In the Devil's Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food

by Stewart Lee Allen

  Both forks and tomatoes eventually carried the day. Ironically, the last place to embrace the tomato was America, the Land of Ketchup. The hero of the tomato was named Robert Johnson, and when he announced in 1820 that he was publicly going to eat one of the devilish fruits, people journeyed for hundreds of miles to his town in New Jersey to watch him drop dead. He mounted the courtyard steps around noon and turned to the throng. “What are you afraid of?” he snarled. “I’ll show you fools that these things are good to eat!” Then he bit into the tomato. Seeds and juice splurted forth. Some spectators fainted. But he survived and, according to local legend, set up a tomato-canning factory.

  The Ketchup with a Thousand Faces

  Yes, people fell screaming in horror as Robert Johnson bit into the bloodred tomato. There was panic in the streets. Until a few years ago his derring-do was celebrated every August in New Jersey with a reenactment of his feat. The problem is that it never quite happened. Andrew Smith is probably America’s leading love apple historian and in his opus The Tomato in America he documents over five hundred versions of the Hero Who Ate the Tomato fable. Thomas Jefferson saves the day in one version, a West African slave in another. The French, of course, have registered numerous claims. Not that Johnson’s role is totally false; it’s just suffered an awful lot of improvement.

  Equally fallacious is the belief that tomatoes and ketchup are forever joined at the hip. To the ancient Romans, ketchup was a kind of fermented fish sauce called garum made by leaving salted fish intestines, heads, and blood in the sun to ferment for about two months. It was probably similar to contemporary Thai fish sauces and, in fact the word ketchup apparently derives from a Vietnamese version called ketsiap. In Europe garum evolved into a kind of pickle juice containing anchovies. It wasn’t until the 1800s that someone tossed in a couple of tomatoes, but there were still lots of variations until the American government outlawed all fermented ketchup in 1906, thus inadvertently giving birth to the thick, supersweet goo with which the gullible now drown their dinners.

  The true heyday of ketsiap/kecap/ketchup/catsup/catchup diversity was the 1800s. There were lobster-flavored ketchups, peach, walnut, beer, horseradish, and mushroom. There’s a good sampling of these recipes in Smith’s books, but the most divine version is still being made in the Caribbean out of bananas. This stuff is incredible: sweet, hot, and luscious. I learned the following recipe from a Senegalese cook in Paris who claimed it was native to his land, but it’s more commonly associated with Jamaica. Follow the same sterilization procedures you would for making pickles or jams, and keep it refrigerated.

  1 dried ancho chile

  6 very ripe bananas, peeled and cut into chunks

  11⁄3 cups cider vinegar, divided

  1⁄2 cup raisins, preferably golden

  1⁄3 cup coarsely chopped onions

  2 garlic cloves

  2⁄3 cup tomato paste

  2 cups water

  1⁄4 cup light corn syrup

  1⁄2 cup dark brown sugar

  1⁄2 teaspoon chili pepper

  2 teaspoons ground allspice

  1⁄2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

  1⁄2 teaspoon grated nutmeg

  Big pinch ground cloves

  1 1⁄2 teaspoons salt

  Big pinch black pepper

  6 tablespoons dark rum

  Soak ancho chile in warm water for 15 minutes. Remove the stem and seeds. Puree the bananas with 1⁄2 cup vinegar and put into a heavy saucepan. Puree raisins, onions, garlic, ancho chile, tomato paste, and remaining vinegar in same processor (no need to wash) and add to saucepan. Add 2 cups water. Stir and bring mixture to simmer over medium heat, then reduce temperature to low and simmer uncovered for one hour. If mixture gets too thick, add water as necessary. Add the corn syrup and sugar and all the spices, including salt and pepper, and simmer for another thirty to forty minutes, or until it leaves a thick coating on the back of a spoon. Stir in the rum. Remove from heat and allow to cool. Puree again and strain it through a fine sieve to remove solids. Store in an airtight container in the refrigerator for up to two weeks.

