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

by Stewart Lee Allen

  Despite this scandalous reputation, the cacao champagnes of the Aztecs first became popular with European ladies living in the New World, who liked to take a glass during Mass. When the local bishop realized what his followers were sipping, he condemned it as “a damned agent from the witch’s brew.” He then tried to throw them out of church, but a sword fight broke out, after which everybody decided to observe Mass at home until the priest came to his senses. Which he soon did, in a manner of speaking; someone poisoned him. Appropriately, it seems the poison was administered via the priest’s own hot chocolate. According to the seventeenth-century traveler Thomas Gage, who was in the Mexican highland area of Chiapas where the scandal broke out, the lady suspected of being the killer claimed that since the priest was “clearly an enemy of chocolate in the church” it was really no surprise that it had not agreed with him. This femme fatale then set her sights on Gage, also a priest, and began sending him presents of chocolate. When Gage failed to respond to these blandishments, she sent him a more direct message—an oversized plantain (banana) in whose peel she’d carved a heart stuck with “two of blind cupid’s arrows.” Gage returned the plantain with his own message carved below, Fruta tan fria, amor no cria, which is to say, “Fruit so cold, takes no hold.” The spurned woman then threatened to slip him a dose of “Chiapas chocolate,” and Gage fled the area.

  The battle lines were drawn. A few religious leaders urged all monks to abstain from the dreadful stuff. This irked the Franciscan order, by then making a pretty penny from exporting it to Spain, which then ruled that hot cocoa could even be enjoyed during the fast of Lent. They commissioned paintings of angels offering steaming mugs to fasting saints, urging them yes, yes, take a sip! “Oh Divine Chocolate!” the poets rhapsodized, “They grind thee kneeling/Beat thee with hands praying/and drink thee with eyes to Heaven!” When Marie-Thérèse of Austria (who was actually Spanish) introduced cocoa to the French royalty around 1661, everyone had a hissy fit. Her husband, Louis XIV, banned her from drinking it in public, lest it corrupt the morals of the French ladies, but this was soon overcome and chocolat, by now made with milk and sugar and scented with jasmine, became standard court rations. When the puritanical Madame Maintenon came into power, it was again briefly banned amid reports that habitués were giving birth to coal-black babies. The next Louis put his mistress, Madame de Pompadour, on a diet of creamy truffle soup and hot chocolate in order to “heat up” her amorous appetites. Pompadour, however, merely grew fat and was demoted to the King’s “confidential adviser,” a code for her increasingly desperate attempts to find women able to satisfy the king’s peculiar sexual appetites—a quest that would end only with the entrance of the harlot-princess-slut divine, dominatrix bitch, Madame du Barry.

  The Aztecs had been proven right: their sacred brew had become the Food of the Gods, or at least the demagogue aristocrats who were the deities of eighteenth-century Europe. By the era of Madame du Barry, Europe had divided into three classes, each of which was identified with a particular brew. Peasants still preferred beer. The hardworking middle class had adopted stimulants like coffee and tea. The aristocrats, to whom work was a dirty word, doted on chocolate. “Chocolate appears as the status beverage of the ancien regime,” wrote contemporary historian Wolfgang Schivelbush. It’s a connection recorded in numerous paintings that depict marquises and marchionesses lounging in bed over a cup of cocoa, or in literary characters like Monsignor, whose fastidious chocolate ritual was used by Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities to characterize the cruelty of the French aristocracy. There was Cosimo III, the last Medici, who was as famous for raping Tuscany to satisfy his appetite for extravagant delicacies as he was for his secret recipe for jasmine-scented chocolate. He especially enjoyed taking a cup of it while watching infidels being burned alive. The connection between the drink and aristocratic sadism eventually became the phrase “Sadean chocolate,” which scholar Barbara Lekatsas explains was created to celebrate “chocolate as an aphrodisiac that symbolized power: the luxurious sacred beverage stolen from Indians who were massacred, both bitter and sweet.”

