In Europe during these same centuries, hunting was still fairly common, and a sport for the nobility. The equipment for an aristocratic medieval huntsman always included a trousse, a leather scabbard containing a chopper, a saw, several different knives for hide-stripping and specialized cutting tasks, and spits for grilling offal over a fire before the triumphant return home with the rest of the animal carcass. Possession of a trousse expressed the hunter’s optimism as he set out; it was part of a nobleman’s personal equipment, and could be indispensable to his honour. The inner parts of the animal which the noble hunter cut out and ate at the site of the kill were called in French the parties nobles; they included the brain, the dark, bloody, shiny bits which were clearly essential to the animal’s life, and sometimes the genitals. The “vitals,” apart from the brain, are equated in many languages with personal courage: in English, a brave man has “pluck” and “guts,” whereas a coward could be mocked as “lily-livered.” Hunters, eating the viscera of their victims, were consuming the essence of strength and bravery.
These once-precious animal parts seem to have become devalued in England towards the end of the eighteenth century; in about 1800, city slaughterhouses were giving them away to the poor. Hunting was no longer economically important as an ordinary source of protein. “Organ meats” were difficult to transport to points of sale while still fresh (they had very poor “shelf life”). Their fall from favour was so precipitous that, for instance, an old collective term for the viscera, “numbles” (“umbles” in some dialects), came to be thought of as a version of “humble.” A person, therefore, who “ate humble pie” (with a filling of kidneys, liver, and so on) was joining the ranks of those whose status was low. Butchers called viscera “offal” (they fall off in the butchering); and “garbage,” meaning viscera and entrails, began to signify refuse of every kind. In any case, there was in Anglo-Saxon countries an increasing distaste for thinking about what meat had been before it was slaughtered; and the trouble with the inner organs is that each of them has its own peculiar texture and shape, and every one has a function that is all too familiar. The ancient distinction between “meat” and “innards” was maintained, although the value system was reversed. Offal tends still to be called by a term which covers all of the inner organs; such terms preserve the distinction between “innards” and “meat,” but euphemistically help the mind to slide past the particularities by refusing to name them.
In the modern ceremony of the barbecue, there remains an echo of the ancient ritual of the impromptu meal at the scene of the hunt. Barbecues are special; they are weekend treats, celebrations of good weather. The fare is “party” and “picnic” as opposed to “everyday.” These are therefore occasions when men may jocularly don aprons and set about enjoying the process of cooking. Barbecues begin with male-dominated firemaking. They take place outside the house—though not necessarily very far from it—and the “masculine” live fire is accompanied by the special grids, knives, and skewers. The women tend to take care of the salads, the plates, the dessert, and washing the dishes afterwards.
In many societies that depend upon success in the hunt for survival, the sharing out of meat becomes an exciting event, with enormously complex rules and meanings applied to it. Among the Copper Eskimo of the Canadian North, for example, the division and distribution of the flesh of a ringed seal is turned into a sophisticated expression, offered by the lucky and the skilful, of friendship, generosity, and orderly care for the good of the entire group. Any ringed seal caught must be shared. Men in the village belong to a piqatigiit, or system of associates, membership in which is linked directly to the body parts of the seal. When a dead seal is towed into the village by one of the hunter’s dogs, the men who are related in this manner (it is a matter of friendship, not kinship) send their sons, daughters, or wives to the returning victor’s house with skin buckets for the parts of the seal that are due to them. There are flipper associates (entitled to hind flippers from the animal), liver companions, hind-quarter companions, associates of the sides of the breast, and so on. As many as fourteen bonds of friendship may be expressed by the body of each ringed seal. The hunter keeps a portion of meat for himself and his family, and gives everything else away; if associates are absent from the village, their pieces go to villagers not entitled to them by special companionship. Sharing, the ethnographers report, is strictest when returns from the hunt are just equal to food needs, or fall behind them.
