It almost makes the notion of returning to the traditional canon of food laws attractive. A ridiculous idea, of course, for every age will develop its own taboos and rituals to give meaning to the fulfillment of our most basic need. But we might want to hesitate before so blithely discarding the ones we’ve taken millenniums to produce. And we should perhaps pause for a moment before creating new rules, because what we outlaw reveals not only our society’s priorities, it also shapes them by giving the avant-garde from Eve onward a wall over which to jump. The urge to break the rules is, after all, the most human of pleasures.
Acknowledgments
I first want to thank my editor at Ballantine, Dan Smetanka, for all his insight and patience, and Jennifer Hengen and Neeti Madan at Sterling Lord Literistic. Grovels to Jeff “Left Jones” Harris for his devoted research into the nature of absinthe. Special gratitude to everyone who contributed recipes to the book—their names are mentioned in the relevant sections—and those scholars who have become specialists in a variety of fields, in particular Stanley Kaplan, Frederic Simoons, the writers at Petit Propos Culinaire , Piero Camporesi, and many others, without whose work researching a book like this would have been pure hell. I’m sure at times I’ve misunderstood their thoughts, and I apologize in advance. All mistakes are mine. A variety of people were helpful in many ways, including David Lindsey, Zarela Martinez, Jerry Feldman, Jean-Louis Palladin, Michael Ginor, Robert Darnton, Zata Vickers, David Kileast, George Faison, Christene Gabriele, John Surinde, Bill Hudders, John the rickshaw driver, Annabel Bentley, Andy Tomassi, Troy and Paula Allen (not to mention Jackson), Pio, the staff at New York’s Veselka Restaurant and at Williamsburg’s Girdle Factory. Particular thanks to Allison Dickens for her forbearance. My especial gratitude to the staffs of the following institutions: the British National Library in London, the Indian National Library in Calcutta, the private Buddhist library in Dharamsala, London’s Guild Library, Columbia University, New York University, the French National Archives, the archives of the Mairie of Paris, and various Peruvian witchdoctors. I owe a special debt to the staff at the Humanities Library in Manhattan, one of the most efficient gulags I’ve had the pleasure to encounter. Bittersweet thanks (and condolences) to the staff at the new French National Library—may the architect responsible for that edifice from hell be consigned to a special purgatory reserved for those who put ego before function. I suppose the “will call” section of his library would do in a pinch.
But above all, my deepest thanks and buckets of love to Nina J., toast-eater and literary wunderkind, who made this book so much better than I ever could have.
END NOTES
Lust
FIRST BITE
The debate over the precise identity of the Bible’s Forbidden Fruit will never end. It seems fair to say, however, that the Latin of northern Europe, where Celtic civilizations were largely centered, used the word pomum to mean apple, while the Latin of Southern Europe used it to mean fruit. Avitus (full name Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus) was a prominent member of the Burgundy Church in Gaul located roughly five hundred miles from the former Celtic capitol at Aix-en-Provence. He uses two words in his poem: fructus (fruit), seemingly for the general abundance of the Garden, and pomum, for the specific fruit Eve eats. Most translators have determined the latter to mean the fruit we know as the apple. The version I referred to was in Avitus’ The Fall of Man, edited and translated by Daniel J. Nodes, who used a ninth-century edition thought to be one of the earliest extant copies. The poem’s text is given in both English and Latin. The conflict between the Romans and Celts, however, predates Christianity. In the first century A.D. Emperor Claudius outlawed all aspects of Celtic religion as “anti-Roman,” and as recently as a few centuries ago Northern Protestants, a group that grew out of the Celtic Church, were still calling the Catholic grape “corrupt” as compared to their “temperate” apple (the controversy appears to have had something to do with the different fruits’ methods of reproduction). The classifying of the apple as an aphrodisiac was universal but it appeared to be particularly popular in the Latin countries, where seventeenth-century priests like Juan Ludovico de la Cerda wrote “the apple to be under the jurisdiction of Venus,” while Daldanius said to dream of them “foretold of venereal fruits.” There’s a host of folktales characterizing them as love charms.