  At the top of this mountain of heartless luxury, sex, and fudge sits the aforementioned Madame du Barry. The last mistress of Louis XV, du Barry was a common streetwalker who’d gained entrance to the king’s bed and the ultimate circle of power by her ability to sate his lecherous appetites. Her secret tool? Chocolate. In the popular eighteenth-century novelette Anecdotes sur Mme. La Comtesse du Barry, she helps the king get an erection with her special hot chocolate concoction and then uses techniques she picked up in the whorehouse to satisfy him. According to historian Robert Darnton, the reason du Barry is portrayed using cocoa to get the king erect was to convey that Louis was impotent as a man and as a king, “the scepter having become as feeble as the royal penis.”

  Certainly chocolate enjoyed a reputation as an aphrodisiac. There is, however, another possible meaning. Books like the Anecdotes were called libelles, illegal, politically motivated histories of the royalty’s personal lives—sort of a cross between the National Enquirer and the Ken Starr reports—that often made their points via a series of elaborate codes. For instance, in another libelle, the king’s earlier mistress, Madame de Pompadour, was lauded for spreading flowers everywhere she went, “but they are white flowers.” According to Darnton, the “white flowers” were a reference to syphilis. The message is that France’s first lady was a whore who was dripping syphilitic discharges upon the marble floors of Versailles. Likewise, when du Barry was repeatedly attacked for using chocolate to arouse unnatural passions in her lovers, it’s worth remembering that Europeans had originally called chocolate cacao but had changed the name because cacao too closely resembled the word caca, slang for feces. So when French libelles like 1878’s La Comtesse du Barry report that du Barry pulls chocolate out of her robe and “the decadent Parisians go crazy with a Roman orgy,” one can reasonably wonder if this is a discreet reference to some form of anal sex. That is, after all, one of the acts classical Roman/Greek orgies were celebrated for back then. Was this constant harping on du Barry’s insatiable appetite for chocolate a reference to some unusual techniques that the so-called Queen of the Left Hand had acquired at her famous brothel, the House of Gourdan? In the popular pamphlet Drame en Cinq Actes, the author writes that du Barry “honeyed the king’s chocolate… . Then the royalty consecrate a new verb for the French dictionary.” What was this “new act” they introduced into the French language? It’s hard to believe it was really just a cup of hot cocoa that got the most jaded emperor in Europe going.

  Haquetzalli

  Perhaps the most fabulous chocolate drink in history was the one enjoyed by Aztec nobility. There appears to have been two main types. The more sacred version involved a massive head of foam, the precise nature of which has been debated for centuries. The only recipe I know of is in The Food and Life of Oaxaca by Zarela Martínez, who claims that the secret is a special kind of cocoa beans called pataxtle which are buried in the ground for about half a year until it turns a chalky white. The beans then go through an elaborate process that results in an espuma or foam, akin to beaten egg whites, which is then spooned cold atop a cup of a warm corn drink called atole. The beans are impossible to obtain outside Oaxaca but according to Martínez can be replaced with an equal amount of white orchid flowers.

  There was also a cold brew called tlaquetzalli (“precious thing”) which was heavily laced with chili peppers. The drink seems to have become extinct and there are no recipes, but some of the early European versions of chocolate appear to be closely related. The following is adapted from a 1652 recipe attributed to Captain John Wadsworth of London. Purists will be furious—for one thing, I use skim milk instead of the water—but the combination of sweet/spicy/cold is surprisingly refreshing.

  2 dried ancho chilies

  4 cups very cold skim milk

  1 teaspoon fennel seed

  8 wedges of Ibarra or other Mexican chocolate containing sugar an
d cinnamon

  Soak the ancho in warm water until softened, about 20 minutes. Remove stem and seeds. Cut into smaller pieces. Put them and all the other ingredients into a food processor or blender and blend on highest setting until all ingredients are completely pulverized. Spoon off the particulate matter floating on top into a large bowl and pour the remaining liquid into it from a height to create a bubbly, frothy surface. Drink immediately. Alternately, strain and discard the solids. Whip to create a froth. Makes three cups if strained. Serve in chilled, gold-lined tortoise shells.

  Gay Gourmand

  In her prize-winning essay How to Eat, Drink, and Sleep as a Good Christian Should, Margaret Sidney tells the heartbreaking tale of a family watching their young boy turn into a homosexual at the dinner table. “Father often looks up from his own dinner in concern, or thinks it over during his hard day’s work at the office. He wonders if ‘Mother’ is on the right track,” she wrote in the 1886 piece for Good Housekeeping magazine. “Both parents know that little Tom should be helped up into a sturdy boyhood and not have all his girlish fancies indulged. But how can they make him love the rare, juicy tender roast beef, the hot baked potato that he now turns away from?”

