generally agree that parents identify “bad food” to their children based not so much on nutrition but on class associations, which in the United States is usually coded by race. In this regard, it’s interesting to note the very different fate of New World foods like chocolate and tomatoes. Both were first adopted by the European elite who then reintroduced them to North America, where they quickly became among our most popular foods. Corn and turkey, introduced directly from Native American cuisine, remain in many ways marginalized.

“Not assimilated yet—still eating pasta,” a New York social worker wrote in 1920 about the dangerously un-American dinners enjoyed by a family of Italian immigrants. Just as the early Jews had used dietary taboos to give their far-flung people a cohesive identity, white Americans intent on creating an ethnic melting pot have tried to eliminate alien foods that threatened their social construct. All non-European cultures received similar treatment—the current governor of Washington State, Chinese-American Gary Locke, still reminisces about a third-grade teacher who beat him for eating un-American breakfasts like rice porridge and dried shrimp—but the Native Americans bore the brunt of this intolerance. The most appalling example was how big business and the government deliberately reduced the original 100 million American buffalo to a mere 21 animals during the 1800s. The buffalo was more than just food to the Native Americans, it was a crucial symbol of cultural identity. The Cherokee leader Black Elk described his famous Ghost Dance as a racial prayer for “the return of the buffalo” and the culture it represented, a movement that ended when American soldiers gunned down hundreds of women and children in the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890. “A peoples’ dream died then. It was a beautiful dream,” he wrote. “And I, to whom so great a vision was given in my youth—you see me now a pitiful old man who has done nothing, for the nation’s hoop is broken and scattered, and the sacred tree is dead.”

Once the government forced Indians onto reservations, they began banning their feasts and traditional foods. “These dances or feasts, as they are called, ought to be discontinued,” wrote Secretary of the Interior Henry Teller to the Commission on Indian Affairs in 1882, referring to events like the green corn dance of the Cherokee tribe. When Smithsonian anthropologist Frank Cushing “went native” among the Zuni in the early 1900s, he found an entire culture/cuisine based on corn. There were hot-pink corn cakes and green ones and blue and white. The latter were made extra pale by adding kaolin clay, but the most prized were the purple-colored pastries called
he-wi
or
piki
, a kind of
mille-feuille
made of layers of thin blue corn crepes. There was a vast array of dumplings and biscuits and even “ice cream” breads made by freezing rather than baking. There were creamy corn biscuits laced with lamb’s milk and “salted buried bread” called
k’os-he-pa-lo-kia
made of the best white corn cooked in corn leaves and flavored with licorice or wild honey. There was even a psychedelic pancake, which was made by pouring red, green, white, yellow, blue, and purple corn batters into a design on a hot stone and then frying it as an enormous flapjack. People expressed themselves in ideas and language directly derived from their beloved cuisine. Just as we say a woman has creamy smooth skin, the highest compliment a Zuni girl could receive was to be told her cheeks were “smooth and silky as the
piki
stone” used for cooking maize crepes.

When the American government made the Hopi language illegal in 1910 and began pushing “American” foods like white flour and potatoes and roast beef and sugar, it not only spelled an end to a historic cuisine, it undermined an entire way of life. Ironically, corn-based cuisine of the Southwest survived, only to have the Europeans actually make the plant itself almost inedible. Scientists in the area now believe that the high-sugar corn hybrids introduced in the 1950s have helped cause a massive outbreak in diabetes and other diseases because the Native American’s digestive system has trouble breaking down sugar. Prior to 1950 diabetes was unknown among native populations of the American Southwest. It now has among the highest rates in the world.

