In the Devil's Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food

by Stewart Lee Allen

  MITTERRAND’S LAST SUPPER

  The idea of covering one’s head while feasting has a curious parallel among the Gurage people of Southwest Ethiopia. When a man there loses his appetite, he is thought to be possessed, the only cure for which is for him to cover his head and eat massive amounts of food, shoving it in as quickly as he can. Some of these snacks go for up to twelve hours, or until he finally says, “Tafwahum,” “I am satisfied.”

  Pride

  THE EGOTIST AT DINNER

  The patriotic ode to sauerkraut comes from the 1935 cookbook Deutsch Heimatküche (German Homeland Cooking) as translated by Bertram M. Bordon.

  THE DIRT EATERS

  Dirt eating, known as geophagy, is a commercial enterprise in parts of the southern United States, where small bags of kaolin can be found in supermarkets for about $1.50 a shot. Longstreet’s imputation of a characteristic associated with Africans to the white Ransy Sniffle is merely one quirk in the curious social relationship between poor southern whites and blacks. In one school of thought, the so-called “white trash” (defined as a group of permanently unemployed Caucasian individuals specializing in incest and drunkenness) are a kind of “anti-aristocracy” created by the freeing of African slaves. The idea is that poor, unskilled whites in the color-obsessed American South could not engage in simple manual work because it was “colored folks’ work” and for them to do so would entail losing social/racial rank. So they became versions of European aristocrats, who also often went penniless rather than lose caste by engaging in productive labor. Many of the “Euro trash” resolved their dilemma by marrying wealthy American heiresses interested in an Old World title. Mr. Sniffle and company merely created the Ku Klux Klan.

  A DINNER PARTY IN KISHAN GARHI

  The detailed analysis of the goings-on in Kishan Garhi is drawn from Mckin Marriott’s “Caste Ranking and Food Transactions: A Matrix Analysis,” in Structure and Change in Indian Society . The suggestion of cow dung place mats is credited to tenth-century writer al-Biruni in Mahedra Singh’s Life in Ancient India, which quotes al-Biruni as saying, “they prepared a separate table-cloth for each person by pouring water over a spot and plastering it with the dung of the cow …”

  The Azande people of Sudan provide a much more congenial explanation for these taboos on communal dining. According to them, a feud between two gentlemen named Yapu-tapu and Nagilinugo over who got to have a hen with their porridge led to King Gbudue ruling that henceforth different groups should eat out of one another’s sight in order to prevent unnecessary jealousy.

  HUMBLE PIE

  The connection between chicken liver pâté and Etruscan divination comes from Giuseppe Alessi, author of Etruschi: Il Mito a Tavola (The Etruscans: The Myth at the Dinner Table). Alessi’s book is available only in Italian, but you can try his re-creations of ancient Tuscan cuisine at his Florence restaurant, Pentola dell’Oro.

  IMPURE INDIAN CORN AND THE BUTTERFLY PEOPLE

  The first cookbook to include a corn recipe was American Cookery by Amelia Simmons, circa 1796, according to Tannahill. Prior to that date, American cuisine was considered undeserving of the printed page. The reference to corn being “the food of the servants” has been attributed to “Report of the Journey of Francis Louis Michel from Berne, 1701.” Corn’s despised status was so well known that Tom Sawyer even remarked on it in Mark Twain’s classic. White America’s intentions toward the buffalo were made relatively clear by General Philip Sheridan, who told the Texas Legislature in the mid-1800s, “let the hunters kill and skin and sell until the buffalo is exterminated, as it is the only way to bring about lasting peace.” Buffalo Bill, hired by the railroads to help exterminate the animals that were blocking their lines, once bragged he killed four thousand in twelve months and left the bodies to rot.

  There’s actually no direct record of whether Native Americans were aware of the nutritional significance of nixtamalization but they seem to have had an inkling because they reserved non-nixtamalized bread for holidays when they did not eat other dietary essentials like salt and chili peppers. Corn’s “murder trial” is mentioned in Daphne Roe, who credits it to Ebbie Watson, Commissioner of the Department of Agriculture in South Carolina. In the early 1900s, approximately nine thousand Americans a year were dying from pellagra. Although foreign foods and alcohol are one of the main health problems among native people in the Southwest, it’s thought that the introduction of sweeter hybrid corns about forty years ago has really made the diabetes rate jump. In addition to the corn’s higher sugar content, the sugar is also fast-releasing, rendering it doubly difficult to digest for some. Details about corn’s cultural importance to the Hopi come from Fussell’s work.