  Real Men, the moral goes, eat only meat. That’s Man with a capital M: Man the Magnificent, Man the Macho, the Meat-Killer and Lord of the Jungle who thrives on “hero sandwiches” and Manhandler beef stews. No queers need apply. But if men like meat, then why shouldn’t men like men? Greek heroes like Milos of Croton boasted of eating a whole bull in one sitting and then a young boy for dessert, because the classical Greek cultures considered both dishes excellent ways to fortify one’s machismo. This was particularly true for the warrior nation of Sparta. “A seventh-century Dorian (Spartan) nobleman through his phallus transferred to a boy the essence of his abilities as a man,” writes historian Thorkil Vanggard. “Through the pederastic act the grown man’s valuable qualities, which were incorporated as these people saw it in his phallus, were transferred to the boy… .”

  The Spartans did this anally (preferably in Apollo’s temple), but other cultures believe that true masculinity was best ingested orally. At the age of eight or so, Sambian boys in Papua New Guinea are forced into all-male households similar to those of the Spartans, where they eat only “men’s food” in order to counteract the effect of all those years of “women’s food.” The food in question is sperm, which they get fresh by giving older men fellatio as often as possible. The Sambians consider this a form of breast-feeding, and when the boys reach the age of fifteen they in turn “nurse” the younger boys toward manhood. It’s a carefully controlled process, according to field psychoanalyst Robert Stiller, and if an older boy attempted to give head to a younger boy it would be “a perversion, shocking; it would be, in our terms, homosexuality.” When they get married, the men refill their manly juices by drinking the white sap from a certain type of tree.

  There’s actually a long history of banning foods that provoke not only lust but the “wrong” kind of lust. An early version of the New Testament banned eating rabbit because it was believed that they grew a new rectum every year and that eating their flesh would fill the diner with an urge to sodomize. The same text claimed eating a weasel instilled an insatiable urge to perform oral sex because the animal procreates through its oral cavities. Hyena sandwiches were a complete no-no because the beast’s well-known habit of changing its sex at the full moon inevitably induced bisexual impulses in the unsuspecting gourmand.

  The most shamelessly homosexual of dishes, however, is freshwater fish. It seems the Egyptian deity Osiris lost his penis during one of those cosmic battles way back when. It fell into the Nile, and a fish called oxyrhynchus gobbled it down, an act that the heterosexual patriarchy found so appalling they made the fish shape the hieroglyph for loathing. They even used to encourage fish bashing by beating the aforementioned guppies to death at religious ceremonies, crying, “Horus [a.k.a. Osiris] of Edfu triumphs over all evil ones.” The saying “Don’t speak to me with that mouth that eats fish” is still used to call someone sexually false and a liar in neighboring Somalia. Even so-called modern cultures still view fish as a more feminine food than meat.

  The same is true for foods thought to threaten a woman’s “feminine” nature. Women today explain their passion for green salads as a way to achieve a slimmer figure. In fact, the association between leafy greens and the feminine gender goes back to a muddled series of Greek myths that connected green lettuce with a lessening of animal desire; since women were not supposed to feel these kinds of emotions, salad became the most feminine of dishes. In nineteenth-century America, when slenderness was definitely not in vogue, girls routinely suffered a nutritional imbalance called “green sickness” that came from living on nothing but sweets and salads. Lectures on feminine foods began with fish and salads and moved straight on to dessert, and newspapers still report studies that “prove” expectant mothers who go vegetarian are more likely to have a baby girl, while meat-eating Moms, of course, tend to produce boys. In one case a teenage American girl was put on a diet of two green salads a day by her psychiatrist to “cure” her lesbianism. “I was on a schedule of green salads interspersed with prayer,” wrote “Whitey” in the collection Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives. “I was full of expectations that … it would solve all my problems and make my mother happy.” When this prescription failed, her parents locked her up in an insane asylum for four years. It was while in the asylum that she had her first lesbian experience.