  Venomous Green

  Some people like to grow flowers. Some like cacti. I grow herbs. Right now I’m looking at my little basil bush. It stands only about six inches tall, but it smells divine—sweet and deep green. I water it carefully, and, when I pluck a few leaves for my tagliatelle, I make sure to scream obscenities at its fuzzy little head just like the Italians used to. It just tastes soooo much better that way.

  Basil was brought to Europe by Alexander the Great when he returned from a war near India around the fourth century B.C. With the plant came a little tale about a girl named Vrinda. It’s a complicated story full of jealous gods and demons and angelic seductions, but in the end our heroine, Vrinda, discovers her husband has been killed. This so distresses her that she throws herself on her husband’s funeral pyre and is burned alive. The Hindu gods commemorated this psychotic act of devotion by turning her charred hair into a sweet-smelling plant named tulsi, or basil, which they order their priests to revere. Some Indian courts still make people take the oath by placing their hand over a basil bush, just as we swear by placing our hand on the Bible, and millions of devout Hindus begin their day with a prayerful circumambulation around the household tulsi plant. In the evening they leave a sacred butter lamp burning by its side.

  The basil bush Alexander the Great brought to Europe went through a variety of genetic modifications. So did the story of Vrinda. First the gods were lost. Then Vrinda’s horrible suicide was deleted. By the final version, Vrinda had become a girl named Lisabetta who, unable to bear parting with the body of her dead lover, cuts off his head and buries it in a pot containing a basil bush. Lisabetta waters it faithfully with her tears until she dies of a broken heart. The plant, thanks to the nutrients afforded by its special fertilizer, grows so large that people make pilgrimages to visit it. It’s the same basic story line—girl loves boy/boy gets killed/girl goes crazy/plant makes the headlines— only transformed by European values. While the Hindus focused on love and devotion, the Euro-Barbarians were more interested in madness and decapitation. This more morbid flavor is in tune with the Mediterranean view of true love as a “grave madness, a powerful force that knocked people off balance and caused them to do dangerous and terrible things,” according to historian Margaret Visser. In his poem “Isabella,” the poet Keats underlines this attitude by writing that the dead lover’s rotting head gave the plant a particularly pleasant fragrance.

  Whence thick, and green, and beautiful it grew,

  So that it smelt more balmy than its peers

  Of basil-tufts in Florence: for it drew (nourishment) …

  From the fast moldering head there shut from view

  This connection between basil and insanity led the Europeans to rename tulsi as basilicum, a reference to the mythical scorpion, the basilisk, which they claimed grew in the brain of those who had smelled the plant. Hence the curious Italian custom of “going mad” and screaming obscenities when plucking its leaves. They may have been on to something about the plant’s unsettling effect. The oil lamp that Hindus light next to their basil plants represents not only Vrinda’s undying love, but also her body writhing in the flames of her husband’s pyre—a love sacrifice that started the tradition, called sati, of burning widows alive with their dead husbands. It’s still practiced today in parts of India, not always voluntarily. Part of the tradition calls for the widow to die with a sprig of basil clasped in her hand.

  Tulsi Ki Chai

  Basil is considered too sacred to be used much in Indian cooking. There is, however, a fragrant tea called tulsi ki chai which is thought to ward off colds. The following recipe was given to me by Bhoopendr Singh, of the small town of Orchha in Madhya Pradesh.

  To make:

  Bring about two cups of fresh water to a rolling boil. Add a half cup of whole basil leaves. Lower heat and let brew for about four minutes. Add two teabags, or the equivalent i
n loose tea, and approximately 6 teaspoons of sugar. Bring to a quick boil and remove from heat. Crush one or two basil leaves and add to each cup. Pour tea over leaves and serve. This is usually served black, but if you want milk, you should add it with the tea and sugar. Please note that tea in India is usually lightly spiced with cloves, pepper, and nutmeg, so you could use one of the chai tea leaf blends now available in lieu of regular tea. Makes two cups.

