This passion for cellulite extended beyond the human form. Ancient Egyptians wore discs of scented animal fat on their heads that would create lovely perfumes as they melted during dinner. But the big demand was on the dinner table itself. “Some persons,” wrote John Trusler in his eighteenth-century The Honors of the Table, “prefer the soft, the other the firm, and each should be asked what [fat] he likes.” He advised that while pork had delicious marrowlike flab, there was also a “nice, gristly fat to be pared off about the ear” of a calf. Because venison fat was “very apt to cool,” Trusler urged thoughtful hosts to provide heated dishes to keep it nice and runny, “a sight which never fails to give pleasure to your company.” Carvers distributed these delicacies by holding the carcass aloft with one hand and artfully slicing with the other, so that the juicy translucent gems drifted down like rose petals to fall in perfectly overlapping patterns onto the guest’s waiting plate.
Fat, in fact, is Jehovah’s preferred dish, and the Bible specifies that the “fat of the beast” should be burned in the temple for His consumption. We mere mortals had to make do with the lean cuts. It was often used as a kind of sauce, and every roast came with a side of grease. Roast lamb was best served with bits of quivering tail fat, which Trusler says “may be readily divided into several pieces” to accommodate the salivating hordes. Middle Eastern cultures had a particular fondness for sheep-tail fat and bred animals with tails so gargantuan—up to eighteen inches across—that mini carriages were harnessed to their behinds to keep the precious appendage safe from bruising. Tail fat is essential for delicacies like qawarma (lamb confit), and was once the secret ingredient in the best baklava. The Dutch doted on the marine-flavored fat of young herons, which was obtained by shaking fledglings out of their nest. When a foreign dignitary visited Holland’s Zevenjuizen Forest in the early 1600s, more than five hundred birds were shaken from their nests for lunch. Perhaps the most famous French fat (excluding Norman butter) is the sots-l’y-laisse, which translates as “only idiots don’t eat it,” found near a chicken’s buttock. When New York Times critic Craig Claiborne took his famous thirty-two-course, $4,000 meal in 1975, one dish consisted of dozens of the gelatinous morsels.
Truly fat-free foods, like people, tend to lack personality. Fat is comparable to the volume knob, because without it our taste buds are incapable of distinguishing flavors but in and of itself it is almost flavorless. How then did it become the food taboo of the modern world? It isn’t, of course. It’s only the idea of fat we loathe. Westerners, particularly Americans, love it to death, and they spend enormous amounts of money to create artificial replacements that give them a thrillingly opulent mouthful without the caloric penalties. For the true fat haters, we have to go back to the Native Americans. When asked in the 1600s what were the three greatest evils Europeans had introduced to the New World, the
Mayans first mentioned torture and genocide. But third on the list was the conquistadors’ propensity for “basting with lard.”
Fat-tailed sheep, seventeenth-century engraving.
Mitterrand’s Last Supper
When French president François Mitterrand realized he was about to die of cancer, he invited his friends over for a final New Year’s Eve dinner: December 31, 1995. The first course was oysters. Then came foie gras. Then roast capon. But no dessert course, no cheese: the last flavor Mitterrand wished to savor belonged to the flesh of the endangered ortolan, a songbird the size of a human toe that is a crime to buy or hunt, and is certainly illegal to eat. Mitterrand devoured it in the traditional manner, first covering his head with an embroidered cloth, then inserting the entire bird into his mouth.
