In the Devil's Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food
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This belief puts our horror of flatulence in a new light—does it derive from the same “horror” we feel when we see (or hear or smell) a ghost? A number of our rules of etiquette make it seem rather likely. We think it merely good manners to cover our mouths when yawning, but the gesture was originally meant to prevent evil spirits from slipping inside. Likewise, we say “Gesundheit!” when someone sneezes to prevent devils from jumping into the breach. At any rate, Pythagoras’ peers viewed the situation with the utmost gravity. The philosopher himself compared eating beans to biting off the head of one’s mother, and he apparently allowed himself to be beaten to death rather than escape by walking across a field of fava beans. Historian Reay Tannahill seems to believe that the Greeks let their fields go fallow rather than plant the haunting vegetable.
Equally interesting is how the rise of Christianity shaped the culinary treatment of the bean. Early Christian Romans cooked fava or broad beans with sage and then tossed them in olive oil on the Day of the Dead (November 2). A distinctly adult, serious dish and quite delicious. But as the pagan gods became the stuff of fairy tales this dish morphed into a sweet called Fava alla Romana o dei morti because sweets, like fairy tales, are the provender most associated with childhood. It was traditional to leave a bowl of these morti out overnight for the spirits, with the children inheriting whatever the ghosts left. Not that there weren’t more adult manifestations. Romans continued to spit out black beans at midnight ceremonies while chanting “Deliver me from evil, protect me and mine from death, oh ye beans!” As late as the sixteenth century, Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti called the practice of giving beans to a dead person’s relatives heresy. Even the “bean-fests” British employers still throw for departing employees are said to derive from the Celts’ traditional funerary food called Beano. And while it’s hard to believe they’re related, there are similar practices in Buddhist countries, and many Japanese still scatter beans around the house to drive out bad spirits during their Setsubun winter festival—“Oniwasoto, Fukuwa-uchi!” shouts Dad as he tosses red beans about (Devils outside, good luck inside!).
So this, I thought, was the context of W.A.R.’s “beaner” remark about Mexican immigrants. What I’d taken to be teenage racism was actually a richly allusive analogy with multiple interpretations; W.A.R. was obviously a group of erudite Classicists whose obscure pre-Christian allusions had been disgracefully misrepresented by the popular press. But when I called their headquarters to inquire, there was no answer. It appears the White Aryan Resistance has gone out of business.
King’s Cake
Le gâteau de roi, or the King’s Cake, has the most convoluted, scandal-ridden history in the Annals of European pastry. The trouble comes from the tradition of hiding a bean in the cake. The child who gets the slice with the hidden legume is crowned king for a day. It sounds innocuous, but the attendant rituals are loaded with references to Pythagorean beliefs, like addressing the child as Apollo (Pythagoras was known as the Thigh of Apollo) and treating him or her as an oracle. Christians sanitized these pagan overtones by restricting the cake’s consumption
Spirit in the Bean porcelain fava in a fin de siècle Paris catalog.
to the Epiphany celebration following Christmas. The bean was then replaced with a porcelain figurine that showed a ghostly face emerging from the tip of a fava bean. When this failed to appease the priests, the bean figurine was changed to a crowned head in honor of the biblical three kings. This made the priests happy, but the politicians began to raise a fuss during the French Revolution when a king’s head, whether in a cake or on the guillotine, became controversial. In 1794 the mayor of Paris urged the people to end the holiday and “discover and arrest the criminal patissiers and their filthy orgies which dare to honor the shades of the tyrants!” The French, to their credit, ignored him, and he had to settle for renaming the cake le Gâteau des Sans-Culottes or “the Cake of the Men-Without-Pants,” in honor of the illustrious beggars of Paris.
Almost every European country has a version of the cake, from the port-flavored bolo rei of the Portuguese to the fruitcake preferred by the English. The following recipe is from La Bonne Cuisine de Madame E. Saint-Ange, who claimed it came from “a good old cookery book from the time of Louis XV.”
13⁄4 cups (550 grams) flour
1 teaspoon (10 grams) salt
2 tablespoons sugar (optional)
7 ounces (250 grams) unsalted butter
1 egg yolk for dough (optional)
2 egg yolks, beaten with 2 tablespoons water for glazing
About 1 cup water
1 dried fava, broad, or lima bean
Mix flour, salt, and sugar in a slightly chilled bowl. Make a well in the flour and put the slightly softened butter into it with the egg yolk (optional). With your fingers, roughly mix the butter and flour, adding water as needed, gradually incorporating the flour until you have a firm dough. If it is too wet, add more flour. Do not knead. Gather into a ball, flour lightly, wrap, and let rest in a cool place for forty-five minutes.
On a floured surface roll out the dough into a rectangle about 24‘ × 8‘. Fold in thirds, putting the top third on the middle, and then the bottom third on top of that. Let rest in a cool place ten minutes. Then turn it 90 degrees (like turning a book sideways), roll it out again and fold in the same manner. Again, let rest ten minutes and repeat. Now (it should be folded into thirds at this point) fold the corners up over the dough to form a round pad. Roll out to a disc about 3⁄4 inch thick. Notch rim with knife, and trim to a circle. With the point of the knife make a slit in the edge and insert the bean and reseal. Place on an ungreased, unfloured baking sheet. Brush the top with an egg glaze and score with grillwork or other design (the royal fleur-de-lis would be most appropriate). Prick through in several places.