  GHOST AT THE DINNER TABLE!

  Whether or not our feelings about flatulence have ties to the Pythagorean theorem is difficult to say. The West’s aversion to passing gas certainly diminished after the Classic civilizations fell apart—at least judging by accounts of medieval table manners—only to be fully resurrected when Renaissance scholars rediscovered the wonders of Greek antiquity in the fifteenth century or so. The most famous admonition comes from the scholar Erasmus’s De Civilitate morum puerilium (“On the Civility of the Behavior of Boys”), which suggests not only that one leave the dining room to vomit but also urges children not to squirm about on their seat because “it gives the appearance of repeatedly farting, or trying to do so.” It remains a standard parental nag even though most have no idea as to its original meaning.

  The overall idea that legumes make you lazy was so widespread that the word lentus, meaning slow, became the root for the word lentils . Roman general Marcus Crassus knew his army would lose against the Parthians, because his men had been reduced to eating beans (Plutarch, Vita Crassi ). Tannahill’s suggestion that an aversion to beans played a significant role in Roman and Greek agriculture is in her Food in History, in which she points out that although the Classicists knew that planting beans on alternate years replenished the soil, they refused to do so.

  KING’S CAKE

  La galette des rois, dreikonigskuche, Twelfth Night cake, bolo rei—there are as many names as there are versions for this cake. Some are filled with almond paste or apples, or flavored with port. There are cheesecake and fruitcake versions. All have at some point included the ceremony of the crowning of the child as the “bean king.” According to Les Fèves des rois by Huguette Botella and Monique Joannes, the rite was started by followers of the two-headed Roman god Janus, who made the person who picked the magic bean king until nightfall, at which point his head was cut off. This custom eventually split into two fêtes. The kids got the fête des rois. The adults ended up muddled into what we call Carnival (Rio de Janeiro’s being the most famous), originally called the Festival of the Crazy, a day when lower classes were allowed to parody the elite by feasting and drinking until morning. They point out that the revolutionary denouncement of les gâteaux des rois might have been reasonable because monarchists later made a point of buying the cakes decorated with the royal fleur-de-lis and a cross to show support for a return to a religious monarchy. Renaming the cake after beggars also led to the kindly tradition of requiring the child “king” to donate money to the poor. An interesting mystical story of this tradition is J. R. R. Tolkien’s short story “Smith of Wooton Major.”

  Sloth

  THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF ENGLISH COOKERY

  The tale of François Vatel has been recounted numerous times and might even be true. It first appears in the correspondence of Mme. Marie de Sevigne, who describes him as a chef of the Prince of Condé who, while preparing a feast for the court of Louis XIV, killed himself over the missing fish. The fish arrived at the castle a half hour later. There is now a French school of hospitality named after him. English children’s love of American literature is discussed in Sarah Freeman’s Mutton and Oysters: The Victorians and Their Food, which quotes people like Lord Frederic Hamilton as saying that he liked books like The Wide, Wide World as a child because
“there [was] plenty of drinking and eating.” For more information on the concept of Victorian childhood, try “The Victorian Invention of Childhood,” by LuAnn Walther. Despite the many barbs flung at English cooking, there’s always been a tradition of good, honest fare there, as indicated by the following passage from the eighteenth-century The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, in which author Hannah Glasse rails against the fashion for French cooks. “If gentlemen will have French Cooks they must pay for French tricks. I have heard of a Cook that used six Pounds of Butter to fry 12 Eggs, when every Body knows, that understands cooking, that Half a Pound is enough.”

