Near a Thousand Tables (23 page)

It is striking how the sheer quantity of food served—and sometimes eaten—persists as an index of status. Reverence for excess remains widespread in the world outside the West. Modern Trobriand islanders relish the prospect of a feast so big that “we shall eat until we vomit.” A South African saying is, “We shall eat until we cannot stand.” The aesthetics of obesity are widely prized. Among the Banyankole of East Africa a girl prepares for marriage at about eight years old by staying indoors and drinking milk for a year until corpulence reduces her
walk to a waddle
. Habits of atavistic overeating recur in high-status individuals, even in
societies which have abundant other ways of honoring rank, and in cases where the eaters in question can have had no doubt of their entitlement. This is particularly remarkable in the history of early-modern Europe, where table manners were becoming a cult and where selfish overindulgence was coming to be seen as repellent. Montaigne reproached himself for greed so urgent that it made him bite fingers and tongue and spare no time at table for talk. Louis XIV incapacitated himself with food at his own wedding feast. Doctor Johnson ate with such concentration that the veins on his forehead stood out and he broke
out in sweat
. Brillat-Savarin, for all his attention to quality in foodstuffs, admired gargantuan appetites. He wrote with awestruck reverence of the priest of Bregnier, who, without hurry or fuss, ate a meal of soup, boiled beef, a leg of mutton à la royale “down to the ivory, a capon down to the bone,” and the “copious salad … down to the bottom of the dish” before finishing off with a quarter of a large white cheese with a bottle of wine and a
jug of water
. This gourmet justified gourmandism on the grounds that it showed “implicit obedience to the commands of the Creator, who, when he ordered us to eat in order to live, gave us the inducement of appetite, the encouragement of savor, and the
reward of pleasure
.” Brillat-Savarin's representative menus for different income groups are calibrated by quantity as well as finesse of preparation and conclude with a meal for the wealthy: a seven-pound fowl, stuffed with Perigord truffles until it is made spherical; a huge Strasbourg pâté de fois gras in the shape of a bastion, a big Rhine carp à la Chambard, richly adorned and garnished, truffled quails à la moelle, served on basil-flavored buttered toast, a stuffed and larded pike baked in creamy crayfish sauce secundum artem, a well-hung roast pheasant, larded en troupet, served on toast dressed à la Sainte Alliance; a hundred early asparagus, five or six threads in diameter, with osmazone sauce; two dozen ortolans à la provençal.

A. J. Liebling, sportswriter and Paris correspondent for
The New Yorker,
described the apotheosis of this tradition in dozens of magazine stories. His exemplar was Yves Mirande, theatrical impresario and the last representative of the “heroic age” of eating before the First World War, who

would dazzle his juniors, French and American, by dispatching a lunch of raw Bayonne ham and fresh figs, a hot sausage in crust, spindles of filleted pike in a rich rose sauce Nantua, a leg of lamb larded with anchovies, artichokes on a pedestal of foie gras, and four or five kinds of cheese, with a good bottle of Bordeaux and one of champagne, after which he would call for the Armagnac and remind Madame to have ready for dinner the larks and ortolans she had promised him, with a few langoustes and a turbot—and, of course, a fine civet made
from the marcassin, or young wild boar, that the lover of the leading lady in his current production had sent up from his estate in the Sologne. “And while I think of it,” I once heard him say, “we haven't had any woodcock for days, or truffles
baked in the ashes
.”

A well-laden board was a sign of status throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the West and the growing opportunities for diversity at table tended to multiply the numbers of dishes. Yet an equivocal attitude is detectable in the satirical tone of some descriptions. The domestic regime of Trollope's Archdeacon Grantly demonstrated not only his wealth but also his worldliness.

The silver forks were so heavy as to be disagreeable to the hand, and the breadbasket was of a weight really formidable to any but robust persons. The tea consumed was the very best, the coffee the very blackest, the cream the very thickest; there was dry toast and buttered toast, muffins and crumpets; hot bread and cold bread, white bread and brown bread, home-made bread and bakers' bread, wheaten bread and oaten bread, and if there be other breads than these, they were there; there were eggs in napkins and crispy bits of bacon under silver covers; and there were little fishes in a little box, and devilled kidneys frizzling on a hot-water dish; which, by-the-by, were placed closely contiguous to the plate of the worthy archdeacon himself. Over and above this, on a snow-white napkin, spread upon the sideboard, was a huge ham and a huge sirloin; the latter having laden the dinner table on the previous evening. Such was the ordinary fare at Plumstead Episcopi. And yet I never found the rectory a pleasant house. The fact that man shall not live by bread alone seemed to be
somewhat forgotten
.

Upper-class indulgence grew increasingly comic. This dialogue from Somerset Maugham's
Lady Frederick
is typical of a tradition in which the meal gets funnier as the menu gets longer.

F
OULDES:
Thompson, did I eat any dinner at all?

T
HOMPSON [STOLIDLY]:
Soup, sir.

F
OULDES:
I remember looking at it.

T
HOMPSON:
Fish, sir.

F
OULDES:
I trifled with a fried sole.

T
HOMPSON:
Vol-au-vent Rossini, sir.

F
OULDES:
It has left absolutely no impression upon me.

T
HOMPSON:
Tournedos à la Splendide.

F
OULDES:
They were distinctly tough, Thompson. You must lodge a complaint in the proper quarter.

T
HOMPSON:
Roast pheasant, sir.

F
OULDES:
Yes, yes, now you mention it, I do remember the pheasant.

T
HOMPSON:
Pêches Melba, sir.

F
OULDES:
They were too cold, Thompson. They were distinctly too cold.

