The Rituals of Dinner

by Visser, Margaret

  Extravagance can be the essence of a feast: quantity and richness of food, and enough alcohol to break down inhibitions. Rabelaisian dinners are expressions of human triumph over the riches of the earth. In A Christmas Carol, Dickens piles up a gargantuan feast for his Ghost of Christmas Present to sit upon; it is the expression of generous plenty, hot, fruity, meaty and bright, and specific to this particular season: “Heaped up on the floor, to form a kind of throne, were turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam.” A seventeenth-century plea for enjoying seasonal cheer had shown fat, florid Christmas being arraigned by his Scrooge-like opposition—twelve dreary jurymen most significantly named: Starve-mouse, All-pride, Keep-all, Love-none, Eat-alone, Give-little, Hoardcorn, Grudge-meat, Knit-gut, Serve-time, Hate-good, and Cold-kitchen.

  Festal lavishness is often used to redistribute wealth. Where beer plays a great part in social intercourse, being what the anthropologist R. Netting calls “both the symbol and the essence of a good life,” among the Kofyar of Nigeria, for example, or the Jívaro Indians of the Amazon, or the Bemba of Zambia, having a large stock of nourishing and convivial drink on hand constitutes riches. But beer parties have to be given regularly, or the standing and reputation—and with them a good deal of the power—of the rich man is lost; the enormous prestige that accrues to being able to invite many guests is “bought” with, and depends upon, the pleasure of other people. Food and drink cannot be hoarded like money; they must be consumed and the surplus shared, so that where they constitute wealth they act partly as society levellers, even though party giving is productive of power and influence.

  Food is tradition, largely because a taste acquired is rarely lost; and tastes and smells which we have known in the past recall for us, as nothing else can, the memories associated with them. Marcel Proust made Remembrance of Things Past, one of the longest novels ever written, arise out of a bit of cake which one day he soaked in tea, just as had been the custom in his childhood. A shudder ran through him, and an exquisite pleasure he could not at first fathom. And then he understood: “Taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest … so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and its surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.”

  Feasts, by means of structure and ritual, deliberately use the powerful connotations of food to recall origins and earlier times. They also attempt to be events in themselves unforgettable, in order to furnish recollections for the future. The food served at festivals is, therefore, not only richer and more splendid than what we usually eat, but also traditional, inherited from the past and intended to be experienced as ancient custom; the recipes and the lore associated with it are to be handed on by us for use again in ritual celebrations. Festive food is both out of the ordinary, and (if the festival is a recurring one) always the same. English Christmas pudding and brandy-soaked Christmas cake is heavy, sweet, and rich: it is eaten in the depth of winter when we can permit ourselves dense food that “sticks to our ribs.” Even then, in the context of the season’s feasting, a tiny bit suffices: once we have recovered from Christmas, we are quite happy to wait a year before trying the cake and pudding again. Dried fruit mixes require long hard work in the making and “maturing” of them: time taken in the preparation of festival foods is part of the value attributed to them, and focuses attention upon that value. There is a tendency, also, to associate very dark food, such as coffee, chocolate, truffles, caviar, and cèpes, as well as plum cake, with excitement and luxury. We feel obscurely that such strange dark stuff must be meaningful and ancient. (Fruit puddings and cakes do have very old roots, but the modern forms of them are quite recent ritual adaptations.) We are eating cultural history and value as well as family memories.

  Weddings are initiations into a new way of life; they are usually celebrated with festive food and drink, which includes, in our own case, wedding cake and champagne. Modern wedding cakes in the Anglo-Saxon tradition are huge and gorgeous creations which rise in tiers, cake upon cake. The English version belongs to the same category as Christmas puddings and cakes, being rich, dark, fruity, long-lasting, labour-intensive, costly, and heavy. The top cake is often kept long enough to be served forth at the first child’s christening party (the littlest tier is of course appropriate for this function), or at the couple’s first anniversary. At the wedding the bride shares her luck by tossing the bouquet to be caught by a fortunate guest, and by giving out bits of her cake; girls used to take these home and sleep with them under their pillows to induce dreams of future husbands. American wedding cakes, on the other hand, are sponges, even cheese-cakes: light but larger than iced fruit cakes, resolutely ephemeral, and not meant to be slept on.

  Since the early twentieth century in Britain, the tiers of cake have been lifted on pillars (upturned champagne glasses are now a popular variant). Americans prefer cakes that maintain the older ziggurat form because soft cake cannot support pillars; upper layers of soft cake rest upon a system of wooden dowels and cardboard plateaux disguised with piped icing or ribbon. A mounted, usually white-iced wedding cake may be piped with scrolls, scattered with icing flowers, studded with pearls and silver balls, beribboned, caged in a shiny sugar filigree, and topped with a nosegay of fresh flowers or porcelain figures of the bride and her groom. There is no wedding without photographs of the couple together, cutting this extraordinary cake. The ritual took hold in the 1930s, when dense British cakes were encased in extra-hard white icing, to hold up the pillared layers. The groom “helped” the bride to cut the cake with a beribboned knife or sword. Now the pair perform as a team. The cake stands tall, white, archaic, and decorated, pyramidal like the veiled bride herself, and dominating the proceedings; it is a version of the bride, and the piercing of it dramatizes her rite of passage.