Bake in an oven at 450°F for thirty to thirty-five minutes. For a sweeter glaze, dust with powdered sugar a few minutes before removing. Cool on a rack and make sure to eat it while warm.
SLOTH
“It is not in the least surprising that when ancestors are forgotten, fathers eliminated and mothers absent, young people frequent snack bars to find that food of orphans, adventurers, and travelers, the sandwich… . the tombstone of taste. When the fire dies in the hearth, the funereal delights of cold snacks come into their own.”
Piero Camporesi,
The Magic Harvest
SLOTH MENU
APÉRITIF
Le Fée Vert
Absinthe mixed with champagne.
POTAGE
Consommé Spartacus
The traditional soup of ancient Sparta: a demitasse of
intensely concentrated broth drizzled with fresh boar blood
and Xeres vinegar. Garnished with fleur de sel.
with
Pain au Turgot
A basket of specialty breads including the bien brun
croutons of Philippe Cordelois.
The famous green breads of Anne-Robert Turgot
are available with twenty-four hours notice.
PREMIER PLAT
Escargots au Lentment
Slow-cooked snails served slumbering under a puff-pastry
dome. With creamy cognac sauce.
PLAT PRINCIPAL
Boeuf en Croûte
Cornfed beef encased in a rich mollet crust. Stuffed with
mushroom duxelles and served with a red-wine reduction and
caramelized shallots.
with
Mashed “Couch” Potatoes
In the style of Joël Robuchon.
DESSERT
Nipples of the Virgin
Breast-shaped pastry oozing with a rich cream/chocolate
filling. Served warm.
DIGESTIF
John Barleycorn Brandy
American vintage (1920).
AN EVENT CATERED BY VATEL!
The Job of Eating Well
Only the most perverse of worlds would rank the pleasure of an afternoon nap among the
greatest of sins. Can it really compare to murder? Does the indolent bum really rank down with the out-of-control capitalist? Sloth is a victimless crime if ever there was one, and yet, of the deadly seven, it is the vice most devoutly abhorred in modern America, at least judging by the rewards doled out to the professional practitioners of lust and pride. The gentle sloths among us, alas, receive no comparable compensation.
The practice of criminalizing foods that engender laziness first appeared in the legal code of the seventh-century B.C. Spartan civilization. The Spartans did everything they could to make dinner pure hell. Meals were served in communal mess halls and in portions designed to leave citizens hungry. Their national dish was a deliberately revolting “black broth,” made of pork stock, blood, vinegar, and salt. Citizens whose generous paunches suggested covert snacking were thrown out of the country. Foreign ambassadors who dined with undue elegance were also expelled. The idea behind this madness, according to Plutarch, was to stop citizens from “spending their lives … laid on costly couches at splendid tables, delivering themselves up to the hands of their tradesmen and cooks, who fatten them in corners like greedy brutes.” The code’s creator, Lycurgus, took his creed so seriously he actually starved himself to death.
It’s a notion that recurs regularly throughout Western history. The nineteenth-century English almost banned the potato for fear it would turn its working class into fornicating hobos, just as the French aristocrats outlawed soft white bread to ensure a hardy peasantry. Modern America has raised this technique to technological perfection; consider, for example, “convenience foods” like Oscar Meyer’s infamous Sack of Sauce in a Can of Meat and premade chocolate sundaes designed so that the microwave melts the sauce but leaves the ice cream intact. TV dinners. McDonald’s. Despite the technological differences between modern America and Sparta, the principle of using diet to create an ideal working class is identical. Where the Spartans banished citizens who enjoyed eating, modern America just pays them less—about 7 percent among female workers. Both today’s fast-food outlets and Spartan mess halls are/were designed to discourage lingering over dinner and eliminate the need for people to “waste” their time cooking for the family. And, like the Spartans’ legendarily bad food, many of these convenience foods are so unpleasant they make even work look good. They’re also immensely profitable for the corporations who produce them. Perfect: American workers now pay more money for worse food so they can hurry back to jobs they hate.
The Spartans wanted to create a society of superwarriors because they believed waging war was the only worthwhile labor. They succeeded, and their fifth-century B.C. invasion of Athens helped end Greece’s Golden Age of democracy, philosophy, and art. But before they fell, at least one Greek sybarite did a gastronomic tour of Sparta. “As he lay on the wooden benches and ate with them he remarked that he had always before been astounded to hear of the Spartan’s courage,” noted historian Athenaeus. “But now he did not think they were in any respect superior to other peoples … for surely the most cowardly man in the world would prefer to die rather than endure living that sort of life.”
