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

by Stewart Lee Allen

  Not that anyone is seriously suggesting that the Hindu fetish derives from a deeply logical impulse. Their passion runs too hot for that. When Indian Muslims want to start a ruckus, they need merely to drive a herd of implied ground round past a Hindu shrine. The Hindus elicit equally enthusiastic responses when they “accidentally” lead flocks of pigs to the nearest mosque. There are riots, murders, then everybody goes home with the glow of sanctity staining their cheeks.

  It’s the English, however, who proved themselves the masters of boor-dom by offending both Muslims and Hindus in one fell stroke. When the East India Company, then in control of India, armed their native troops with the Enfield rifle in the mid-1800s, the weapon was cutting-edge stuff: three times more accurate and ten times as fast on the reload. The secret was the grease that encased every Enfield bullet. Unfortunately, this supergrease was made from pig and cow fat, the two animals sacred or taboo to every native on the subcontinent. The fact that the soldiers had to bite off the bullet’s tip to load the rifle was pure bad luck. The Indian officers explained their dilemma to the British. If we touch this bullet—much less put it in our mouths!—we will become Untouchables. How will we find wives? Our own mothers will disown us! The English officers wrote to London and urged that the bullets be coated in mutton fat. London bureaucrats told them not to be silly. Indian soldiers started to mutiny. Unrest spread throughout the region.

  Then out of the jungle trotted a sadhu with four pieces of chapati bread stuck in his turban. To this day the Indians claim to be clueless as to the meaning of the Chapati Movement of 1857, but it appears to have been a culinary chain letter. The first sadhu gave his four chapati breads to a village elder with the message to share them with everyone in the village and then bake four more, which in turn were to be delivered to the next village with the same message, etc., etc. Historian Christopher Hibbert speculates that the chapati movement referred to rumors that the British were adding ground cow bones to local flour so as to destroy India’s religious structure and facilitate converting the continent to Christianity. At the time, however, no one knew what it might mean, and everybody was on edge. The breaking point came when an Untouchable asked an Indian soldier for a drink from his canteen. When the soldier politely cited his caste as grounds for refusal, the Untouchable said, “What does it matter? Soon you will be without any caste just like me. You chew the taboo bullets. Cow killer! Pig lover! You are all just Untouchables!”

  The Hindu soldiers went wild and started massacring not just the English officials, but women and children. The British responded with a lamentable lack of restraint. They killed innocent children and shot rebelling soldiers out of cannons. Taking up the culinary motif, they sewed some Hindu soldiers into cow carcasses and left them to suffocate. Their behavior was so louche that the British government decided to take India away from the East India Company and make it a member of the British Empire. In fact, this early revolution probably failed only because the Indian soldiers, who outnumbered the English twenty-five to one, refused to use the hated Enfield rifles during the fight.

  Revolutions over cow fat, riots over roast beef—it strikes Westerners as preposterous until you realize that we, too, have massacred and tortured thousands over the exact same issue. The first known portrait of God is a horned figure dancing on the walls of a Paleolithic cave in France. Horns, it seems, have always been a sign of supersexual or supernatural power. The ancient Babylonians used them like military stripes and gave their more powerful spirits an impossible number, like the seven-horned lamb in the Bible’s Book of Revelation. At some point this horn fetish became focused on cattle. From the Greeks’ bull-headed Minotaur to the mysterious horn temples of ancient Ur to the modern bullfights of Spain, the entire cradle of Western civilization was once a den of cattle worship. The most eccentric was the early Egyptian cult of Apis, in which a cow or bull was selected based on certain markings and worshiped as a god. The animal was particularly revered by baby-seeking ladies who flashed their genitals at the bemused beast to ensure conception. A pagan horned deity surrounded by naked women indulging in obscene rituals—any medieval Christian would have recognized HIM in a second. Witches kissing the Horned One’s ass were little more than overwrought cow lovers. The Judeo-Christian Church had simply demonized earlier religions and turned the horned deity into Uncle Nick, first in the Golden Calf so disliked by Moses, and then in the horned Lucifer. People who persisted in this original faith were tortured, tenderized, and roasted at the stake. When Linda Blair was possessed by the Devil in Hollywood’s The Exorcist, she shouldn’t have spewed vomit and obscenities. She should have mooed.