The details on the Spanish alterations of the Aztec flower myths come from “L’Arbre interdit du Paradis Azteque” and “Myths of Paradise Lost,” by Michael Graulich, in Revue de l’histoire des religions and Current Anthropology, respectively. He attributes the information on the Catholic appropriation to Codex Telleriano-Remensis and Vaticanus, which is identified by a commenting scholar as “intended to be tools in the hands of missionaries.” The anecdote of the Mayans blaming the loss of their flowered drinks for their societal despair is mentioned in Sophie Coe’s First American Cuisine. Whether or not the drinks contained an actual flower is not quite clear; scholars like Gordon Wasson have suggested it was peyote or a similar psychoactive plant. Other accounts identify the drink as being honey mead, called balche, that was infused with leaves or bark from a tree that was supposedly exterminated by the Spanish.
The tale of the Celtic apple “crucified” on a Christian tree comes from “The Apple Mystery in Arthurian Romance” by Jessie L. Weston, in which she describes a curious allegory in the Arthurian mythos called Le Pèlerinage de l’ame. It consists of a dialog about a wild (Celtic) apple that will produce only bitter fruit until it is grafted onto a desiccated tree that she identifies as representing Christianity. The illustration shows Christ nailed to a tree and covered in foliage. “Why should the redeemer of the world be represented under the form of an apple?” she writes. “Unless I am very much mistaken we are here dealing with an attempt on the part of the church to Christianize an already existing pagan ritual.” The manuscript dates from the eleventh century, but the tale appears to be much older and probably accounts for a curious series of religious paintings showing the baby Christ with an apple in his hand, which he appears to be offering to the viewer.
Some of the Celt’s sacred apple groves were located near Carlisle, which the Romans called Aballaba for its revered apple orchards. Many of these sacred Druid groves inspired Christian saints with names like Our Lady of the Pines.
LOVE APPLE
The etymology of the tomato’s name is rather confusing. Tomato derives from the Aztec xitomatl, but the Italian name of pommo d’oro (golden apple) has been attributed to a misunderstanding of pommo di moor (the Moor’s apple), pommo di morti (apple of death) and pommo di amour (love apple). The reference to the mandrake root and broomsticks relates to an unguent made of mandrake, belladonna, and baby fat which was rubbed on brooms that were inserted into the vagina, thus allowing the substance to be absorbed into the bloodstream. Other mandrake relatives were also notorious as glorifiers of fleshly pleasures, particularly the belladonna that Italian contessas used as an eyedrop in order to dilate their pupils and give them an unnatural beauty. In addition to the stream of tales connecting the tomato to Eden, there is lots of interesting art that underscores that belief. The popular plant guide Paradisi in sole, from 1625, shows Adam and Eve romping about under pineapple trees. Eve is shown picking a vegetable off a lowlying bush that appears to be a member of the nightshade family, although it’s impossible to say if it’s a tomato. The seventeenth century painter Isakk Van Oosten was famous for putting guinea pigs from South America in his painting of the Garden of Eden. The popular fifth-century bestiary Physiologus naturalis, details how two elephants representing Adam and Eve were ejected from Paradise after eating fruits identified as “love apples,” meaning mandrakes. Although there are reports of Italians in the 1600s eating fried tomatoes, this was probably a reference to green tomatoes and was not the norm, according to Camporesi’s The Magic Harvest, which mentions that the 1890 edition of Rei de cuoci calls tomato coulis only a garnish. It also contains the full quote of the Italian prelate Giovani
Battista Occhiolini urging the Vatican’s Prefect of Public Order in 1784 to promote potato eating. The list of disapproved foods by Abbot Chiari is in his book Lettere scelte di varie materie pieacvolie, 1752; he calls them “drugs,” i.e., spices, and it seems to have been a reference to the growing use of tomato sauce at that time. The sad tale of the fork-loving princessa can be found in Norbert’s The Civilizing Process.
VENOMOUS GREEN
Frederic Simmons reports that one twentieth-century census indicated that thousands of people in northern India still consider the plant tulsi their primary religion. There’s a curious coda to Vrinda’s tale. On the twelfth day of the bright moon of Kartk, Hindus celebrate how Vrinda, reincarnated as Rukmini, married Krishna, who was an avatar of Vishnu, the god who helped murder Vrinda’s husband by seducing her. It’s all very confusing and appropriately celebrated by smearing cow dung on the basil pot.
