Garlic was also employed against earthly enemies. The Hindu warrior caste was encouraged to indulge, and both Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great pledged the plant to their war gods because they believed it made their soldiers fiercer in battle. “Now bolt down these cloves of garlic,” wrote the Greek playwright Aristophanes around the fourth century B.C. “Well primed with garlic you will have greater mettle to fight!” The principle is no different than howling to unnerve your foe, and no doubt the stench emanating from the mouths of Roman Legionnaires was pretty damn shocking since their wartime staple was a brew made of raw garlic, barley, and sour wine. The Welsh claim that a famous seventh-century victory resulted from the warriors wearing cut sprigs of wild garlic in their hats. Some say the plants merely helped the Welsh soldiers recognize one another, but folklore holds it was the notoriously pungent odor of the local wild garlic that unmanned the Saxons and led to victory. The leek (as in gar-leek) remains their national plant, and its colors still adorn the flag.
The two garlic lovers from Mar’ib who offended the Moon goddess so long ago would have found none of this surprising. They knew that nothing offends like unsavory breath, and that nothing is more pleasing than an appetizing aroma. And like all men, they knew the best smell in the entire universe is of someone cooking you dinner. So when the Moon priests told them to make amends by roasting the head of a cow in the desert night, they understood its justice. Having taken away the Moon’s appetite with their breath, they were now obliged to restore it by sending the succulent scent of roast beef floating up to her pale face peering over the desert horizon.
Five Angry Vegetables
A novice Buddhist monk once asked Lama Kalu Rimpoche whether eating garlic would prevent his attaining enlightenment. The Rimpoche replied with a parable. Many eons ago, he told the young monk, a demon drank a magic elixir to increase his powers. He flew high among the clouds and changed the color of the sea. But the gods eventually shot him down. The demon’s blood fell upon the Earth, and from it sprouted garlic. This, he said, was the birth of the Five Angry Vegetables doctrine, which prohibits Buddhist monks from eating not only garlic, but also onions, chives, spring onions, and any member of the Allium family. The following deliciously crunchy-smooth dish called Lo Han Jai, or Buddhist Vegetarian Delight, is the traditional culinary embodiment of the law’s principles because the absence of garlic or onion is thought to help monks control the angry passions. Lay Chinese like to start the New Year with a dish.
There are many variations on this soothing dish, so you may adjust the following recipe according to your personal level of enlightenment. Serve with hot rice.
1 cup dried black shitake mushrooms
1⁄2 cup dried snow fungus or cloud ear fungus
3 ounces dried bean curd stick (about 2 cups)
1⁄2 cup canned bamboo shoots, drained and sliced
2 ounces dried mung bean thread (about 1 cup)
1 cup firm fried tofu cut into 1-inch cubes
4 cups shredded Chinese or Napa cabbage
1⁄2 cup sliced carrots
3 tablespoons soy sauce
2 tablespoons sugar
3 cups water, plus water for soaking
1⁄2 cup raw peanuts
1 cup drained sliced water chestnuts
1⁄2 cup straw mushrooms
1 teaspoon oriental sesame oil
Sea salt, to taste
Soak the following ingredients individually in warm water for fifteen minutes: dried black shitake mushrooms, dried snow fungus, dried bean curd stick, and dried mung bean thread. Drain, rinse, and set aside.
If you cannot find prefried tofu, deep-fry firm tofu in a cup of oil for about five minutes, or until golden. Remove and drain on paper towels. Pour off all but 1⁄4 cup of the oil and return heat to medium. Add cabbage, canned bamboo shoots, and carrots. Stir-fry for one minute. Add black shitake mushrooms, snow fungus, bean curd sticks, mung bean thread, bamboo shoots, fried tofu, soy sauce, and sugar. Mix well and add the 3 cups of water, peanuts, and all other ingredients except sesame oil. Simmer covered about fifteen or twenty minutes or until vegetables are tender. Season with salt and sesame oil. Serves 6.