  It has been rare in the history of humankind for people to eat as much meat as we do. Killing an animal has not been always an automatic or an everyday affair: it has tended to be done on solemn occasions, and for a special treat. Feasting meant meat, a meal unusually rich in protein, for as many as shared in it. But a dead animal can no longer give milk or breed young; its loss had to be calculated and deemed worthwhile. Festivals and celebrations helped force owners of animals to stop saving and enjoy; and since meat could not be kept long, other people would necessarily be called in to help finish the meal, with all the social side effects which must result.

  Such extravagance was, however, supposed to be occasional and therefore exciting and meaningful. It might be so different from the normal diet that feasts could be a trial as well as a pleasure. As late as the mid-1950s in Hong Kong, meat was a luxury, eaten only at banquets; older villagers still remember being so unaccustomed to meat that they used to become ill after banquets, especially after the annual division of pork, which was sponsored by their lineage ancestral halls. They loved the luxury, but could tolerate only a very little pork. Now there is more meat available, and more tolerance of it. On the other hand, Xenophon made Hieron the tyrant say that feasts are unusual, and that is why they give pleasure; people who can eat whatever they like every single day quickly become jaded, stuffed, and unable to enjoy holiday junketing.

  We need to eat in order to live; yet even eating vegetables means cutting and killing first. When the meal includes meat and especially if the animal is domestic and therefore “known” to us, death can be dramatic. In order to affect people, such a death must be witnessed by them, and no
t suffered out of sight as we now arrange matters; attention is deliberately drawn, by means of ritual and ceremony, to the performance of killing. This is what is meant by “sacrifice,” literally, the “making sacred” of an animal consumed for dinner. It is a practice still common in many societies. Yet sacrifice, because it dwells on the death, is a concept often shocking to the secular modern Western mind—to people who calmly organize daily hecatombs of beasts, and who are among the most death-dealing carnivores the world has ever seen.

  Sacrificing an animal means consciously participating in cosmic movement, from life through death to life. The dead creature is eaten in the context of sharing, both with other people and with unseen supernatural forces, part of the meat being set aside to be offered up to the gods; sometimes the whole animal is destroyed and not eaten by its sacrificers, so that the gods receive all of it as a gift. (“To sacrifice” in English means “to give something up” in consequence.) Sacrificial animals are usually males, which makes sense in the context of animal husbandry, where females produce both the milk and the young. Emphasis is placed in addition on the unblemished state of the animal chosen, because generosity and not merely economics enters into the offering and eating of the sacrifice.

  The “change” brought about in the animal—its death—is used to suggest endings of various kinds: the end of hostility, of impurity, of an earlier state of being. The subsequent eating then performs the function of moving forward, by incorporating the change into the life of the group. Sacrifices are used for initiation ceremonies, to mark the “death” inherent in every new start. The dead creature mediates and reconciles: it is a kind of hyphen, separating but uniting one side and another. Sacrifice was used to celebrate one of the world’s great religious ideas: that of the covenant between the Jews and their God. As a linking device, sacrificial offering was a perfect expression of the tremendous and irreversible connection. The Hebrew prophets railed repeatedly against sacrifice—but only whenever the connection between sacrifice and the covenant was forgotten; for sacrifice could be abused, as any ritual can be subverted when it is performed for debased ends, or as a hypocritical facade.

  Myths about sacrifice often tell us that the animal killed and eaten takes the place of the original sacrificial offering, a human being. Time and again the point is made that in the past, or elsewhere—or even now if we are not very careful about it—the group on hand at this violent death might have murdered, or wanted to kill and even eat, a human victim. Animals, according to this apprehension, are surrogates, substitutions for members of our own species whom we once joined in killing. Nothing so unites us as gathering with one mind to murder someone we hate, unless it is coming together to share in a meal.

  Many of the rituals of sacrificially slaughtering an animal for dinner include gestures of identity with the victim (putting a hand on it, for example, before striking the blow), the expression of admiration and gratitude (treating it gently, dressing it with wreaths, gilding its horns), and the eliciting of signs that the animal does not mind dying to feed us (the creature might be made to lower its head in agreement, or be required to walk calmly to its fate). There are often ritual cries of sorrow when it dies. For gratitude is the result of sacrifice: thankfulness for dinner, for contact with God and conscious participation in the cycle of the cosmos, for the social well-being which sharing in a meal inspires, and to the victim for bringing us together. Animals killed sacrificially can also induce a fearful awareness of the human capacity for violence. In sacrifice, violence is noted and regretted, and attempts are made to transcend it. (The modern institution of mechanical slaughterhouses and butchering behind the scenes, on the other hand, is designed to preclude any experience of what must invariably happen before we select our supermarket slice of steak, spread out on its cardboard tray under a chaste stretch of plastic film.)