  The Ecstasy of Being Eaten

  The first story about Adam and Eve consists of dinner followed by sex, and writers have been fixated on the combination ever since. Some studies claim that dinner precedes 98 percent of all literary seductions. If true, you’d expect the Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber, with its 971 dinner scenes, to be an outright orgy. You’d be disappointed (it’s a rather stiff read), but that’s because writers tend to sublimate. Nineteenth-century Russian author Nikolai Gogol wrote obsessively about food, but most agree he was really thinking about sex, which he never, ever, wrote about or, apparently, experienced. His story “The Fair at Sorochintsky” transforms a tryst between an unfaithful wife and a priest into a feast of lewdly shaped delights. “Here is my offering to you, Afansy Ivanovic,” cries the woman, bouncing into the priest’s chamber. “Here are curd donuts, wheaten dumplings and cakes!” The priest wolfs down the treats while eyeing her suggestively open blouse. “Though indeed, Kharonya Riniforovna,” he leers, “my heart thirsts for a gift from you much sweeter than any buns or donuts!” In another story, a couple expresses their shared love by feeding each other night and day. There’s smoked sturgeon and kasha and fruit jelly and stewed pears and sausage and pancakes and blinis and sour cream and mushrooms and sage tea and watermelon and, of course, fish head pie. They rack up eleven huge meals every day, and the husband’s last words to his dying wife are, “Won’t you like a little something to eat, Pulcheria Ivanovna?” After his wife’s death, her favorite dishes make him cry.

  Gogol obviously had food issues—he eventually starved himself to death—but his muddling of sex with eating is quite understandable because they’re so damn similar. During both we allow a warm (or at least reheated) creature to enter our bodies. Before we begin a feast, our mouths produce thick saliva without which our taste buds would be unable to function, just as before beginning sex, a female produces a rush of mucus that facilitates her having, or at least enjoying, intercourse. During the act itself—of eating, that is—our lips flush and swell with blood in much the same way the clitoris and penis do during sex. All three, along with the tongue, are classified as “specific erogenous zones” because of their mucocutaneous nature and the density and sensitivity of their nerve endings.

  So it’s really no surprise that we’re constantly muddling together the acts of sex and eating. What’s interesting is the way the different genders go about it. Where Mr. Gogol makes the kitchen into an arena of bawdy adultery, Willa Cather makes it the “heart and center of the house” full of “the fragrance of old friendships, the glow of early memories.” Kitchens, to Cather, are temples of domestic love, “like a tight little boat in a winter sea.” Her famous novels set during the American pioneer era are fine examples of how female authors tend to write about eating as an act of sharing that is also quite sexual. In One of Ours, an old German widow feeds a man with an excitement that is deliciously lascivious.

  “I been lookin’ for you every day,” said Mrs. Voigt when she brought his plate. “I put plenty good gravy on dem sweet per-taters, ja.”

  “Thank you. You must be popular with your boarders.”

  She giggled. “Ja, all de train-men is friends mit me … I ain’t got no boys mein own self, so I got to fix up liddle tings for dem boys, eh?”

  She stood nursing her stumpy hands under her apron, watching every mouthful he ate so eagerly that she might have been tasting it herself… .

  Even when being raunchy most women authors have a different tone than their male peers. In Dorothy Allison’s collection Trash, the writer remembers her lovers not only by what they ate, but also by the sex they performed using ingredients from the evening meal. Eggplants dominate this lewd yarn, but it’s still all about soul love. “I remember women by what we ate together,” she writes, “by what they dug out of the freezer after we’d made love for hours. I only had one lover who didn’t want to eat at all. We didn’t last long.”

  It seems a woman’s take on eating is the same as sex—a shared experience that tends to fill you up. In a study comparing 489 food stories told by children between three and five years of age, sociologist Carole Counihan found that girls were twice as likely to describe eating in terms of a shared experience. Boys tended to see it as an act of killing and devouring. No wonder they later seem to find the whole thing less than satisfying when they grow up. In The Gift of an Apple, Tennessee Williams compares eating to “an act of love … draw out the final sweet moment. But it can’t be held at that point … it has to be finished. And then you feel cheated somehow.” Ernest Hemingway agreed. In A Moveable Feast the ultimate macho says writing reminds him of sex because both leave him “empty.” His cure for this depletion, an aphrodisiacal plate of oysters washed down with a good white wine, helps. “As I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and make plans.”