THE KING’S CHOCOLATE
The name Theobroma (food of the gods) is the genus classification assigned to cacao when it arrived in Europe during the 1500s; whether it was an appellation of approbation or a reference to Aztec beliefs is not clear. Most of the details on the early American use of chocolate come from Sophie Coe’s The True History of Chocolate and Gordon Wasson’s Wondrous Mushrooms. The chocolate/Lent controversy was finally settled by ruling that chocolate made with water, but not milk, was permissible while fasting. The story of the Queen of France being banned from drinking chocolate in public comes from the Memoires de la Duchesse de Montpensier as mentioned in LeGrand, who expresses doubt about the anecdote.
In his analysis of chocolate’s relationship to the aristocracy, Wolfgang Schivelbush points out that with the fall of the ancien régime, chocolate as a morning beverage ceased except for its use among children, often the place where outmoded and discarded customs like fairy tales end up. French social philosopher Roland Barthes coined the phrase “Sadean chocolate,” which he explains as a personification of the de Sade aesthetic involving “abundant, delicate soft food … to restore, to poison, to fatten, to evacuate; everything planned in relation to vice.” Sophie Coe was the first to speculate that the Europeans stopped calling chocolate cacao (from the Mayan ka-ka-w) because of its similarity to the slang for excrement. The speculation that the references to chocolate and Madame du Barry imply some kind of anal sex originates in my perverted little mind alone. Robert Darnton, probably the leading authority on French libelles, told me he is skeptical of the idea, but it’s worth noting anal sex is still sometimes referred to as “fudge packing.”
GAY GOURMAND
The taboos on hyenas, rabbits, etc., are in the Epistle of Barnabas , part of the apocrypha material deleted from the Bible. Various details on American taboos come from Laura Shapiro’s Perfection Salad. The quotes in the discussion of fellatio among the Sambia come from Robert Stoller and Gilbert Herdt’s “The Development of Masculinity,” in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Not everyone is so sexually insecure about dinner. The Hua men of New Guinea say women’s food is soft, disgusting, wretched, revolting. But they gobble it up when no one is looking—it’s the only way to get her secret powers.
BEIJING LIBIDO
This is, of course, only a partial list of aphrodisiacs. Apparently the rhino’s penis, not its horn, was originally considered the aphrodisiac. To be fair, consumption of both rhino horns and tiger penes for medical purposes was declared illegal by the State Council of the People’s Republic of China in May 1993. The law appears to have enjoyed limited enforcement.
THE RAINBOW EGG
The South Carolina study is cited in Simoons’s Eat Not This Flesh. It’s intriguing to speculate what role these African beliefs, transmitted via slavery, may have played in America’s un-Euro aversion to wet omelets. Langercrantz, however, suggests that texture plays a significant role in these taboos and notes that many Central Africans with egg taboos will sometimes eat them if they are very, very well cooked; while wetter eggs remain beyond the pale. While the idea that the Rainbow Egg refers to the arch of the rainbow is entirely mine, it seems borne out by other references in Aboriginal myths to world-creating Double Rainbow Eggs. The translation for the Orphic poem comes from Newall.
Gluttony
PORCUS TROIANU
The adaptation of Ovis Apalis (Eggs in Pinenut Sauce) comes from Ilaria Gozzini Giacosa’s A Taste of Ancient Rome, with permission.