  TOAST AND THE INCREDIBLY SAD TALE OF PHILIPPE THE SHOEMAKER

  The historic relationship between beer and bread is too well documented to require specific references, although Food: The Gift of Osiris is a good starting point. The first “official” bread is thought to have been sun-baked loaves with a moist, chewy interior, but the first bread/beer/porridges were probably like the chang barley beer enjoyed in the Himalayas. It is served in a bamboo trunk with the “head” being a mass of fermented barley that resembles a diseased cauliflower; you get to the liquor by sipping through a wooden straw. Delicious when fresh. An interesting parallel to the European notion that ancestral characteristics can be passed through bread existed among the Zuni Indians who, according to turn-of-the-century anthropologist Frank Cushing, added a nut called k’u’-shu-tsi to their corn breads because it was the food of their ancestors and so eating it passed on ancestral wisdom (in Zuni Breadstuffs). The description of the Egyptian pregnancy tests comes from “On an Ancient Method of Diagnosing Pregnancy and Determining Sex” by P. Ghalioungui in Medical History. Much of the material relating to the controversy of mollet comes from Kaplan’s massive Bakers of Paris, and manuscripts in the French National Archives. The police report quoted is Traite de la Police by Police Commissioner Delamare (available in various editions), but particularly the one from 1710. For the panisvores among you, yes, baguettes were not invented until much later, but I’m using the word generically for bread. Besides, the baguette, too, was criticized for epitomizing Parisian shallowness with its emphasis on excessive crust. Blame for the translation of the poem by Condamine belongs to me.

  The transvestites supposedly leading the bread riots were not necessarily sexual transvestites, but merely men in drag because they thought the soldiers were less likely to shoot at women. Other accounts suggest that there were also females dressed as men. Many historians have debated whether or not Marie Antoinette actually made her famous cake remark. The classic version, re: starving peasants, was “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche,” a reference to a delicate type of bread similar to mollet. It is usually translated into English as “Let them eat cake.” If the queen never made a remark about who should eat what kind of bread, well then, she must have been the only person in France who had failed to express an opinion.

  The white bread vs. brown wasn’t merely a question of social standing. The darker the bread, the easier it was for unprincipled bakers to hide adulterations in the loaf like acorns, bark, mud, sawdust, dog weeds, and God knows what else. Some even added poisons like bay leaves or the herb darnel to make so-called “dazed bread.” Dark rye loafs also sometimes contained grain infected with the mold ergot, the base for the drug LSD, which people like Camporesi believe caused some of the bizarre religious “dancing” hysterias that swept through medieval Europe.

  THE VIRGIN’S NIPPLES

  If you’re interested in seeing some older samples of erotic Italian pastry, there is a collection on display at Rome’s Museo delle Tradizioni Popolari. The recipe is based on June di Schino’s “The Waning of Sexually Allusive Monastic Confectionary in Southern Italy.”

  THE ROOT OF LAZINESS

  Modern nutritionists now say potatoes may indeed induce sloth because they help produce serotonin, which causes people to relax, a belief epitomized in the recent book of Kathleen DesMaisons, Potatoes Not Prozac. Cobbett was not the only Englishman to see the potato as the root from hell. Many considered the potato famine divine justice for Irish sloth, and believed the best possible outcome would be partial extinction of the Irish and total extermination of the potato. Others suggested outlawing small farms to prevent the growing of potatoes. La pricesse or la ratta potatoes can be found at PricessePotato.com Tel 631 537-9404; Fax 631 537-5436. Available October through late March.