If guilt is a flavor, and it definitely is, then l’ortolan is one of the world’s greatest dishes. The lemon-colored songbirds, called buntings in English, originally appeared in French chansons as symbols of innocence and of the love of Jesus. Then a tribe near Bordeaux began trapping them as they migrated south to Africa, pulling them out of the sky with little wooden traps called matoles hidden high in the treetops. The birds must be taken alive; once captured they are either blinded or kept in a lightless box for a month to gorge on millet, grapes, and figs, a technique apparently taken from the decadent cooks of Imperial Rome who called the birds beccafico, or “fig-pecker.” When they’ve reached four times their normal size, they’re drowned alive in a snifter of Armagnac. This sadistic mise en scène has transformed the bird from a symbol of innocence to an act of gluttony symbolic of the fall from grace. In Colette’s novel Gigi, for instance, the tomboyish main character prepares for her entry into polite society with lessons in the correct way to eat lobsters and boiled eggs. When she begins training to be a courtesan, however, she is said to be “learning how to eat the ortolan.” Not that it was only courtesans who indulged. The tradition of covering one’s head while eating the bird was supposedly started by a soft-bellied priest trying to hide his sadistic gluttony from God.
Cooking l’ortolan is simplicity itself. Simply pop them in a high oven for six to eight minutes and serve. The secret is entirely in the eating. First you cover your head with a traditional embroidered cloth. Then place the entire four-ounce bird into your mouth. Only its head should dangle out from between your lips. Bite off the head and discard. L’ortolan should be served immediately; it is meant to be so hot that you must rest it on your tongue while inhaling rapidly through your mouth. This cools the bird, but its real purpose is to force you to allow its ambrosial fat to cascade freely down your throat. When cool, begin to chew. It should take about fifteen minutes to work your way through the breast and wings, the delicately crackling bones, and onto the inner organs. Devotees claim they can taste the bird’s entire life as they chew in the darkness: the wheat of Morocco, the salt air of the Mediterranean, the lavender of Provence. The pea-sized lungs and heart, saturated with Armagnac from its drowning, are said to burst in a liqueur-scented flower on the diner’s tongue. Enjoy with a good Bordeaux.
What could be more delicious? Nothing, according to initiates, who compare the banning of the ortolan to the death of French culture and continue to eat them despite fines of up to $2,000. “It is the most incredible thing—delicious!” says Jean-Louis Palladin, a French chef who once smuggled four hundred ortolans into the United States for a dinner at his restaurant in Washington’s Watergate Hotel (he hid them from customs in a box of diapers). Palladin sneers at the idea that the covering of the diner’s head is to hide their shame from God. “Shame? Mais non! It is for concentrating on the fat going down the throat. It is really like you are praying, see? Like when you take the Mass (communion wafer) into your mouth from the priest’s hand in church and you think about God. Now that is what eating l’ortolan is really most like.”
President Mitterrand appears to have agreed. Although so ill that he was passing out between courses, France’s last truly great leader broke the traditional limit of one bird per diner that night in 1995. He ate two. It was the last thing he tasted. The next morning Mitterrand began refusing food. He died within the week.
PRIDE
“Poor white trash I am for sure/I eat shit food and am not worthy.”
Dorothy Allison,
Trash: Stories
PRIDE MENU
COCKTAIL HOUR
The Dirt Eater
Traditional Southern Champagne cocktail with chocolate
overtones. Served with disdain.
FOR STARTERS
Crostini di Fegato
Traditional Tuscan crostini covered with a lily-livered pâté.
THE BREAD BASKET
Pane de Indio
Bread basket of native baked goods like blue someviki and
psychedelic blinis. Served with wildflower jams.
VEGGIES
Dead Man’s Lima Beans
Fresh lima beans tossed with butter and bacon fat. Served
with a Judas sop.
THE BLUE PLATE SPECIAL
Humble Pie
A traditional Batalia pie
filled with chitterlings, sweetbreads,
and sots-l’y-laisse. Served with a Florentine sauce.
FOR THE SWEET TOOTH
Galette des Rois
Traditional New Orleans epiphany cake.
WE FOLLOW A SEGREGATED
SEATING POLICY.
