In the Devil's Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food (25 page)

SAINTS AND SUPERMODELS

While there were a number of centuries separating Jerome (who was reputed to be something of a gourmet) and the super-slim saints of the late medieval period, many of their diaries seem highly influenced by his teaching. Angela of Foligno, for example, said she starved for years to cool her “hot little body,” and when that failed literally burned herself to extinguish the internal “heat” of lust. Interestingly, the dieting diaries of some of the saints seem as image conscious as the ones given out by celebrities; the famous St. Catherine of Siena buttressed her fasting by “devoutly receiving Holy Communion very frequently indeed,” according to her confessor. The statistics from America’s
Psychology Today
are similar to numbers for Europe that indicate in countries like Britain about 15 percent of all teenage girls will eat only one meal a day in order to keep their weight down. Roughly a quarter of all models qualify as anorexic, according to federal health guidelines. Girls are twenty times more likely to suffer anorexia than boys, and approximately 10 percent of those afflicted die from the condition. For information and on-line counseling visit
www.edauk.com
.

THE JOY OF FAT

It wasn’t just fat that people loved in Trusler’s time. Anything quivery and squirty seemed appealing, including an eyeball, “which is to be cut from its socket by forcing the point of the carving knife down to the bottom,” and the sweet tooth “being full of jelly.” Fletcherism, which entails chewing every morsel approximately thirty times, was discovered in 1898 by Horace Fletcher, a.k.a. “the Great Masticator.” It’s said to be quite an effective way to lose weight. The Mayans’ reservations on basting are mentioned in Coe, who sources it to
Cronicas de
Michoacan
, edited by Gomez de Orozco.

MITTERRAND’S LAST SUPPER

The idea of covering one’s head while feasting has a curious parallel among the Gurage people of Southwest Ethiopia. When a man there loses his appetite, he is thought to be possessed, the only cure for which is for him to cover his head and eat massive amounts of food, shoving it in as quickly as he can. Some of these snacks go for up to twelve hours, or until he finally says,
“Tafwahum,”
“I am satisfied.”

Pride

THE EGOTIST AT DINNER

The patriotic ode to sauerkraut comes from the 1935 cookbook
Deutsch Heimatküche (German Homeland Cooking)
as translated by Bertram M. Bordon.

THE DIRT EATERS

Dirt eating, known as geophagy, is a commercial enterprise in parts of the southern United States, where small bags of kaolin can be found in supermarkets for about $1.50 a shot. Longstreet’s imputation of a characteristic associated with Africans to the white Ransy Sniffle is merely one quirk in the curious social relationship between poor southern whites and blacks. In one school of thought, the so-called “white trash” (defined as a group of permanently unemployed Caucasian individuals specializing in incest and drunkenness) are a kind of “anti-aristocracy” created by the freeing of African slaves. The idea is that poor, unskilled whites in the color-obsessed American South could not engage in simple manual work because it was “colored folks’ work” and for them to do so would entail losing social/racial rank. So they became versions of European aristocrats, who also often went penniless rather than lose caste by engaging in productive labor. Many of the “Euro trash” resolved their dilemma by marrying wealthy American heiresses interested in an Old World title. Mr. Sniffle and company merely created the Ku Klux Klan.

A DINNER PARTY IN KISHAN GARHI

The detailed analysis of the goings-on in Kishan Garhi is drawn from Mckin Marriott’s “Caste Ranking and Food Transactions: A Matrix Analysis,” in
Structure and Change in Indian Society
. The suggestion of cow dung place mats is credited to tenth-century writer al-Biruni in Mahedra Singh’s
Life in Ancient India
, which quotes al-Biruni as saying, “they prepared a separate table-cloth for each person by pouring water over a spot and plastering it with the dung of the cow . . .”

The Azande people of Sudan provide a much more congenial explanation for these taboos on communal dining. According to them, a feud between two gentlemen named Yapu-tapu and Nagilinugo over who got to have a hen with their porridge led to King Gbudue ruling that henceforth different groups should eat out of one another’s sight in order to prevent unnecessary jealousy.