Other hunting groups have similar systems of food distribution. Australian Aborigines, for instance, are very particular about how they cut and share the kangaroo. All their meat-division and cooking techniques are laid down in traditional law, established by the creation ancestors. A kangaroo is split in two parts—body and tail—and fitted into a pit with live coals surrounding its flesh. Earth is piled on top, leaving only the kangaroo’s feet protruding. Once the cooking is finished, the pit is uncovered and the meat is cut along the ritually correct dividing lines by the hunter, who hands out the meat which is traditionally their portion to his male relatives. The hunter himself might get very little: he relies on those he is feeding to give to him when they are successful in a later expedition. Women wait in the background to be given pieces of meat by their menfolk; this ceremony has been described as “men’s time.”
In south-eastern Algeria, non-nomad Touaregs club together to buy and share out a camel. The heart of the animal goes to the village chief, and a kidney to the scribe, or to the chief if he is lettered. The rest is divided into eight parts, and then the systematic ensurance of equality in the shares begins. Each part is divided also into eight, and eight piles of meat are formed, with pieces from all the original eight sections in each. Several people will contribute the money to buy each pile of meat. These groups now choose tokens to represent them (a stone, a knife, a straw); then someone—preferably a child—is blindfolded and led to the mounds of meat in turn, to drop one token at each heap. The group must accept its meat as a fair share; they then set about dividing it among themselves. The butchers who are essential to this elaborate performance are not paid, but allowed to buy fat from the hump, liver, and tail; the burier of unwanted remains receives the right back foot; indivisible parts like the head and the skin must be sold separately.
Civilized people are easily reminded, when they share out the flesh of animals, that they have killed, or sacrificed, in order to feed themselves. An animal, moreover, has an awkward shape: it has only two buttocks, two hind legs, a limited number of ribs. The quality of the meat varies greatly from cut to cut; forethought must be given to how people are to be served and satisfied. Hierarchy can be expressed by the allocation of pieces in descending order of desirability, and even of size. Meat is good to use for this solemn ceremony because it is rich and expensive; it used to be eaten comparatively rarely, and then on special occasions. Until recent times, meat has had exceptionally poor keeping qualities, which meant that it had to be disposed of quickly—all of it tended to be divided out in one operation. For thousands of years it was placed before the family as a result of male enterprise and triumph; and men, with their knives, have insisted on carving it up, and even cooking it before the expectant and admiring crowd. Vegetables, on the other hand, were most often the result of the steady, unexalted, cooperative, and often mainly female work required for collecting them, or for tending them in the fields. Vegetables cost plenty of effort and care, but far less guilt, drama, and intensity than that which attends the catching and slaughtering of animals. A joint of meat served for dinner restricts the number of guests invited; vegetarian meals permit far more elastic arrangements because they are easily shared and extended.
Sharing meat can be made into an expression of egalitarian ideals—but only if the flesh is reduced to small fragments, as relish, soup, or stew to be eaten with vegetables, as pie filling and stuffing, or as minced and re-formed meat cakes. A whole beast cut up in public, on the other hand, expresses the unity of the group that consumes
it; but if the pieces offered retain their character and everyone gets something different, then meat division can dramatize at the same time the individuality and the ranking of everybody at dinner. The hunters who gathered round to roast the fresh innards of their prey felt themselves to be a close inner group, both set apart and deserving of their privilege. (They also, as Walter Burkert points out, shared the guilt of the killing.)
Ancient Greeks normally dined on red meat only when the animal had first been ritually sacrificed. A sacrificial beast was usually a domestic animal, chosen as a perfect male specimen among the herds and flocks; meat-eating after sacrifice was, in Greece as in ancient Israel, an integral part of a farming, rather than a hunting, economy. After the killing (about which the Greek texts are always extremely euphemistic—vase paintings may depict mythic scenes of human sacrifice, and also killing as a climax to the hunt, but they never show an ox being ceremonially put to death, even in otherwise detailed sacrificial scenes), the animal was laid on its back and the mageiros, the “knife-wielder” or butcher, slit its torso up the middle. Heart, lungs, and liver were removed in one piece, then the spleen; the digestive organs, stomach, and intestines were set aside to be turned later into sausages; and finally the kidneys were revealed and extracted.