The Egotist at Dinner
What I found surprising while researching the sin of pride was how wrong I was. I mean, I’m usually right about everything. The idea of my being wrong is absurd. I am always right and invariably superior in every way to my peers, above whom I reign in a cloud of jasmine-scented perfection constantly flickering with the lightning flashes of my creativity and insight. Did I say peers? How tellingly indicative of my modest inclination and my desire to bestow credit on even the most undeserving. But for many, I think, pride is a constant pitfall. Particularly when it comes to dinner. That’s why I anticipated that this section would be a tale of boorish snobs who openly sneer at other cultures’ cuisine and insist on choosing the wine. A history of France, in other words. Instead, it turns out to be a tale of racism and hatred.
Take the term beaner. The original expression was bean eater, a reference to the Mexicans’ beloved frijoles, but used as a derogatory label by white racists to suggest Mexicans’ supposed laziness and ignorance. Modern English is littered with similar expressions. African Americans deride whites as “crackers,” presumably referring to a uniquely Caucasian love of Nabisco baked goods. Whites slander blacks for their alleged addiction to watermelons. The English are “limeys” because their sailors sucked on limes (to avoid scurvy). The French are “frogs” because of their national dish of frogs’ legs. At the height of World War II, with all sorts of vicious and absolutely applicable insults available to hurl at the Nazis, the allies expressed their horror by focusing on Germany’s unnatural appetite for pickled cabbage and defamed them with “krauts” (for sauerkraut). The National Socialists, however, were unapologetic. “Also our noble sauerkraut,” intoned a Nazi-era cookbook called Homeland Cooking:
We should not forget it
A German created it
Therefore it’s a German dish
If such a little piece of meat, white and mild
Lies in a kraut, that is a picture
As like Venus in Roses.
The meaning is obvious: You are what you eat, and if you don’t eat like me—or like what I eat—you’re my enemy. In some cultures the word for enemy translates literally as “those with different mouth.” Does this mean world peace could be achieved by implementing a Universal Menu? Those humanitarians at the McDonald’s corporation seem to think so, which makes one wonder if there are not worse things than an occasional war. At any rate, behaviorists explain the rampant food abuse of hatemongers to the fact that eating among animals is generally a single-species activity, and hence a key definer of group identity. Psychologists have reported cases of clinical depression among expatriates that were cured only when the patient went on a steady diet of his or her native food. It’s a pretty good indication of how important a role cuisine plays in our sense of self, hence the keen interest in forcing conquered peoples to lose their native dishes, particularly in the United States, where the idea of the “melting pot” demands that immigrants lose their cultural identity and become “white bread” Americans both in their hearts and at the dinner table.
The Dirt Eaters
The dirt eater is the ultimate scum of American society. He or she is the outcast, the loser, the one who has not only admitted defeat but made it his daily bread, the lowest of the low, the sucker up of the ground upon which we walk, on which dogs piss and garbage is tossed. “Technically, I’d rather eat dirt than food,” Georgia’s Rena Bronson told the media in 1999. “If I could eat dirt for breakfast, dirt for lunch, dirt for dinner and a little iced tea, I’d be fine.” Bronson is a registered nurse who eats three small bags of clay a week. Not just any old dirt. She’s an epicure who dines exclusively on creamy white kaolin clay, the flavor of which has been described in truffle-ian raptures. Dirt eaters like Ms. Bronson have been around for centuries and, contrary to current American attitudes, generally have been considered quite respectable. Some African Americans still send bags of clay to expectant mothers, and over a million Mexicans every year participate in a Christian/Mayan Eucharist ceremony in which clay tablets are eaten in lieu of the traditional wheaten wafer. As in much clay cookery, the Mexicans bake their mud to get rid of excess moisture and concentrate flavors, a craft perfected by the Australian Aborigines who make a white organic loaf that is kneaded and sun-dried before being wrapped in leaves and baked. Women in northern India used to buy a clay pot that imparted a pleasant odor to their water. When their thirst was slaked, they would consume the cup itself. The Kai people of Papua New Guinea string small balls of clay on a stick and grill them like Middle Eastern kebabs; one would imagine this would go rather nicely with the original potato-chip dip the Peruvian Incas created out of a special riverside mud patch. Mise en scène aside, there are three basic dirt varieties: red (rustic), white (creamy and light), and black (comparable to bitter chocolate). The best, though, are the rare “blue earths” which are full of coal-tar air bubbles that tickle the palate with champagne sensations.