The Butterfly People

They first appeared among poor Spanish shepherds in the eighteenth century. But it didn’t stop there, and the so-called “butterfly people” were soon seen everywhere: dazed peasants marked on the bridge of the nose with a curious butterfly design, which soon spread to the rest of their body in huge throbbing scabs. Some drowned themselves to stop the itching. Others went slowly insane. By 1881 an estimated one hundred thousand people in Italy were affected, and corn, which had become a staple among the poorest of the poor, was fingered as the cause. Some said the vegetable’s “impure Indian” nature lay at the root of the horrible disease. Others claimed moldy kernels were the culprit. In America, where the disease was rampant among the poorer people in the South, South Carolina actually put the vegetable on trial. “Corn stands indicted!” wrote the state’s agricultural commissioner in 1909, “the original wild grass of Aztecs and given to us by the Indian. You are here assembled to try the case and render a verdict . . . for the charge of murder. . . .” It wasn’t until the mid-1900s that Nobel nominee Joseph Goldberger proved that the disease, now called pellagra (rough skin), was caused by the absence of the vitamin niacin in corn. The mystery, however, was why there were no cases of pellagra among the Indians, who for centuries had been relying so heavily on the stuff. The answer lay in how the plant was processed. Indians always soaked the kernels overnight in a bath made of water and lime or wood ashes before grinding it into meal. The European invaders had assumed this was merely to make the maize easier to grind and had taken it as an example of “Indian laziness.” It turned out that the step of soaking the grain with ash, called nixtamalization, was what released the niacin “bound up” inside corn and turned the plant into a kind of universal superfood that met almost all nutritional requirements. The Indians were well aware of this—they used a similar process with coca (cocaine) leaves to activate its chemical stimulants—but the European invaders were apparently so arrogant they hadn’t bothered to ask.

Sky Blue Corn Flakes

The greatest exception to Euro-American contempt for corn is, of course, cornflakes. Not that the cereal didn’t meet initial resistance; it was called “horse food” when introduced in the late 1800s by John Harvey Kellogg (brother to Will Kellogg of Kellogg’s cereal fame). Food writer Margaret Visser credits the cereal’s triumph to the fact that it was served submerged in milk, because “in North American culture, nothing bathed in fresh milk can be threatening or bad.” The original cornflakes, however, were sky blue and invented by the people of the American Southwest, who took the leftover crumbs of their blue
piki
bread (a kind of crepe) and dried them to a crunchy texture. Traditional
piki
is rather difficult to make—for one thing, you need to polish a four-hundred-pound stone to a silky smoothness without speaking—so you might try this recipe for
someviki
dumplings. Some tribes served it with fermented fruit pastes called
tsu’-pi-a-we
, but it’s good with blueberry preserves.

2 cups blue corn flour
24 teaspoons of honey
1
¹
⁄2 cups boiling water
36 corn husks soaked overnight in water and shaken dry

Combine corn flour with honey and mix well. Add the hot water slowly and mix. Knead until very thick. Place two tablespoons dough in a corn husk and wrap it up tight, using rubber bands if necessary. Drop in simmering water and cook for 45 minutes.

To test for doneness, slice a dumpling in half; if you can see dry or uncooked flour, cook further.

Ghost at the Dinner Table!

I was writing a magazine piece on the political alliances between white supremacists and the environmental movement (“A Pure Environment for the Pure White Race” is one of the more catchy slogans) when I heard my first antibean sentiment in many, many years. It was on a prerecorded message from San Diego’s White Aryan Resistance (W.A.R.). Recorded messages are quite popular among hate groups and W.A.R.’s was the typical five minutes of brain-dead racist drivel followed by a pitch for contributions. Its only memorable feature was that most of the abuse was directed at Mexican immigrants. Mexicans, the tape informed me, were lazy and criminal. They were drug dealers. They bred like rabbits. They were, moreover, “beaners.” As soon as the twangy voice on the tape said these words, I felt a wave of nostalgia sweep over me—the stereotype of a do-nothing man snoring on the couch while engulfed in a miasma of bean-inspired flatulence was standard fare during my California youth. I’d never actually considered calling someone a bean eater to be particularly insulting, or at least no more so than calling a Frenchman a frog or a Brit a limey. So I was puzzled at W.A.R.’s belief that Mexico’s supposed predilection for beans was seriously defamatory. The Mexicans themselves, the original ones, had a very high opinion of the legumes. The Mayans called them their “little blackbirds.”