  Beijing Libido

  The Chinese are the world’s reigning omnivores. They eat cats. They eat dogs. They eat monkey brains, fish bladders, and gorilla paws. They gulp down Tibetan lamas, and it seems just a matter of time before the running dogs of Taiwan slide down the national gullet. But their appetite for what Western minds might perceive as socially unacceptable shines most bright when it comes to aphrodisiacs. It’s almost as if someone had run down a list of protected species and ticked them off one by one. The recent stability of the world’s tiger population, for instance, is now threatened by a Chinese demand for the animal’s penis. You can get tiger penis in capsule form or in the ever-popular “three penis” wine (actually more like a whiskey). Some fifty thousand seals have the same bit of their anatomy hacked off every year for similar reasons, making their little man 500 percent more valuable than the rest of the animal’s carcass combined. The horn of the rhino now sells for $54,000 a kilogram in China. The eggs of the endangered leatherneck sea turtle also rate high on the list.

  But the lust for exotic erotica is universal. Seafood of any kind rates high, but whale mucus is particularly popular in the Middle East. Malaysians suck blood from a freshly decapitated rattlesnake to get going. Japanese mix the testes of the poisonous puffer fish with hot sake, and the Romans once fancied the feet of the skink lizard. Everything from cockroaches to leeches to jackal bile to asses’ milk has been vainly rubbed on weary members for so long, it’s a wonder the damn things haven’t been rubbed right off. The only men who considered the ladies’ feelings appear to be the Mongolians, who once used goat’s eyelids as a sexual enchancer; apparently those wiry eyelashes drove the girls crazy. But it’s the English who win the prize for perverse quirks—Elizabethan men found prunes so titillating that brothels kept jars of them on the bedside table. How most of these items came to be considered love engines is anyone’s guess, although many bear a vague resemblance to genitals, particularly the ever-popular sea cucumber, which squirts out white threads when alarmed. None of these aphrodisiacs are particularly effective, which is perhaps their sole virtue; scientists now hope that the proven effectiveness and relative cheapness of the drug Viagra will decimate the market for tiger penii. One species has already made a comeback. Thought to have been exterminated by China’s libidinous appetite for its antlers years ago, a small herd of Tibetan red deer was recently spotted two hundred miles from the Dalai Lama’s former home in Lhasa. Perhaps some of Tibet’s other endang
ered species will stage a similar comeback.

  The Rainbow Egg

  The Australian Aborigines say that long ago during The Dreamtime a fisherman found an egg lying on the beach. He was hungry and put it in the fire to cook. As soon as he put the egg in the flames, a terrible storm broke out. Rain fell and fell. Then the egg cracked open and out of it poured more water—oceans and rivers—and mountains and rainbows and suns and moons and stars, all gushing out like a roaring river and washing The Dreamtime away. And so the world was born. But still the rain fell, and more water came from the Rainbow Egg until the world was drowned. So the fisherman had to change himself into an angry duck.

  Minus the irate duck, this Australian Aborigine tale of the creation of the universe exists in almost every culture. The Egyptians said the universe was once an egg, which they called the “essence of the divine apes,” and that the yolk was the sun and the egg white the galactic emptiness in which we drift. The pre-Buddhist Bon cult of Tibet believed the world was nothing more than an egg with eighteen layers, an idea embedded in the egg-shaped Buddhist temples throughout the Himalayas. The Orphic cult of Greece, which banned the eating of eggs around 600 B.C., celebrated the omelet most eloquently:

  O mighty first begotten, hear my prayer

  Two-fold, egg-born, and wandering through the air.

  Bull-roarer, glorying in thy golden wings

  From whom the race of gods and mortals springs.

  All this praising of an egg might seem a bit much to Westerners, but there’s a universal series of beliefs that cast the egg as the Viagra of the gods. Near the Chinese/Indian border a woman who offered a man an egg was proposing marriage. Listless Filipino men eat balut, an egg in which a young duck has developed, to restore sexual vigor. For maximum potency you should feel the embryo’s bones and feathers as you chew. German farmers once smeared eggs on their plows to ensure fertile fields. Colored eggs, especially red, are considered particularly powerful from Greece to China, where they are tossed into the laps of women desiring pregnancy. The Koreans claim their first king emerged from a mysterious red egg left by a flying horse. Christianity’s multicolored Easter Egg hunt no doubt relates to all of this, though where the giant rabbit came from is anybody’s guess.