The liver was immediately examined for its prophetic properties. The lobes, the portal vein, the gall sac, the shine of the liver’s surface were all portentous. The backbone and thigh bones were cut out and covered with fat, to be burned in the fire for the gods, who doted on the aroma of their smoke. The priests and other important people present at the sacrifice made shishkebabs of the prized viscera, grilled them at the fire, and ate them. Occasionally the priests would later cook and eat the unburned offerings set aside for the gods; they received the animal skins in payment for their office. The bulk of the other, ordinary meat was set aside to be eaten later by hoi polloi. Hierarchy having been given its due in the eating of the sacred innards (some etymologists believe that the very word “hierarchy,” in Greek “charge over sacred things,” came from priestly superintendence over animal sacrifices), the rest of the meat was cut up into fairly equal pieces and threaded onto skewers to be carried off and sold or eaten elsewhere.
The Greeks also knew the carving of a whole sacrificed animal, skinned and roasted, before the assembled company of diners. Here the group was clearly ranked according to the pieces allotted; these kept their whole original shape rather than being cut into collops. An especially good piece, such as a large chine of pork, was a geras, or gift denoting honour. The privilege represented by a piece of meat was expressed by the superiority in tenderness and savour of the portion, its size, or its singularity. (The viscera were prized for existing in smaller quantity than the rest of the meat, and also because there is only one heart and one liver; each of these could be presented to someone as a special privilege.)
The ancient Greek word for “fate,” moira, means literally a portion, a piece of meat from the ritually sacrificed animal. This serving expressed the recipient’s honour among the assembled guests, their estimation of him: it amounted symbolically to what we still call his “lot” or his “portion” in life, his “slice of the pie.” A moira, as portion of a whole, could also be a piece of land, or a section of the universe. When the three eldest brothers, the greatest of the Olympian gods, drew lots for the three main divisions of the world, Zeus received the heavens, Poseidon the sea, and Hades the Underworld (Earth was herself a goddess, or, belonging to Gaia, was a portion already “served”). A shared sacrificial meal was a dais or “division,” from the verb “to cut up”; it is meat which informs the metaphor. The distribution of meat, at a civilized meal or dais, was supposed always to be “equal.” This meant either that everyone received the same amount (an egalitarian arrangement), or that everyone’s part was equal to what he deserved (which is hierarchical or meritocratic). Both points of view might be expressed in the same meal, as we have seen, by the exclusive allocation of the “innards” to a privileged group, as opposed to the equal sharing of the “meat.” The slight to one’s honour which could be suffered through getting a portion of meat beneath one’s due can be represented by the rage of Heracles when, after the completion of his Labours, he was invited to dinner but served a “lower” helping of meat than those given to the three sons of his tormentor, Eurystheus. He slew them all.
Fate or moira is closely linked to the idea of drawing lots (as in the myth of the dividing up of the world), and to oaths and curses—words which create ineluctable events in the future. When Atreus chopped up his brother’s children and served them up to their father as his portion at dinner, Thyestes cursed his murderous brother and all his house. This curse was to operate relentlessly for generations, as the fate of the House of Atreus. Thyestes accompanied his utterance with its perfect physical embodiment, the destruction of the dinner-time civilities: he kicked over the table and sent the dishes crashing to the floor.
In medieval France, there appears to have been a fashion for swearing at dinner over the meat before it was carved. A “great bird” was chosen for this solemn ceremony: a peacock, swan, heron, or crane—or a pheasant, as in the famous Vow of the Pheasant made by Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy, at Lille in 1454. The guests one by one made a vow over the fowl, in the presence of their fellow diners and co-conspirators. The bird was then cut up and everyone ate their portions. (At Philip’s Pheasant Banquet, the bird sworn over was alive and wearing a jewelled collar. It does not appear to have been eaten—at least not immediately.) The vow was intended to be irrevocably binding and, as such, fateful.