  You and Your Beautiful Hide

  He was the most elongated man I’d ever met, seven feet tall, with ears that hung down to his shoulders. Would have made a terrier pup jealous. The Masai of northern Kenya are famous for elongating their earlobes to enhance their natural good looks, and his must have made him look pretty sweet. His outfit, however, left a little to be desired. He’d given up those traditional bloodred Masai robes and spears for a grimy guard’s uniform and a shotgun, which he pointed at everyone who dared to enter the courtyard of our little hotel in the town of Isiolo. But he was definitely a Masai and loved nothing better than to talk about his family’s cattle.

  “We only have a few,” he told me sadly while we shared a cigarette. “Ah, but they are just so beautiful. If you saw them …”

  Everybody loves a good steak, but the beefy passions of the Masai people of northeast Africa are so intense, so soul-consuming, that anthropologists have suggested they suffer from a collective neurosis called “the cattle complex.” They pray to the beasts. They polish their horns. They drink their blood. They even name their children after cows. And every night, dressed in traditional crimson robes, spears in hand, the giant warrior-herders sing their beloved moo-moos to sleep.

  God gave you to us long ago

  You are in our hearts

  Your smell is sweet to us.

  But is this true love? Anthropologists Keith Hart and Louise Sperling found crucial differences between the Masai and Hindu cattle fetishes. For one thing, the Masai eat their loved ones. Reluctantly, true, and they get the animals drunk before their throats are slit, but eat them they do, and apparently with gusto. The wills of high-ranking tribesman usually contain instructions on which members of his herd should be eaten at his wake and which skins he wishes to be buried in. In fact, it’s actually a point of pride to live upon nothing but cow products, mainly milk and blood mixed together, or a kind of cheese made by curdling milk with cow urine. The only combination not allowed is milk and meat together, and the Masai will always take a special herb to make them vomit out any milk they have drunk before they eat beef. To eat anything “not cow,” or even mix vegetables with cow products, is allowed, but it’s terribly déclassé. The ultimate disgrace is to be banned to one of the tribes that actually grow and eat vegetables.

  Equally odd is that although the Masai language has more than ten adjectives exclusively devoted to describing a cow’s charms, they appear to be indifferent to the quality of any given animal. It’s only the size of a man’s herd that matters, and the chief’s advisers are chosen not based on blood relation or geography, as is typical, but by the number of animals they own. I should say the number of animals they stole ; the Masai are notorious cattle raiders (they don’t view it as theft), and at one point owned 1 million head among forty thousand people. The anthropologists’ conclusion was that a cow is no more sacred to the Masai than a lucrative NASDAQ share is to a Wall Street stockbroker. “Pastoral nomads (like the Masai) are some of the thickest-skinned capitalists on earth,” they wrote in their paper Cattle as Capital, “and view the cattle as self-reproducing commodities … representing future consumption.” Their reluctance to sell or eat their animals is simply the capitalist’s eternal hope for higher returns on the morrow.

  The security guard I met that night would probably not have agreed. It was just one of tho
se chance encounters that happens when one travels about mindlessly for months at a time. I was trying to meet a friend up toward the Ethiopian border and had gotten stuck in Isiolo because bandits had made trucks shy about heading north. I certainly had no interest in cows. But it’s hard to avoid the topic when talking to Masai. My friend that starry desert night told me how the god Engapi used to send all the world’s cattle to the Masai on a string between Heaven and Earth. When the Masai carelessly allowed the string to break, Engapi sentenced them to a life of “gathering” up all the cattle that were (of course) rightfully theirs. He told me that in his father’s day his tribe had owned hundreds of cattle. He even reminisced about the great cattle wars when the men would form raiding bands with names like “Red Bull,” because naming the group after a bull made them more attractive to the cattle. One of their favorite tricks was to shoot arrows up in the air; when the dirt-loving farmers covered their heads with their shields, he said, they were shot in the stomach. Ha! Ha! Ha! He laughed, throwing his shotgun over his shoulder. Such foolish people!