Feasting to the Death
When a member of the Kalauna tribe on Goodenough Island catches his wife fornicating with another fellow, his revenge is swift. He picks his best sweet potatoes. He slaughters his fattest pig. Then he throws a dinner party for the man who cuckolded him, chuckling with delight as the guest grows infuriated at such generosity. The next morning there’s bound to be a knock on the husband’s door, and there, as expected, stands the home-wrecker with a single, shriveled sweet potato in his left hand. He hands this to the husband. “What,” sneers the husband, “is this all your garden grows?” The other guy gestures, and his friends come out of the jungle carrying baskets brimming with taro root and roast pig and yam and pineapples and dried fish. “You think we cannot pay back your yams?” he snickers, tossing the food at the husband’s feet. “Yes, now you see that we at least do not spend all our time bonking our wives as you do!”
The battle is on, and it continues until the one who throws the largest feast is declared victorious. This behavior, detailed in anthropologist Michael Young’s Fighting with Food, is actually relatively restrained. Similar orgies in nearby Indonesia involved building sixty-foot-high walls made of pigs, fish, and fruit. The Kwakiutl people of northwest Canada replaced traditional warfare with enormous potlatches, or feasts, where guests/ foes were stuffed with smoked salmon and berries, deluged with blankets and buttons. When the guests were too full to continue eating, the merciless host simply threw food into the fire until the flames leaped ten to fifteen feet high. When the guests remained by the roaring flames—shivering with cold and sneering about their host’s miserly heating arrangements—even more food and seal fat were tossed on the fire. If the house burned down, as it often did, the owner earned extra glory, and his guests rowed back to their island in a huff; the only way for them to avoid defeat now was to burn down an even bigger house.
These are particularly extreme examples of how people have used food to express aggression, but they are hardly unique. When the last Duke of Burgundy, Charles the Bold, wanted to underline for visiting dignitaries that his tiny kingdom remained strong, he made the banquet look like a military encampment by serving thirty pies individually enclosed in miniature tents. Each pie was gilded in gold with the initial of a town controlled by Charles’s army. When another noble decided he had to resolve a conflict over who controlled the town of Breisach, he invited the feuding parties to a dinner the main dish of which consisted of two marzipan soldiers standing guard over a smoked ham. Needless to say, Breisach was noted for its outstanding smoked meats. State dinners like these were “not merely entertainments and celebrations, they were a means of asserting rank and power,” according to historian Stephen Mennell, and they grew increasingly popular with nobility as actually going to war proved more and more inconvenient.
You would think nobles must have rather looked forward to some of these skirmishes, but that all depended on the chef. When the Italian Medici family married off their son to the French princess Marguerite-Louise in 1661, the nuptial feasts clearly reflected the fact that this wedding was all about war and power, not love (the couple loathed each other so much they were officially married by proxy). One prenuptial to-do began with a huge roast guinea fowl split down the middle and opened to create a two-headed fowl to represent the Medicis’ double-headed heraldic eagle. Pine nuts arranged in a flower garnished its breasts, and the whole thing was covered with a rainbow of colored jelly. The fowl’s heads, of course, were crowned with sugar coronets picked in gold leaf. Next to this strutting symbol of Medici aggression was an elongated pie shaped into the letter S, after the princess’s nickname, and filled with layers of candied citron, pistachios, eggs, marzipan, lean ham, roast capon, sweetbreads, sugar, and cinnamon. A dish doubtless as rich and sweet as the bride herself. The pièce de résista
nce, according to historian Elizabeth David, again celebrated the Medici power in a sumptuous dish of “pigeons en daube in the Catalan manner, the breasts larded, first half-roasted then stewed in muscatel wine with lemon juice, powdered mostaccioli [spiced and musk-scented biscuits] and pounded candied citron, this sauce to be reduced to a jelly-like consistency and poured over the cold pigeons, the dish garnished with ten rose-shaped tartlets filled with five different sweet jellies—red quince, bitter cherry, white quince, agresta and plum— the jellies stuck with little candied cinnamon sticks and pistachios, the tartlets then covered in marzipan paste in the shape of the Grand Duchess’s oak tree arms, with a sugar icing flecked with gold.” There were, of course, other amuse-gueules on which to nibble, like musky confits, Tuscan spring cheeses, peach sweetmeats, and a dish of larded capons set on slices of roasted sweetbreads and ortolans and deep-fried pig cheeks with a thick sweet-and-sour sauce of verjuice. The only dish that apparently bothered to celebrate the joining of the two families was a parsimonious plate of blancmange shaped into the lady’s heraldic lion and surrounded by the Medicis’ lilies. The marriage was a disaster.