A peacock, the “greatest” of birds, was prepared for an important banquet by being skinned carefully so that its feathered mantle remained intact. The flesh was then stuffed, roasted, “endored” or gilded with egg yolk, and sewn back into its feathers, with the tail splendidly raised, the feet gilded, and the head, complete with its aigrette, restored. On especially magnificent or dramatic occasions the peacock, holding in its beak a wad of flaming wool, was brought into the hall on a gold or silver dish by a beautiful young female member of the host’s family, and presented to the most honoured male guest. He had to pronounce a vow, holding his hand stretched over the bird—that he would, for instance, be the first to strike an enemy with his spear, or the first to plant his standard for the honour of his lady upon a besieged town—and he then had to demonstrate, before the assembled company, his skill at carving the fowl over which he had sworn. The carver might be expected to wear an iron band on his arm thereafter, to symbolize his fateful vow and remind him constantly of it.
A carver, where meat is ceremonially divided before the company, is the focus of everyone’s attention. In the Middle Ages he was one of the lord’s friends, a nobleman, a relative, perhaps his son. The carver alone handled unsheathed knives before the eating began; and only he could keep his hat on where all the other servers at table had to remain bare-headed in deference to the diners. He walked into the hall at the head of a procession, lit with flaming torches in winter, which included the Taster (sometimes the Carver carried out the tasting as well as the cutting), the Cup-Bearer, the Butler (the “bottler,” who saw to the drink), and the Panter. The last-named official was in charge of the pantry and the bread (pain). He too wielded knives: one for large loaves, a special parer, a trencher knife, and a “mensal” knife for cutting the value-laden upper crust off the bread and presenting it to his lord.
To cut and present meat, first to the lord and then to the company according to their rank, was to “do the honours.” Honour, writes Giles Rose in 1682, “is more Spiritual than the material,” and the carver was therefore higher in rank than “those that employ themselves in nothing but what is meerly corporal.” Since his role was theatrical and ornamental as well as practical, he should be a “handsom comly person of a good behaviour and well clad”; one sufficiently educated in the niceties of portions; and sensitive enough to “study the appetite of his Master, to the end tha
t he may always present him with that bit which is most agreeable to his Princes Stomach.” By the sixteenth century, the “prince’s” carver was a professional, well born but not necessarily of the nobility. He had, if he was to hold a position at an Italian court, to learn his craft and perform it with the panache and the skill of a juggler.
A manual for carvers, from the pen of Vincenzo Cervio (1581), is one of the earliest absolutely specific and detailed instruction books we possess in any field. Cervio takes nearly two thousand words to explain how to divide a pheasant in four, and four thousand for the carving of six platefuls of peacock. He “does not wish to discuss” the carving of an old, tough, and ill-adorned peacock, except to say that in such a case you should not bother to try cutting off slices of anything but breast, and you could leave it on its dish for carving, in the dreary manner of the French or the Germans.
No carver worthy of the name, in Cervio’s book, cut up meat on a dish. He lifted the entire joint or fowl up into the air, speared on the carving fork held in his left hand, and sliced pieces off it by wielding an extremely sharp knife in his right; wafers of meat fell to the small plate underneath (a tondo: Italian plates were round), in perfectly organized patterns—not overlapping too much, warns Cervio, so that the plateful would look “more ample.” A swift tidying of the slices with the knife-point was permissible, before salt, lifted from its receptacle with another knife, was sprinkled over them with a flourish and plenty of grazia, and the dish presented to the diner.
As a carver, one had first to decide exactly how to divide a bird among the number of people to be served; and then there were questions of who got what. It was best to give pieces from several parts of the body to each—say a bit of breast, some wing, some thigh. It is clear that noble diners ate very sparingly of each of the many animals which figured at any meal: merely slivers and tiny morsels of as many different “honourable” meats as possible. Birds were almost never completely consumed at table; often only the breast was eaten, and the rest was removed to the kitchen, perhaps to be made into soups, and perhaps to feed servants and retainers. Good carving, Grimod de la Reynière was to point out in 1808, permitted great economy; messy carving caused waste.
The Rituals of Dinner Page 29