  ANGER

  “Meat eaters are generally crueler and more ferocious than other men; the observation is from all places and all times. English barbarism is well known in this regard …”

  Rousseau

  Emile

  ANGER MENU

  APÉRITIF

  Kir Royale

  Champagne stained bloodred with crème de cassis

  AMUSE-BOUCHE

  Insanity Popcorn

  Traditional popped kernels flecked with vicious chile.

  FIRST COURSE

  Wagyu Beef Kabobs

  Free-range beer-fed beef which was massaged to death.

  Served saignant.

  PLAT PRINCIPAL

  The Sadean Goose

  Served in two styles: seared liver with wild chanterelle

  mushrooms, and breast au jus,

  roasted alive

  VEGETARIAN OPTION

  Buddha’s Delight

  (Lo Han Jai)

  Winter-vegetable stew, cooked according to the precepts of the

  Doctrine of Five Angry Vegetables

  DESSERT

  Twelve-Foot Trifles

  Candied Jellies

  Liquor-Soaked Muscadines

  Mincemeat Pies

  Plum Tarts

  Raspberry Fools

  Fruits Sauvage

  Served in a traditional Tudor food fight.

  Casual attire advised.

  In the case that the host sets the house ablaze, guests are advised to exit in an orderly manner.

  The Civilized Sauce

  Neurologists tell us that hunger and aggression are controlled by the same small part of the brain. Stick your finger in the hypothalamus region, they say, and people (or at least animals) will be overcome with an urge to attack or eat. Putting aside the question of some scientists’ kinky habits, this finding highlights how deeply the two impulses are linked. It’s classic Pavlov. Millenniums of sating our hunger by attacking other organisms has left us neuro-wired to feel the same impulse upon sighting a saignant steak as our Neanderthal ancestors did when they laid eyes on a juicy-looking mastodon: Kill it, grill it, sauce it, and eat it.

  This instinctual connection between anger and eating is expressed in a number of curious ways. Some cultures wage war by throwing feasts in which victory is achieved when the enemy is unable to eat another bite. Others have banned foods with characteristics thought to induce violent behavior, a school of thought epitomized by the cult of vegetarianism. Fourteenth century Turkey actually created an army of cooks called the Janissary. Originally members of the Sultan’s kitchen staff, these merciless killers were called the ocak, or hearth, and used a qaza sarf, or cooking pot, as their symbol. Officers were called sorbadji, soup men, and wore a special spoon in their headgear. Other ranks included cörekci, baker, and gözlemici, pancake maker. The highest officer was, of course, called Head Cook and when he decided to overthrow the Sultan—something he did with regularity—he called his followers into the kitchen and overturned a cauldron of soup, thus symbolically rejecting the Sultan’s provender and all his policies.

  The most refined reaction to the violence of eating came in Europe, which developed a style of cooking intent on removing all angry emotions from the dinner table. The secret was a good sauce, and the revolution reached its peak in the 1800s, according to writer Chatillon-Plessis, who divided the continent at the time into two groups: the “bleeding dish nations,” like Germany and England, which served their meat in a savage and barbaric sauceless state, and the “sauce nations” like the French. “Compare these two,” he wrote in his La Vie à la table à la fin du 19th siècle, “and see whether the character of the latter is not more civilized.” Along with a growing propensity for concealing our meat under a blanket of bernaise, the tradition of carving whole carcasses before dinner guests disappeared, save for holidays, where custom demands we continue to attack defenseless animals like a pack of wolves. “Cruelty, violence and barbarism were the characteristics of men who fed upon the fiber of half-dressed meat,” opined English social critic Lady Morgan, “[whereas] humanity, knowledge and refinement belong to the living generation, whose tastes and temperance are regulated by the science of such philosophers as Carême [a famous Parisian chef].” The hope was that by concealing the natural savagery of the rite known as dinner, one could wean man from his other, more barbaric, habits and world peace would ensue. Instead we ended up with the modern American supermarket, where nary a clue remains to remind consumers that they are walking in a mausoleum of death and suffering. All is sparkling white, celestial light, angelic muzak. Or, at least, so it seems on the surface.