Bean baiting, however, has an ancient pedigree among European types. It all began with Pythagoras. Everybody knows Mr. P from high school geometry where his self-named theorem about triangles is taught ad nauseam. But the Greek philosopher was also the founder of a religious cult that espoused sexual equality, vegetarianism, reincarnation, and the well-tempered musical scale millenniums before it was fashionable to do so. He was also the first to publicly theorize that humans reproduce through “seeds,” which I suppose makes him the discoverer of sex. His most controversial belief, however, was that no one, under any circumstances, should ever eat a bean. There are a variety of theories explaining this curious taboo—it was about politics, or some peculiar disease—but the generally accepted reason was the one given by his near peer, Diogenes Laertius. “One should abstain from eating beans,” wrote the Roman scholar around the first century B.C., “because they are full of the material which contains the largest portion of that animated matter of which our souls are made.” The key words in this explanation are “animated matter” and “soul.” The Greek word for soul is
anemos
, which also means “wind.” The “animated matter” Diogenes refers to is the intestinal ululation associated with bean eating. Thus the reasoning behind the Pythagorean ban becomes clear. The buried dead were thought to release their souls in the form of gases or winds that, drifting up through the soil, got sucked into delicious little fava beans and frozen. When these beans were eaten and processed by a human’s intestine, these soul winds were released and—eager to resume their ascension to Heaven—headed straight for the nearest opening, from which they exited with a cry of joy.

This belief puts our horror of flatulence in a new light—does it derive from the same “horror” we feel when we see (or hear or smell) a ghost? A number of our rules of etiquette make it seem rather likely. We think it merely good manners to cover our mouths when yawning, but the gesture was originally meant to prevent evil spirits from slipping inside. Likewise, we say “Gesundheit!” when someone sneezes to prevent devils from jumping into the breach. At any rate, Pythagoras’ peers viewed the situation with the utmost gravity. The philosopher himself compared eating beans to biting off the head of one’s mother, and he apparently allowed himself to be beaten to death rather than escape by walking across a field of fava beans. Historian Reay Tannahill seems to believe that the Greeks let their fields go fallow rather than plant the haunting vegetable.

Equally interesting is how the rise of Christianity shaped the culinary treatment of the bean. Early Christian Romans cooked fava or broad beans with sage and then tossed them in olive oil on the Day of the Dead (November 2). A distinctly adult, serious dish and quite delicious. But as the pagan gods became the stuff of fairy tales this dish morphed into a sweet called
Fava
alla Romana o dei morti
because sweets, like fairy tales, are the provender most associated with childhood. It was traditional to leave a bowl of these
morti
out overnight for the spirits, with the children inheriting whatever the ghosts left. Not that there weren’t more adult manifestations. Romans continued to spit out black beans at midnight ceremonies while chanting “Deliver me from evil, protect me and mine from death, oh ye beans!” As late as the sixteenth century, Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti called the practice of giving beans to a dead person’s relatives heresy. Even the “bean-fests” British employers still throw for departing employees are said to derive from the Celts’ traditional funerary food called Beano. And while it’s hard to believe they’re related, there are similar practices in Buddhist countries, and many Japanese still scatter beans around the house to drive out bad spirits during their Setsubun winter festival—
“Oniwasoto, Fukuwa-uchi!”
shouts Dad as he tosses red beans about (Devils outside, good luck inside!).

So this, I thought, was the context of W.A.R.’s “beaner” remark about Mexican immigrants. What I’d taken to be teenage racism was actually a richly allusive analogy with multiple interpretations; W.A.R. was obviously a group of erudite Classicists whose obscure pre-Christian allusions had been disgracefully misrepresented by the popular press. But when I called their headquarters to inquire, there was no answer. It appears the White Aryan Resistance has gone out of business.