HUMBLE PIE

The connection between chicken liver pâté and Etruscan divination comes from Giuseppe Alessi, author of
Etruschi: Il Mito a
Tavola (The Etruscans: The Myth at the Dinner Table).
Alessi’s book is available only in Italian, but you can try his re-creations of ancient Tuscan cuisine at his Florence restaurant, Pentola dell’Oro.

IMPURE INDIAN CORN
AND
THE BUTTERFLY PEOPLE

The first cookbook to include a corn recipe was
American
Cookery
by Amelia Simmons, circa 1796, according to Tannahill. Prior to that date, American cuisine was considered undeserving of the printed page. The reference to corn being “the food of the servants” has been attributed to “Report of the Journey of Francis Louis Michel from Berne, 1701.” Corn’s despised status was so well known that Tom Sawyer even remarked on it in Mark Twain’s classic. White America’s intentions toward the buffalo were made relatively clear by General Philip Sheridan, who told the Texas Legislature in the mid-1800s, “let the hunters kill and skin and sell until the buffalo is exterminated, as it is the only way to bring about lasting peace.” Buffalo Bill, hired by the railroads to help exterminate the animals that were blocking their lines, once bragged he killed four thousand in twelve months and left the bodies to rot.

There’s actually no direct record of whether Native Americans were aware of the nutritional significance of nixtamalization but they seem to have had an inkling because they reserved non-nixtamalized bread for holidays when they did not eat other dietary essentials like salt and chili peppers. Corn’s “murder trial” is mentioned in Daphne Roe, who credits it to Ebbie Watson, Commissioner of the Department of Agriculture in South Carolina. In the early 1900s, approximately nine thousand Americans a year were dying from pellagra. Although foreign foods and alcohol are one of the main health problems among native people in the Southwest, it’s thought that the introduction of sweeter hybrid corns about forty years ago has really made the diabetes rate jump. In addition to the corn’s higher sugar content, the sugar is also fast-releasing, rendering it doubly difficult to digest for some. Details about corn’s cultural importance to the Hopi come from Fussell’s work.

GHOST AT THE DINNER TABLE!

Whether or not our feelings about flatulence have ties to the Pythagorean theorem is difficult to say. The West’s aversion to passing gas certainly diminished after the Classic civilizations fell apart—at least judging by accounts of medieval table manners—only to be fully resurrected when Renaissance scholars rediscovered the wonders of Greek antiquity in the fifteenth century or so. The most famous admonition comes from the scholar Erasmus’s
De Civilitate morum puerilium
(“On the Civility of the Behavior of Boys”), which suggests not only that one leave the dining room to vomit but also urges children not to squirm about on their seat because “it gives the appearance of repeatedly farting, or trying to do so.” It remains a standard parental nag even though most have no idea as to its original meaning.

The overall idea that legumes make you lazy was so widespread that the word
lentus
, meaning slow, became the root for the word
lentils
. Roman general Marcus Crassus knew his army would lose against the Parthians, because his men had been reduced to eating beans (Plutarch,
Vita Crassi
). Tannahill’s suggestion that an aversion to beans played a significant role in Roman and Greek agriculture is in her
Food in History
, in which she points out that although the Classicists knew that planting beans on alternate years replenished the soil, they refused to do so.

KING’S CAKE

La galette des rois, dreikonigskuche
, Twelfth Night cake,
bolo
rei
—there are as many names as there are versions for this cake. Some are filled with almond paste or apples, or flavored with port. There are cheesecake and fruitcake versions. All have at some point included the ceremony of the crowning of the child as the “bean king.” According to
Les Fèves des rois
by Huguette Botella and Monique Joannes, the rite was started by followers of the two-headed Roman god Janus, who made the person who picked the magic bean king until nightfall, at which point his head was cut off. This custom eventually split into two fêtes. The kids got the
fête des rois
. The adults ended up muddled into what we call Carnival (Rio de Janeiro’s being the most famous), originally called the Festival of the Crazy, a day when lower classes were allowed to parody the elite by feasting and drinking until morning. They point out that the revolutionary denouncement of
les gâteaux des rois
might have been reasonable because monarchists later made a point of buying the cakes decorated with the royal
fleur-de-lis
and a cross to show support for a return to a religious monarchy. Renaming the cake after beggars also led to the kindly tradition of requiring the child “king” to donate money to the poor. An interesting mystical story of this tradition is J. R. R. Tolkien’s short story “Smith of Wooton Major.”