  The Sadistic Chef

  Infants are ripped from the womb and thrown into boiling oil. There’re dead bodies, flames, and the stench of burning flesh. Men in bloodstained smocks—their eyes bloodshot from wine and heat—scream abuse at the underlings. Grate, pound, whip, beat, sear, burn, blacken, chop, crack, mince; Throw it on the grill, the head chef growls, and don’t dare take it off until it’s COMPLETELY done, do you understand?

  “A true gourmand,” wrote nineteenth-century gastronome Brillat-Savarin, “is as insensible to suffering as is a conqueror.” My preceding description of a restaurant kitchen may be considered an exaggeration, but Savarin’s comment was all too typical of his age. His contemporaries recommended that cooks tenderize their meat by whipping the animals to death. Pigs had red-hot irons thrust into their living bodies to make the meat “sweet and tender,” and eels were thrown alive into the fire for extra flavor. True gourmets had pregnant sows kicked to death in order to mingle their milk with the embryos, which were then removed and served forth. One recipe recommended that geese be plucked, basted with butter, and then roasted alive. “But make not haste,” instructs the seventeenth-century cookbook, which suggests placing dishes of water at the bird’s side to ensure it does not die of thirst before properly cooked. The bird is done, the author writes, when “you see him run mad up and down, and to stumble … wherefore take him and set him on the table to our guests who will cry out as you pull off his parts; and you shall almost eat him up before he is dead!”

  These practices, common up until the eighteenth century, were ostensibly done to produce a more succulent dish. The ancient Romans, however, were unapologetic about serving violence as an aperitif to revive the jaded palate. Some hosts executed criminals or staged gladiator duels on the dining table. But most merely let their guests watch the first course slowly die à table , according to Seneca.

  Mullets enclosed in glass jars are brought and their colour observed as they die. As they struggle for air death changes their colour into many hues. Others are killed by being pickled alive in garum (vinegar)… . “There is nothing,” you say, “more beautiful than a dying mullet. Let me hold in my hands the glass jar where the fish may leap and quiver in the struggle for life. See how the red becomes inflamed, more brilliant than any vermilion! Look at th
e veins which pulse along its sides! Look! You would think its belly were actual blood! What a bright kind of blue gleamed right under its brow! Now, between life and death, it is stretching out and going pale into a gradation of colour of infinitely subtle shades.”

  The old Romans found this appetizing, the theory goes, because they were more in touch with the essentially violent nature of the human species. Be that as it may, governments today have made these kinds of culinary highjinks illegal, and restauranteurs now go to enormous lengths to prove that their steaks died with a smile. Japan’s famously effeminate Wagyu cattle, whose flesh sells for $150 a pound, enjoy free beer and massages before having their throats slit. Livestock raisers like California’s Niman Ranch have made a fortune by claiming that their animals are not only killed in a painless manner, but spend their lives in a kind of free-range Club Med. And just as our ancestors’ science believed that their sadistic cuisine was both healthy and delicious—some butchers who failed to torture their wares faced criminal prosecution—today’s professors have conclusively proven that nice tastes nicer. Their secret elixir is glycogen, a carbohydrate found in animal tissue that provides energy for immediate action. If an animal dies after a horrific struggle, or even in extreme shock, its glycogen is depleted. This leads to tougher, more pungent meat, because when the animal dies its glycogen breaks down the flesh to make it more tender and flavorful. A cow that has died while stressed out, it seems, tastes like death. One that dies well rested is merely delicious.