COCKTAILS WITH THE DEVIL
The foodies in the Irish Vision of Merlino moan, “In recompense for the food we refused not/and the evil of our not keeping the fasts/great hunger and this/is ever on us to our consuming.” The Islamic sunken garden referred to in the text still exists in Seville. The numerological breakdown of the garden comes from al-Haythami’s Majia al-zawa’id, which also stipulates that every man’s sexual stamina shall be increased one hundredfold. Although he does not mention how this was to be achieved, one presumes that chickpeas were well represented among Heaven’s forty-nine hundred courses; the legumes were considered so rousing that merely drinking their cooking water was said to give the imbiber the power to “deflower 72 virgin goats.” The comments on bodily waste in Paradise have been attributed to Sahih Muslim Book 39, #6798 by Jabir ibn Abdulla, who states, “I heard Allah’s Apostle as saying that the inmates of Paradise would eat and drink but would neither spit, nor pass water, nor void excrement, nor suffer catarrh. It was said: Then, what would happen with food? Thereupon he said: They would belch and sweat (and it would be over with their food), and their sweat would be that of musk and they would glorify and praise Allah as easily as you breathe.” The details on heavenly sexual provender come from Koranic verses 76:19 and 37:40. Presumably female faithful suffer similar rewards, although the Koran states only that Allah will also provide “boys of perpetual freshness” to the blessed in Heaven. Whose pleasure they are intended to fulfill—male or female—is unclear. The poems cited appear in Jan van Gelder’s excellent study of Arabic food imagery, Of Dishes and Discourse, and A. J. Arberry’s Islamic Culture. For the record, the most temperate Paradise I’ve bumped into is the Buddhist Tavatimsa, which seems to consist only of silver-colored streams and psychedelic lotus blossoms.
THE SULTAN’S DATE
Waines’s book (published by Riad El-Rayyes in Lebanon) recommends simply mixing equal parts sugar and powdered cinnamon, which is fine but not quite the same as the original, which called for flavoring the sugar with musk, camphor, and hyacinth. Admittedly, some of these ingredients are extinct, but there are interesting substitutes. The first step is to replace hyacinth with violets.
Violet-scented sugar: Carefully wash and dry 1⁄2 cup violets (do not use pink or white) and partially pulverize in mortar or processor. Mix with equal amount superfine (castor) sugar and spread on foil-lined tray and dry for one hour at 50° C. Cool.
Musk: This can be replaced with ambrette seeds (Abelmoschus moschatus), which are available from various herbal stores.
Camphor: The easiest replacement is cinnamon. Alternately, there’s so-called edible camphor, still used in Bengali sweets and called kacha karpoor. You should add approximately the amount that would cover the tip of a pin. Do not use camphor oil or inedible synthetic camphor. Most forms of camphor are inedible and should not be eaten under any circumstances.
One source of fresh dates is Western Date Ranches in Yuma, AZ (520-726-7006).
ANGEL FOOD CAKE
Medieval speculation about angels’ appetites grew so intense that the Vatican finally ruled that they neither ate nor fornicated and were genderless. There are actually a variety of foods called manna, such as a quasi honey that drips off the desert tamarisk trees and that is made into a kind of halvah around Turkey. Another manna is used in making the laxative mannitol. The lichen manna, however, is thought to be the likeliest source of the biblical chow because of the reference to it falling from the skies.
SAINTS AND SUPERMODELS
While there were a number of centuries separating Jerome (who
was reputed to be something of a gourmet) and the super-slim saints of the late medieval period, many of their diaries seem highly influenced by his teaching. Angela of Foligno, for example, said she starved for years to cool her “hot little body,” and when that failed literally burned herself to extinguish the internal “heat” of lust. Interestingly, the dieting diaries of some of the saints seem as image conscious as the ones given out by celebrities; the famous St. Catherine of Siena buttressed her fasting by “devoutly receiving Holy Communion very frequently indeed,” according to her confessor. The statistics from America’s Psychology Today are similar to numbers for Europe that indicate in countries like Britain about 15 percent of all teenage girls will eat only one meal a day in order to keep their weight down. Roughly a quarter of all models qualify as anorexic, according to federal health guidelines. Girls are twenty times more likely to suffer anorexia than boys, and approximately 10 percent of those afflicted die from the condition. For information and on-line counseling visit www.edauk.com.
THE JOY OF FAT
It wasn’t just fat that people loved in Trusler’s time. Anything quivery and squirty seemed appealing, including an eyeball, “which is to be cut from its socket by forcing the point of the carving knife down to the bottom,” and the sweet tooth “being full of jelly.” Fletcherism, which entails chewing every morsel approximately thirty times, was discovered in 1898 by Horace Fletcher, a.k.a. “the Great Masticator.” It’s said to be quite an effective way to lose weight. The Mayans’ reservations on basting are mentioned in Coe, who sources it to Cronicas de Michoacan, edited by Gomez de Orozco.
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