The Wonderful World of English Cookery
Food lovers have long regarded the English cook with awe. His boiled cabbage and overcooked beef. Those cannonball puddings. There is no foodstuff on Earth he has not reduced to an overcooked, flavorless monstrosity. But why? The French believe it’s genetic. “The Englishman is naturally a glutton stuffed with beefsteaks and plum pudding, a boa quasi-asphyxiated by a gazelle he just swallowed,” opined scholar Jean Saint-Arroman in 1852, “whereas the Frenchman is naturally sober … so it is to us [the French] the sun, fine weather and the most precious gifts of nature. To the English, fogs, coal, plum pudding, the spleen and consumptive diseases.” It’s a point of view that has some resonance for anyone who’s experienced the splendors of English cookery (green eel pie, anyone?). There are, however, other theories. Historian Stephen Mennell, for instance, believes France’s obvious culinary superiority to the English developed from Louis XIV’s requirement that France’s nobility live with him in Versailles. Louis had merely wanted to keep an eye on rebellious nobles. But by putting all the aristos under one roof, he inadvertently created a gastronomic hothouse where armies of chefs, pâtissiers, sommeliers, boulangers, and maîtres d’hôtel competed for the approval of the world’s fussiest eaters. One maître d’, François Vatel, went so far as to throw himself on his sword when the fish arrived a half hour late. Voilà, the birth of French haute cuisine. British nobility, on the other hand, were not obliged to dwell at court, and, living on their own estates enjoyed less-elevated fare. If the fish arrived late, good—it meant two helpings of boiled beef.
Although this theory does explain the absence of a truly British high cuisine, my personal favorite relates to the so-called invention of childhood during the Victorian era of the 1800s. The Victorians were the first to completely embrace the notion that children are fundamentally different from adults. Juveniles were strictly segregated, dressed in funny clothes, and told specific bedtime stories. They also had special dietary needs, i.e., old potatoes. “New potatoes are acceptable,” wrote Pye Henry Chavasse in his 1844 bestseller Advice to Mothers on the Management of Their Offspring, “but old potatoes, well cooked and mealy, are the best a child can have.” Chavasse preached that children under ten should breakfast exclusively on lukewarm milk poured over stale bread that was “preferably seven days old.” Sweets were “slow poison,” as were green vegetables. Once children had reached their second decade, they could be served old mutton—never beef or pork—and weak beer. Onion and garlic were absolutely forbidden. “Meat, potatoes and bread, with hunger for their sauce is the best, and indeed should be the only dinner, they should have,” he wrote. Chavasse was the Dr. Spock of his day, and middle-class Victorians followed his advice religiously. Children were shoved full of a gruel made of milk, crushed biscuits, and flour that had been boiled for seven hours. The students of Eton ate nothing but old mutton and potatoes 365 days of the year for both lunch and dinner until a compassionate graduate left a bequest to provide them with a plum pudding every Sunday. Their peers in France may have had to choke down an unreasonable number of baguettes, but almost a quarter of what they ate consisted of vegetables, eggs, and fish, not to mention half a bottle of wine every day. Even the boarding school in Provence that served nothing but cabbage soup 125 days of the year ranked above the English programs.
This sadistic approach to child nutrition was a perfect match for the theories of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, who believed children were “natural atheists” because they enjoyed nature instead of God. He recommended bringing this under control by reminding them that “they are more ignorant and wicked than they could possibly believe,” and breaking their spirit at every turn. Withholding pleasant food was considered a particularly plum way to do this because it trained them out of the expectation of “natural” pleasure at the table. Add this food guilt to the insanely bland food expectations created by Chavasse, and you have the pleasure-free cuisine that some claim helped create the stoic Victorian personality that led to Great Britain’s domination of the world. It also explains why Victorian brats were so fond of American children’s literature. It was the scenes of kids gorging on buckwheat pancakes with maple syrup, eggs, and sausage that they really liked.
Toast
Fresh-baked bread is as soft and warm as a newborn baby. It’s like eating a living creature. No wonder Christians use bread to symbolize the flesh of Christ or that the Jews call it the Staff of Life or that the Mayans’ thirteen-layer loaf macerated in honey mead, called noh-wah, was said to symbolize Heaven. Most people believe toast’s divine status derives from its role as a dietary staple. It’s more complicated than that, and a better explanation is the way it is made. Like beer, bread is created by allowing grain to ferment and then either baking or boiling the result. Today we know fermentation is just a yeast infection of sorts, but anybody who has seen a barrel
of fermenting beer seething like a volcano, or a loaf rising, can understand how the humans who first witnessed it considered the process supernatural and akin to the swelling belly of a pregnant female. Italian women used to stand in front of their ovens gnashing their teeth and contorting their faces in a mock birth delivery to ensure a risen loaf. As late as the 1800s, it was traditional to force an older, unwed daughter to sit atop an oven baking bread to make her more attractive to suitors. The world’s first bakers, in Egypt, actually doubled as gynecologists by selling wheat to women who suspected they “had a bun in the oven.” The ladies would urinate on the wheat and, if pregnant, it would germinate in sympathy. If she was barren, the grain, too, would remain fallow (yes, this is largely effective).