In the Devil's Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food (6 page)

Porcus Troianu

The first thing the waiter does is trim your toenails. Then a glass of Falernian wine from a century-old Opimian vintage is served. A servant singing a poem written by your host, Trimalchio, brings out a heaping platter of cold cuts: spiced sow udders, rooster combs, winged rabbits, testicles, flamingo tongues, and ostrich brains. Finally dinner begins. Milk-fed snails the size of tennis balls served in a sweet-and-sour sauce gets things rolling, followed by an
amuse-gueule
of dormice, eaten whole after being dipped in honey and poppy seeds. Fish are killed
à table
by pouring scalding hot sauce onto them. They’re still moving as you dig in. The fowl course begins with a pastry “egg” containing a minuscule bird called
beccafio
, or fig-pecker, covered in raw yolk and pepper. You eat it in one mouthful, bones and all. Whole roast geese and swans are brought out, but when you take a bite, surprise! They’re made of pork. Finally, the main course: cow-stuffed-with-lamb-stuffed-with-pig-stuffed-with-rooster-stuffed-with-chicken-stuffed-with-thrush. Dessert comes in the form of cakes that descend from the ceiling and squirt saffron-scented juice in your face. For those guests still peckish, there are pickled rabbit fetuses to nibble while Trimalchio stages his own funeral and has his obituary, praising his good taste and generosity, read out loud.

Trimalchio was the kind of arriviste that caused the Roman Senate to ban hundreds of dishes around the first century B.C., a former slave turned multimillionaire who blew his fortune on the most obscene luxuries money could buy. Almost everything he served at that famous dinner—described in the anonymous first-century book
The Satyricon
—was criminal contraband at one point or another. During one course, a whole roast pig is carried triumphantly into the dining room, only to have Trimalchio go berserk when he “realizes” that his chef has neglected to gut the beast. The cook is about to be strangled in front of the guests for his incompetence, but Trimalchio decides that his last act on Earth should be to gut the animal with everyone watching. When the chef, weeping, begging for his life, plunges a knife into the carcass, a sea of sausages gushes out. Ha! Ha! It was all a joke. The cook receives a gold crown, and the guests all make a quick visit to the vomitorium to empty their stomachs before digging in. This kind of dish was called
porcus
Troianu
, or Trojan pork, because like its namesake, the Trojan Horse, it was stuffed with piquant surprises. It was banned so often that the dish must have figured on the Top Ten Most Wanted list of the Roman police.

Equally illegal were those poppy seed–crusted dormice. The dormouse was a long-tailed rodent that Romans kept from birth in ventilated clay jars called
dolia
, where their inability to move, combined with intensive force-feeding, ensured they would become a ball of butter-soft flesh. These potbellied rats were apparently so delicious, the government feared it would turn their army into a bunch of spineless, rat-eating gluttons. Guards were posted at the markets with orders to seize any specimens offered for sale. When dormice grew scarce, the elite simply “crammed” (force-fed) chickens and pigs until they reached unnatural size and tenderness. Clerks recorded the animals’ weight at the dinner table, before oohing guests. Moralists like Cato the Elder then required that people dine with their doors open so everyone could see exactly what was being eaten. He then limited the number of dinner parties per week. He punished guests as well as hosts. Cato was such a prude, he even campaigned against the civilized fad of building statues to chefs instead of generals.

Roman excess eventually ate the empire alive by making it overreliant on foreign imports. (Unless you subscribe to the theory that their lead-lined wine flagons caused their downfall via brain damage, in which case they drank their empire to death.) During the ensuing Dark Ages, when there was nothing to eat, much less overeat, laws restricting gluttony disappeared, only to pop up again in sixteenth-century Florence, which sternly restricted cardinals to a mere nine dishes per meal. Japan’s nineteenth-century royal family allowed only certain produce to be sold in designated seasons, thus ensuring no merchant ever got a better
matsutake
mushroom than the Emperor. Wild fowl was banned for similar reasons, as were new cake designs and, of course, “thick green tea.” The number of courses served at dinner was determined by one’s social class. Peasant farmers were allowed only one plate per course, as compared to the Samurai’s nine, and were not allowed to drink sake. Peasant parties also had to end by sunset. The message was clear— farmers were meant to grow food for the emperor’s dinner, not enjoy it.