Sloth

THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF ENGLISH COOKERY

The tale of François Vatel has been recounted numerous times and might even be true. It first appears in the correspondence of Mme. Marie de Sevigne, who describes him as a chef of the Prince of Condé who, while preparing a feast for the court of Louis XIV, killed himself over the missing fish. The fish arrived at the castle a half hour later. There is now a French school of hospitality named after him. English children’s love of American literature is discussed in Sarah Freeman’s
Mutton and
Oysters: The Victorians and Their Food
, which quotes people like Lord Frederic Hamilton as saying that he liked books like
The
Wide, Wide World
as a child because “there [was] plenty of drinking and eating.” For more information on the concept of Victorian childhood, try “The Victorian Invention of Childhood,” by LuAnn Walther. Despite the many barbs flung at English cooking, there’s always been a tradition of good, honest fare there, as indicated by the following passage from the eighteenth-century
The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy
, in which author Hannah Glasse rails against the fashion for French cooks. “If gentlemen will have French Cooks they must pay for French tricks. I have heard of a Cook that used six Pounds of Butter to fry 12 Eggs, when every Body knows, that understands cooking, that Half a Pound is enough.”

TOAST
AND
THE INCREDIBLY SAD TALE OF PHILIPPE THE SHOEMAKER

The historic relationship between beer and bread is too well documented to require specific references, although
Food: The
Gift of Osiris
is a good starting point. The first “official” bread is thought to have been sun-baked loaves with a moist, chewy interior, but the first bread/beer/porridges were probably like the
chang
barley beer enjoyed in the Himalayas. It is served in a bamboo trunk with the “head” being a mass of fermented barley that resembles a diseased cauliflower; you get to the liquor by sipping through a wooden straw. Delicious when fresh. An interesting parallel to the European notion that ancestral characteristics can be passed through bread existed among the Zuni Indians who, according to turn-of-the-century anthropologist Frank Cushing, added a nut called
k’u’-shu-tsi
to their corn breads because it was the food of their ancestors and so eating it passed on ancestral wisdom (in
Zuni Breadstuffs
). The description of the Egyptian pregnancy tests comes from “On an Ancient Method of Diagnosing Pregnancy and Determining Sex” by P. Ghalioungui in
Medical History
. Much of the material relating to the controversy of
mollet
comes from Kaplan’s massive
Bakers of Paris
, and manuscripts in the French National Archives. The police report quoted is
Traite de la Police
by Police Commissioner Delamare (available in various editions), but particularly the one from 1710. For the
panisvores
among you, yes, baguettes were not invented until much later, but I’m using the word generically for bread. Besides, the baguette, too, was criticized for epitomizing Parisian shallowness with its emphasis on excessive crust. Blame for the translation of the poem by Condamine belongs to me.

The transvestites supposedly leading the bread riots were not necessarily sexual transvestites, but merely men in drag because they thought the soldiers were less likely to shoot at women. Other accounts suggest that there were also females dressed as men. Many historians have debated whether or not Marie Antoinette actually made her famous cake remark. The classic version, re: starving peasants, was
“Qu’ils mangent de la
brioche,”
a reference to a delicate type of bread similar to
mollet
. It is usually translated into English as “Let them eat cake.” If the queen never made a remark about who should eat what kind of bread, well then, she must have been the only person in France who had failed to express an opinion.

The white bread vs. brown wasn’t merely a question of social standing. The darker the bread, the easier it was for unprincipled bakers to hide adulterations in the loaf like acorns, bark, mud, sawdust, dog weeds, and God knows what else. Some even added poisons like bay leaves or the herb darnel to make so-called “dazed bread.” Dark rye loafs also sometimes contained grain infected with the mold ergot, the base for the drug LSD, which people like Camporesi believe caused some of the bizarre religious “dancing” hysterias that swept through medieval Europe.