All this pomp and aggression sometimes spilled off the table. English Tudor mansions had a separate room where, after the main meal, guests would adjourn to nibble on sweets like twelve-foot-tall trifles, jellies, tarts, and liquor-soaked muscadines before a crowd of commoners. The feast was officially over when the host allowed the spectators to rush into the room and have a massive food fight that would leave everybody covered head to foot.
Using dinner to sate the aggressive instinct makes the most delicious of sense. First, put the weaponry of knives and forks into your enemies’ hands and let them loose on a battlefield groaning with corpses and bloody-colored liqueurs. When they lay near death in a gluttonous coma you, the host, pick up a sprig of parsley and nibble it with a patronizing air—you have proved yourself the wealthiest, the most powerful, the most capable of digesting death. You have won. Normally one goes to war and the victors feast. Here, one feasts and he who feasts best is declared the king. It’s life lived in reverse, which is as it should be; Lord knows, the world only makes sense when you stand it on its head. At least that’s how the Kwakiutl tribe seemed to think. “Of olden times others ill-treated our forefathers and we fought them so that the blood ran over the ground,” rhapsodized one of their chiefs a hundred years ago. “But now we fight with butter and blankets, smiling at each other. Ah, yes, how good is the new time!”
THE EIGHTH SIN
“A Cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing.”
Samuel Johnson
When Everything Is Allowed and Nothing Has Flavor
fter writing a book like this one, even casual meals can take on alarming overtones. A recent lunch with some publishers from Scotland is a case in point. It started well enough. Booze was flowing, everybody was smoking; then one of the Scots ordered a plate of steak tartare. Raw meat. I was appalled, in part because of the biblical taboo against eating blood, but also because I knew that tartare was traditionally ordered by British businessmen desirous of gaining an advantage by intimidation. I had been under the impression that this was to be a casual, get-acquainted kind of chow down. Just what the devil was going on? What was the real agenda? Then the other publisher ordered. Sweetbreads with puff pastry. A mixed message. Puff pastry is related to the mollet bread restricted to European aristocrats; it spoke of a heartless refinement and indicated he was the brain behind whatever mischief was afoot. The ordering of a peculiar organ meat seemed another attempt to disorient me, and no doubt most Americans would have been terrified of these raw meat and organ–eating barbarians from Scotland. Why, Henrietta, I done hear they wear skirts and eat deep-fried pizza over there! But I knew better (well, actually, they do eat deep-fried pizza in Scotland) and so when the waiter asked my pleasure, I, too, ordered sweetbreads, thus letting my lunch companions know that this Yank, at least, remained unmoved by their Neanderthal propensities and was as bloodthirsty as even the most literate of Scotsmen.
It’s not just paranoid writers who are prone to such overreaction. My stereotyping of the raw beef–eating editor as a dangerous opponent, for example, is typical. Many people say they avoid rare or raw meat because they are uncomfortable with the violent emotions it arouses; one can almost hear the nineteenth-century condemnation of the barbaric behavior of “bleeding dish nations” in the sentiment. In fact, the food taboos and their attendant attitudes that are the subject of this book continue to permeate almost every aspect of our lives. People seem to still think you are, literally, what you eat. In one 1989 study, college students who believed a certain person ate pork invariably attributed piglike characteristics to that person. When told the same person ate only chicken, those “piglike” traits were immediately replaced with chickenish ones. This has interesting implications, because we are constantly picking up information about one another’s eating habits via body odors that are perceived on a subconscious level. So the characteristics we attribute to certain foods—attitudes formed from beliefs that go back centuries—flavor all our social interactions, from work, to romance, to whom we move away from on the bus. For instance, when we sit next to someone eating or smelling of potato chips, studies indicate we immediately classify that person as lazy and immoral, the same belief about the potato that led the English to denounce the root in the eighteenth century. People say they eschew garlic because of its strong odor, but it was only a century ago when American newspapers featured editorials condemning garlic eaters as “moral degenerates,” a pretty clear indication that this attitude has its roots in something deeper than odor.