All these laws were in vain, thank God, for what is civilization if not an eternal quest for a new sensation? Some call it moral rot, but, of course, one man’s rot is another man’s wine. So the eleventh-century Indian king Shrenika threw vegetarian orgies whose courses were defined not by the dish served, but how it was consumed; the first course consisted of fruits that were chewed, then a course of the sucked, then the licked, and so forth. Turn-of-the-century American millionaire Diamond Jim Brady would put away twelve dozen oysters in a sitting and hired naked girls to feed them to him by hand. England’s King James I threw a memorable party in 1606, at which noble ladies playing the Seven Virtues ended up so sodden with food and drink they were unable to play their parts. “Faith was left sick and spewing in the lower hall,” wrote one correspondent describing the scene, “and Victory slept off the ill effects.” The most notable modern effort was a series of secret meals in the 1990s that featured endangered species like the
ortolan
, wood-cock, and, presumably, dolphin and whale (all denied by the participants, of course).

But it’s the normally abstentious Greeks who have the last word. Literally, because the longest single word in their language was a dish recorded by Aristophanes in his work
Ecclesiazusae
.

Now must the spindleshanks, lanky and lean,
trip to the banquet, for soon will, I wean,
high on the table be smoking a dish,
Brimming with game and with fowl and with fish.
(called)
Plattero-filleto-mulelto-turboto-cranio-morselo-pickleo-acido-silphio-
honeyo-poureontehtopo-ouzelo-thrusheo-cushatao-culvero-cutleto-
roastingo-marrowo-dippero-leveret-syrupo-gibleto-wings
So now ye have heard these tidings true,
get hold of a plate and an omelet too!

Ovis Apalis

While not as tasty as potbellied rats, the following recipe for eggs with pignoli sauce gives a hint of Roman hedonism. Served with honeyed wine (made by adding half a cup of heated clear honey to a bottle of white wine and chilling), it would be a fun way to start off a dinner party. The recipe is from the West’s oldest cookbook,
Apicius de re Coquinaria,
written by Apicius sometime in the first century.

2 ounces pine nuts
3 tablespoons vinegar, preferably red-wine vinegar
1 teaspoon honey
A pinch of pepper
A pinch of lovage (celery leaf)
4 medium boiled eggs (about four minutes)
Soak the pine nuts in the vinegar for four hours. Puree with all other ingredients (except eggs) in a blender. Serve sauce separate from eggs, and allow guests to add according to taste. The sauce will stay good for days.

Cocktails with the Devil

The gravity with which Christian moralists viewed Rome’s gluttonous frolics is best measured by the exquisite horrors assigned food lovers in Hell. One medieval Irish manuscript leaves them to float forever in the Lake of Pain, a single drop of which “would destroy all the creatures on the face of the Earth by the bitterness of its chill.” Others have them lounging before a dinner table groaning with delicacies that they can never quite sink their forks into. But the most popular torture is to have a demon shove frogs and snakes down their jaded gullets. Hardly prestigious, but more telling was the man who administered the punishment, none other than Satan’s right-hand man, Beelzebub. Other cultures mete out similar unpleasantness. The Buddhists devote not one, but two levels of their eight-story inferno to chastising gourmets. On the first floor is
Samjive
, where meat eaters relax in a pit full of dung that is a-crawl with maggots that gnaw the gourmand’s tongues. Three levels down is
Raurave
, also known as the “Screaming Hell,” where restaurant critics bob helplessly in a river. Every now and then a solicitous demon fishes one of them out to ask if he’d care for refreshment. “Oh please, just water and bread,” cries the epicure. “I’m not fussy!” Ha! Ha! laughs the one rogue devil. Then he pries open the critic’s mouth and pours down a goblet of molten lead.