  THE LAST DROP

  Reverend Billy Sunday’s eulogy is to be found in Ardent Spirits by John Kobler, as are many of the other particulars on the history of Prohibition. Sunday was a former professional baseball player whom an estimated one million Americans trekked out to see preach by the time he peaked in 1917. Most of the statistics on the economics of Prohibition come from the Cato Institute’s Alcohol Prohibition Was a Failure by Mark Thornton (also in his book The Economics of Prohibition), which details Richard Cowan’s “Iron Law of Prohibition,” i.e., that the more intense the law enforcement, the more potent the dope gets (“How the Narcs Created Crack,” National Review, 12/5/86). Thornton notes that although the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed in 1933, its spirit lives on in the current “drug war,” which has (predictably) had the same results of increasing criminal power and putting harmless people in prison. Interestingly, some believe that narcotics got a foothold during Prohibition because their smaller size made them an attractive smuggling alternative. The pro-Prohibition statistics come from The Encyclopedia of Prohibition and Prohibition, the Way to National Prosperity by Reverend T.M.C. The role of the women’s movement is detailed in Women and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873–1900 by Ruth Bordin. For an alternate view, there’s always Ralph Waldo Harley’s The Age of Unreason: Prohibition, and Women and What They’re Doing , which points out that “chain store flappers, private office concubines, dance hall shimmyshakers, bobbed-headed movie rats, hip-wriggling bridge hounds, adultery billboards … and female men” are “hell bent” on imposing their morality on the world. His circular analysis on the futility of giving women the right to vote is remarkable. “If all wives vote with their husbands,” he writes, “the ratio remains unchanged.” If all women vote against their spouses, again nothing changes. So why give them the vote? Not every bar-keep objected to the women’s crusade—some found the hymn-singing ladies such a draw that they hired actors to imitate them and put on two shows a day.

  IN THE GREEN HOUR

  Wormwood’s active compound thujone is also found in sage, probably accounting for the popularity of the “exhilarating” sage beer during the medieval period. Michael Albert-Puleo speculates in his essay on the mythology of the sage plant that the old saying “he who would live for aye, must eat Sage in May,” might refer to how sage’s thujone content peaks in spring. Absinthe has made a comeback in the last five years, via versions from Romania and Czechoslovakia. You can buy it in England, but by all accounts it lacks any serious wormwood punch. The stuff sold in the United States, called Absente, has even less psychoactive punch (the manufacturer claims that its thujone content increases when you add sugar, in the traditional manner of drinking). If you want to get the real thing, there are still moonshiners in Switzerland and France who follow the same recipes used a century ago. Just head up to the hills and ask around.

  Greed

  THE MAGIC CANNIBAL

  Much of the information on various aspects of medieval law on cannibalism comes from Tannahill. There are, however, different interpretations of the sixth-century Salic and eighth-century Charlemagne laws in other works. The translation of Castillo’s man-feast is by A. Maudslay in “The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico 1517–1521.” Innocent’s concern about the Arthurian cult is detailed in The Catholic Encyclopedia, which also quotes eighth-century chronicler Helinandus on the grail, “called Gradalis or Gradale, means a dish [scutella], wide and somewhat deep, in which precious viands [meat] are wont to be served to the rich in degrees [gradatim], one morsel after another.” The word precious in its truest sens
e means magical. According to Helinandus, the precious viands referred to would have been lamb; Christ is commonly referred to as the Lamb of God. St. Philip Neri seemed to understand that the chalice was all about cannibalism—apparently he licked and sucked on the Eucharistic goblet so intensely he left tooth marks in its rim.

  The Irish saint who apparently used a human sacrifice was Columba who, in founding his church at Iona, suggested to his followers, “it is permitted that one of you should go under the clay of this island to hallow it.” One of Columba’s disciples, Odran, replied, “If thou shouldst take me I am ready for that.” Columba accepts and “then Odran went to heaven.” That would have been in the sixth century, and various other public Druid rites apparently related to ritual cannibalism are well documented until the 1300s. As recently as the 1950s Catholic nuns were warning children to not bite the host with their teeth lest it bleed. Rindfleisch’s Nazi relation is mentioned in the “Communique of the Polish-Soviet Extraordinary Commission for Investigating the Crimes Committed by the Germans in the Majdanek Extermination Camp in Lublin,” translated by Philip Trauring. He appears to have specialized in vicious “medical” experimentation. The Bishop of Amalfi, trampled to death by his fellow prelates at the Fourth Lateran Council, was rewarded with a marble tomb in the Vatican for the inconvenience.

  SMOKED GREEN MAKAKU

  The horrified expression of the smoked monkeys on the boat was apparently caused by their facial muscles contracting during the smoking process. I refer to the country by its new name, Democratic Republic of Congo, but when I was there it was known as Zaire, although previously it had been known as the Belgian Congo, not to be confused with the much smaller Republic of Congo on Africa’s Atlantic seaboard.