  This sense of emptiness Hemingway and Williams kvetch about might have something to do with the male tendency to eat one’s mate. “No, on thy flesh I will feed,” wrote one Elizabethan poet, setting the stage for centuries of skin-like-whipped-cream, cheeks-like-peaches, lips-like-cherries metaphors, a genre Margaret Atwood spoofed in The Edible Woman when she had the housewife character bake a cake shaped like her body so her husband could more conveniently consume her. The eighteenth-century author whose obsession with pain, love, and food gave us the word sadist , The Marquis de Sade, would have appreciated the thought. His 120 Days of Sodom is the crown jewel of the let’s-eat-the-girls genre and includes one scene in which two bound waifs are placed side by side in front of a succulent meal—since they can’t get a bite, they wind up eating each other. Human flesh, we are told, is the ultimate aphrodisiac. But the marquis recommends a simple breakfast: a plain omelet served piping hot on the buttocks of a naked woman and eaten with “an exceedingly sharp fork.”

  The King’s Chocolate

  There were two items that the Marquis de Sade requested most fervently during his stay in the dungeons of the Bastille prison. The first were replacements for the mahogany dildos he kept breaking while amusing himself. The other was “chocolate … black like the Devil’s ass.” The eighteenth-century nobleman considered these items complementary because chocolate replenished his sexual fluids that, in consort with those super-strong dildos, enabled him to achieve his ten daily orgasms. Indeed, it was a chocolate-fueled sex-and-whips orgy that landed de Sade in prison in the first place. But his real sin, as we shall see, was to feed chocolate, called Theobroma, or the Food of the Gods, to the lower classes and women.

  The first culture to fall down in awe before the bonbon was the Olmec people of Central America around 1500 B.C. It might have been the Mayans. We really don’t know; hell, we don’t really know if the “Olmecs” even existed. All we know for certain is that chocolate was revered by almost all early Central American cultures. Cacao beans, the fruit from which chocolate is derived, were used as money. An egg cost three beans. A dalliance with a hooker set you back twelve. The Aztec ruler Montezuma kept a billion pods in his treasury, and archaeologists have discovered caches of counterfeit chocolate currency, porcelain cacao beans so artfully done that nobody realized they were fake until a scientist tried to cut one open. The pleasure of actually consuming chocolate, however, was restricted to the ruling classes, who enjoyed it with an after-dinner smoke much as we do liqueurs today. There were superexcellent tlaquetzallis, or blue-green chocolates. There were red chocolates flavored with anchiote, pink chocolates, orange ones, black and white cho
colates. Many were flavored with wild honey or blue vanilla or “mad with flowers.” There was also an alcoholic drink made from the sweet pulp surrounding the pod. None of this stuff resembled the dark, gleaming bodies we now so avidly devour. Back then, chocolate was a drink, served cold, honey-thick, and redolent of hot chili peppers. Milk and sugar were unknown.

  The only time commoners were allowed a drop of this nectar was when they were about to die. Peasants marked for sacrifice took a tall glass of itzpacalatl, a chocolate drink mixed with human blood, just before the priests ripped out their still-beating hearts. The drink was said to render the victims docile, but it also had symbolic significance because the Aztecs believed that the cacao pod represented the human heart, and its liquor, blood. Its long-standing reputation as a powerful aphrodisiac made it particularly taboo for women and priests. Emperor Montezuma, on the other hand, apparently took fifty glasses a day and imbibed a special brew before braving his army of wives.

  Although these early Americans believed cacao incited both violence and lust, it is the love connection that has stuck through time. “Chocolate,” wrote the English poet Wadsworth “t’will make Old Women Young and Fresh/Create new Motions of the Flesh/and cause them to long for You-Know-What/If they but Taste CHO-CO-LATE!” Scientists say this is nonsense, because while chocolate contains stimulants like caffeine and theobromine, the amounts are too small to have any significant effect (aside from which, the only sexual enhancement attributed to caffeine is it tends to make sperm swim more vigorously). The euphoria-inducing compounds phenylethylamine and serotonin are present in even smaller amounts.