Tasty and cheap, these foods are rich in minerals; they often played an essential role in diets worldwide. The extreme denigration of dirt eating is primarily a North American attitude, and it probably developed because the food’s popularity among African slaves led to its being associated with laziness, perhaps because prisoners tend to be undermotivated, or because dirt coating the stomach lining slows absorption of vitamins and can cause lethargy and sometimes death. Some slave owners actually made workers wear iron gags to keep them from excessive snacking. But what makes the American loathing of dirt eating so interesting is that although the habit was heavily associated with Africans, the first literary dirt eater was a white man. His name was Ransy Sniffle, and he appeared in an 1833 magazine story called “The Fight” by Augustus Baldwin Longstreet. The writer describes Sniffle as a flat-headed monstrosity with oversize joints, withered limbs, and a complexion a “corpse would have disdained to own.” The archetypal white trash, in other words; a “clay-eater, his bloated watery countenance illuminated by the exhilarating qualities of rum.” Mr. Sniffle, however, was more than a mere fancy. He was a caricature created as part of a campaign against the Populist democratic movement of Andrew Jackson. There was a whole cadre of writers and magazines involved in this effort, and their primary mission was to portray poor whites as animals whose habits not only made them unsuitable dinner guests but, by association, inappropriate participants in the political arena. By making Sniffle a “dirt eater” like the disenfranchised Africans, Longstreet was indulging in the hallowed tradition of manipulating food habits to exclude a group from political power.
A Dinner Party in Kishan Garhi
The use of food to disempower has a long tradition in the American South. “The commonest of these [social] taboos,” wrote John Dollard in his study of southern racial segregation, “are those against eating at a table with Negroes.” Interracial eating was second only to interracial sex among the taboos of the old South, and a disproportionate number of civil rights battles were fought over segregated lunch counters. The American system of culinary segregation, however, is pretty weak stuff compared to the system devised by India’s Hindus, who, at over 1 billion, now constitute about one-fifth of the world’s population. Hindu society is divided into four rigidly segregated classes called castes. At the top are the Brahmins, or the priest class. Then come the Kshatriyas, warriors. Next the Vaisyas, merchants. At the bottom is the servant class of Sudras. Within these four über-castes are also thousands of subcastes (many based on profession), all of which maintain their social standing by snubbing one another’s dinner parties. Sociologist McKin Marriott showed what a soap opera this can become in a 1968 study that focused on the tiny village of Kishan Garhi, which, despite containing only 166 f
amilies, boasts a whopping thirty-six individual castes. The trouble began when the local goatherds decided to force the village barbers to accept a dinner invitation. Under Hindu social rules, this would have put the barbers below the goat boys. The barbers didn’t seem to care—more free grub for us seems to have been their admirably pragmatic attitude— but it put the top-dog Brahmins in a bind. If the barbers lost caste it meant they would no longer be able to trim the Brahmins’ hair because, as priests, the Brahmins must follow strict regulations not only about what they eat—and with whom— but also which castes are allowed to touch or even breathe on them.
The village elders conferred. A compromise was worked out. They ruled that the barbers could have dinner with the goatherds but could eat only non-kacca, or unsacred, dishes. This left the hair stylists just enough social rank to continue as the Brahmins’ barbers. The goatherds, however, were furious. They fired their local Brahmin priest and replaced him with one from a distant village. Then the plot thickened: a local Brahmin was seen eating with the goatherds. The village was scandalized. What they didn’t know, however, was that the Brahmin in question was blackmailed into accepting the dinner invite to get a money loan from the goatherds. The village eventually found out, and all hell broke loose. The Brahmins wouldn’t eat with the Brahmins, the barbers were out of work, and the goatherds’ position was so confused that they were virtually (gasp!) without caste.
In the Devil's Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food Page 7