The real punishment for these bon vivants, however, must be to watch the feasting upstairs in Heaven because, in the typically topsy-turvy logic of all religions, those who disdained dinner on Earth are rewarded with a celestial smorgasbord that would have left Trimalchio drooling. Most religions mention rivers of milk and delicious wine and clear-run honey, but Islam arguably provides the most details. Early Muslim scholars reported that chickens the size of young camels fell freshly fried at your feet. Fish liver seemed popular, as well as boiled and salted camel. Later, theologians decided that every palace in Heaven had “seventy tables in every house and on every table seventy different types of food.” That comes to forty-nine hundred courses per meal, dessert included. Al-Haythami, the medieval scholar who did the preceding math, however, failed to describe the exact dishes in his writings. For this we have to examine the menus served in Islam’s famous Paradise Gardens, designed to re-create the “Garden of Delights” where faithful Muslims spent eternity. The Koran describes heaven as a walled garden full of fountains and trees (the word
paradise
comes from an ancient Persian word that means “walled garden”). Some of these earthly gardens had fountains every 50 yards. Others featured declawed tigers to reflect the belief that men and animals lived harmoniously in Heaven. One turned the caliph’s entourage into weightless spirits by constructing elevated footpaths in a sea of flowering trees; from the palace, it appeared that the viziers were actually floating among the treetops.

This obsessive re-creation of the afterlife went beyond mere landscaping. “Truly, the companions of the garden that day will be busy and merry,” claims the Koran, an innocent-sounding passage that was somehow interpreted as meaning that the faithful would be “busy and merry” deflowering virgins. The question is, how many? Our friend al-Haythami again provides the math. “A palace in paradise is made from a pearl; within are 70 courts of ruby and in every court, 70 houses of green emerald; in every house is 70 bedrooms, and in every bedroom, 70 sleeping mats; and on every mat, a woman.” This adds up to roughly 23 million lubricious nymphets for every man. Truly devout caliphs gathered the hugest of harems in order to prepare for the labor to come. Some went as far as to adorn their gardens with structures named the Hall of Mirrors, which were nothing but gargantuan domed bedrooms devoted exclusively to Allah’s labor.

The caliphs were equally fastidious in re-creating the heavenly diet. Tenth-century Egyptian caliph al-Aziz had fresh cherries from Lebanon flown in, tied to the feet of carrier pigeons. His predecessor Khumarawayh preferred dates stuffed with almonds because that was the fruit most often mentioned as heavenly provender. He was particularly partial to consuming them while floating atop a pool of quicksilver set in the midst of his garden. Another popular dish was the sweet
judhaba
:

Judhaba made of choicest rice,
as shining as a lover’s eyes;
How marvelous in hue it stands,
beneath the cook’s accomplished hands!

Poetry like this would be recited as each dish arrived at the caliph’s table. When the guests were too stuffed to take another bite, the poets would extol the virtues of coming delights in order to revive their appetites.

Here capers grace a sauce vermilion
whose fragrant odor to the soul are blown,
here pungent garlic meets the eager sight
and whets with savor sharp the appetite,
while olives turn to shadowed night the day,
and salted fish in slices rims the tray.

Lamb appeared frequently on the menu, and flavors like saffron, rosewater, and cardamom dominated. Specific dishes would have included fried eggplant dressed in a saffron/sesame sauce (served cold), lamb covered in poppy seeds, fish stuffed with walnuts, cod in a sweet-and-sour raisin sauce, and chicken with dried pears and peaches, to name a few. People slaked their thirst with date wine and afterward nibbled on a multitude of refreshing sherbets and the sweet jellies called
rahat lokum
(“giving rest to the throat”), which we Westerners call Turkish Delight. Then steaming black coffee served in jeweled
zarfs
, scented with ambergris and cardamom and presented by Heaven-sent virgins. Then, ah yes, back to that “work.”

But better than the endless food and sex, dinner in Heaven would never be interrupted by a trip to the bathroom. A mere belch takes care of all unpleasantness, an emission producing a divine odor “like that of musk,” which would be of itself an act of praise to Allah.