  The ancient Greeks used sacrifice to express contact with—but also their difference from—the gods, who were not only immortal but capable of dining on whiffs of the smoke of burned animal bones and fat. Every meat meal began with a sacrifice; Homer used a word meaning “to make holy” (like the word “sacrifice”) for slaughtering an animal for dinner meat. The way in which sacrifice was performed was extremely important, being sacred ritual: the rules were like a solemnized code of table manners. If anything went wrong, the whole ceremony became fraught with danger. Homer’s epics provide many descriptions of sacrifice carefully performed in preparation for dinner. One such narrative, from the Odyssey, describes a ritual that was pious yet primarily secular in the sense that it required no temple and no priest; it was not festive behaviour. On this occasion a boar was selected, and some of its bristles burned as a preliminary offering to the gods. This was like the offering of “first fruits” at a harvest of vegetable crops, the first small consecration to the gods before anything can begin. (The Jewish rite of circumcision is a sacrificial offering in this category, as well as an initiation and a celebration of belonging.) The boar was struck on the head and stunned, then slaughtered and cut in large pieces. From each of these another “sacrifice” was made, of a small slice which was covered with fat, sprinkled with barley groats, and thrown into the fire.

  These pieces-of-pieces were consumed by the gods, who delighted in fat and smoke; they shared the dinner with the people eating together. Behind this practice lay the story of Prometheus, the humanity-loving god who tricked Zeus into letting human beings sacrifice the way they do, sharing with the gods yet eating the meat themselves, using fire, and learning technology and all that it entails. Prometheus was to be crucified for his pains, bound and nailed to a rock for thousands of years, until he was rescued by a man, Heracles, who was to become immortal and go to live with the gods. It was in honour of the binding of Prometheus that every Greek banqueter wore a wreath tied round his head. Sacrifice, which deals death, was always an institutionalized bridge linking—but separating—mortality and immortality. The barley groats sprinkled on the gods’ portions were agricultural offerings; in Latin they were known as mola, ground grain, a word related to “mill” and “meal,” and the root of the word “immolation.”

  As the feast of Eumaeus in the Odyssey continued, the remaining lumps of pork were sliced, skewered, and grilled. From the cooked meat yet other “first fruits” were offered up: seven portions were laid aside, in this case for Hermes and the Nymphs; they were thought of as invited to the meal as invisible guests. When the mortals present finally came to be served, Odysseus, disguised as a stranger-guest, was given the choicest portion of meat, “long slices from the chine,” which he deserved both as guest of honour and because he was, in reality, the master of the feast. When everyone was served, each diner took another offering from his portion, and gave it up to the gods. There followed the sharing out of wine. But first a little of it was splashed on the ground: again “first fruits,” this time poured out, as a libation. Only after all this piety could the diners settle down to eat their meal.

  The Jewish feast of Passover is a ritual meal which used to begin with a sacrifice, wedding the products of the nomadic pastoral life (in the slain lambs eaten) and of agricultural settlements (in bread). The bread contained no leaven and no flour from the previous harvest because Passover initiates the new year, being held on the night of the full moon of the vernal equinox. It stresses cleansing, formerly through selection of the victims and through their carefully separated blood poured out for God, and today through rejection of leaven as impurity. It celebrates the unbreakable covenant between God and the Jews; and it commemorates their liberation from Egypt after the last of the seven plagues, which struck the first-born children of the Egyptians but “passed over” those of the Jews. It includes first fruits of both animal husbandry and agriculture, provides initiation, commemorates and reseals connection with God, and strengthens the community of the group celebrating: all of these intentions were present within ancient Greek sacrifice, in its own context.

  During Passover, past events such a
s the Exodus from Egypt become present truths by the ritual repetition of them; people relive and incorporate the past which has formed them. The killing of sacrificial victims ended in Judaism with the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in A.D. 70. The commemoration continues as the annual Seder celebration, a ritual dinner (Seder means “order”) that remembers and makes present the Jewish past, the story of which is retold by the partakers in both meal and history. Yearly repetition makes it a cyclical feast, but it relives initiatory historical events: it knows time as both linear and circular at once. It is about the creation of the world, its preservation, and the cleansing of old imperfections so that new life can begin and continue.

  The Christian Eucharist (Eucharist means “thanksgiving”) was born directly from the Jewish Passover sacrifices. In it, animals are not killed because one message of the Eucharist is that, for believers, it re-enacts the conclusive sacrifice; neither human beings nor animals need ever be immolated again, because the thing has been done. Sacrifice is not abolished but included, in something larger than itself, which is done but not over. One way in which Christians can relive the uniting of the great oppositions articulated in their religion is in the celebration of what Catholics call “the Mass,” literally, “the sending” of the congregation out into the world after they have experienced what is undoubtedly the most significance-charged dinner ritual ever devised.