How deep our feelings on sin and food run is most clearly illustrated today by attitudes toward certain intoxicants. It’s a complicated issue, but what binds these two situations together is the subliminal belief that what you take into your body has the ability to radically transform; you are what you eat, the reasoning goes, so you are what you smoke/snort/shoot. This is arguably more rational when discussing psychoactive substances, as opposed to food, but a look at the history of chocolate and cocaine shows how porous that border can be. The American government is currently using a dangerous kind of chemical weaponry to eliminate the coca plant—the source of cocaine—because we consider it to be a dangerous drug; the people of the Andes, however, consider coca to be a food and its leaves, chewed, provide essential nutrients in their traditional diet. Likewise, although we now consider chocolate to be a food, when it first came to Europe it was thought to be a powerful intoxicant. Eighteenth-century Europeans believed chocolate transformed women into sex-hungry whores; the popular image of cocaine/crack as a substance that transforms female users into animal-like prostitutes is remarkably similar. In fact, the 1990s hysteria over deformed “crack babies” (now largely discredited) had a parallel hysteria among the eighteenth-century French who banned chocolate over “cocoa babies,” which they believed were being born pitch black as a result of their mothers’ hot chocolate habit (this theory, too, has been discredited). The fact that both ages allowed the devastation wreaked by alcohol to continue suggests that social and health concerns were not the real reasons for these taboos, but rather that they are/were both motivated by a desire to keep un-Christian/foreign substances out of the social body. Otherwise, wouldn’t we today be spraying poison on the brandy-producing vineyards of Europe, and not just on the coca fields of Colombia? It’s perhaps telling that the first Western war against the coca plant was waged by Spanish missionaries who attempted to eradicate it (along with guinea pigs) in the 1600s because they considered both sacred to Satan.
So perhaps Westerners shouldn’t be patting themselves on the back just yet for their rational attitudes about what people put in their bodies. Yet, it is true that almost all of the foods once forbidden are now allowed, and that absolute dietary taboos are now a thing of the past in mainstream society. The question is whether this ne
w freedom has left us better off. There’s certainly no doubt that Westerners enjoy a richer and more varied diet now than at any point in history. Yet, many people report that they find eating less satisfying than ever. Cultural historian Piero Camporesi attributes this dissatisfaction to a “profound disruption with the past,” and compares the abandonment of food taboos to our discarding of sexual mores in the late-1900s. He believes that these changes have eviscerated the meaning of both sex and eating, and have produced a tendency to indulge in shallow and meaningless pleasure that leads to a kind of moral decay. It’s an interesting comparison; sex and food are our two most basic drives and there’s a long tradition tying the family unit to both sex and communal meals. There’s certainly no denying that, as meals lose social and spiritual meaning, we spend less time eating together, or that as the communal family meal withers, so do our table manners and the general level of civility, leading to the creation of the current fast-food hamburger culture, in which everything is immediate, rude, meaningless, and disposable.
The point is that these archaic food taboos and rules, however preposterous and evil they may have at times been, also deepened our lives by imbuing our most common social gathering with meaning. Dinner gave us not just physical nutrition but spiritual nutrition as well. The laws governing what we ate also gave a sensory dimension to our sense of culture and time; one could tell the day by the smells of the special foods being cooked, which, in turn, led to unconscious meditations on the religious holiday being celebrated and its corresponding moral message. These aromatic links to liturgical time, in turn, bound us to the eternal cycles of spring and fall, winter and summer, life and death; it’s no coincidence that the month of dietary restrictions that marks the Christian fast of Lent occurs in the last barren months of winter, or that its ending with the feast of Easter—celebrating Christ’s resurrection from death—coincides with the first days of spring, when life returns to Earth’s fields. The food laws of holidays like Easter or Ramadan were a crucial part of a multisensory celebration of nature, religion, and morality that marked the cycle of rebirth; they also reminded us that there is a naturally fallow season innate to life, a lesson often forgotten in our new artificial Eden, where all pleasures are always available, if perhaps too often plastic-wrapped and lacking true savor.
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