L
ADY
M
ERESTON:
My dear Paradine, I think you dined uncommonly well.

F
OULDES:
I have reached an age when love, ambition and wealth pale into insignificance beside a really well-grilled steak. That'll do, Thompson.

Today, the cult of abundance abides in America, where it thrives on “the embarrassment of riches”—an example of splurge and overspill in a culture always struggling to escape from a past dominated by the Puritan gospel of thrift. It may have started in colonial times. It was well established in the mid-nineteenth century, when “every day at every meal you see people order three or four times as much … as they could possibly eat, and, picking at and spoiling one dish after another, send the bulk away uneaten.” A hotel in New York listed 145 items on its dinner menu in 1867. The longest menu in the history of restaurant going has to be that of the Airport Diner in Newark, New Jersey, which daily listed over 50 appetizers, 40 soups, 300 sandwiches, 200 salads, 400 main courses, 80 different vegetables and 200 desserts. Over too items at dinner and 75 at breakfast were not unusual. But overindulgence was too cheap and easy to obtain and austerity, like every kind of rarity, was by then becoming the creed of arbiters of taste. Sarah Hale advised postbellum hostesses to “provide enough, and beware of the common practice of
having too much
.” The abundance of America is best evoked by the legendary eating habits of Duke Ellington, the jazz wizard. He was, perhaps, outside fiction, the world's last real heroic eater. He liked “to eat till it hurts.”

In Taunton, Mass, you can get the best chicken stew in the United States. For chow mein with pigeon's blood I go to Johnny Cann's Cathay House in San Francisco. I get my crab cakes at Bolton's—that's in San Francisco too. I know a place in Chicago where you can get the best barbecued ribs west of Cleveland and the best shrimp creóle outside New Orleans. There's a wonderful place in Memphis too for barbecued ribs. I get my Chinook salmon in Portland Oregon. In Toronto I get duck orange, and the best fried chicken in the world is in Louisville, Kentucky. I get myself half a dozen chickens and a gallon jar of
potato salad so I can feed the seagulls. You know, the guys who reach over your shoulder. There's a place in Chicago, the Southway Hotel, that's got the best cinnamon rolls and the best filet mignon in the world. Then there's Ivy Anderson's chicken shack in Los Angeles, where they have hot biscuits with honey and very fine chicken liver omelettes. In New Orleans there's gumbo filé. I like it so well that I always take a pail of it out with me when I leave. In New York I send over to the Turf Restaurant at Forty-ninth and Broadway a couple of times a week to get their broiled lamb chops. I prefer to eat them in the dressing-room where I have plenty of room and can really let myself go. In Washington at Harrison's they have devilled crab and Virginia ham. They're terrific things.

He conceded a place of honor to crêpes Suzette and octopus soup in Paris, mutton in London, smorgasbord in Sweden and an hors d'oeuvre trolley in The Hague—“eighty-five different kinds, and it takes a long time to eat some of each.” But, like Daniel Hines, Duke remained faithful to the excellence and excess of his homeland.

There's a place on West Forty-ninth Street in New York that has wonderful curried food and wonderful chutney. At old Orchard Beach, Maine, I got the reputation of eating more hot dogs than any man in America. A Mrs. Wagner there makes a toasted bun that's the best of its kind in America. She has a toasted bun, then a slice of onion, then a hamburger, then a tomato, then melted cheese, then another hamburger, then a slice of onion, more cheese, more tomato, and then the other side of the bun. Her hot dogs have two dogs to a bun. I ate thirty-two one night. She has very fine baked beans. When I eat with Mrs. Wagner, I begin with ham and eggs for an appetizer, then the baked beans, then fried chicken, then a steak—her steaks are two inches thick—and then a dessert of applesauce, ice cream, chocolate cake and custard, mixed with rich, yellow country cream. I like veal with an egg on it…. Durbin-Park's in Boston has very fine roast beef. I get the best baked ham, cabbage and corn bread at a little place near Biloxi. St. Petersburg, Florida, has the best fried fish. It's just a little shack, but they can sure fry fish. I really hurt myself
when I go there
.

Just as individuals, for most of history, gained prestige in proportion to their food consumption, so modern America owes part of its world-beating renown to its image as land of plenty.

Stupefying quantity is an important historic feature of elite food styles: eating for greed or waste is a commonplace form of aristocratic display; heroic eating is model behavior. Yet mere quantity did not remain the only criterion of a prestigious diet. Taste as well as waste has an ennobling effect. Selection for quality also seems to be programmed into evolution. Compared with other primates of similar size, the human diet is high in nutrient quality per
unit of weight
. Diversity, as well as quality, typifies high-status diets and may also be a craving sanctioned by evolution, the ideal of an omnivorous species. As the incomparable food journalist Jeffrey Steingarten said, “Lions will starve in a salad bar, as will cows in a steak house—
but not us
.” Diversity in diet is a function of distance: it attains impressive proportions when the products of different climates and eco-niches are united on the same table. For most of history, long-range trade has been a small-scale, hazardous, costly adventure; so diversity of diet has been a privilege of wealth or a reward of rank.

Paradoxically, quantity, in some cultures, is not enough. It has to be combined with other forms of profligacy, as in the potlatch of the American Northwest, where surplus feast food is flung into the sea as a gesture of conspicuous consumption; or in the fashionable banquets of Renaissance Rome, when gold vessels were flung, with fake ostentation, into the Tiber (where concealed nets ensured ease of retrieval); or in the meals Lady Mary Wortley Montagu ate in the harem of the Topkapi Saray, where fifty dishes of meat were served, one at a time. The tables were laid with tiffany silk, of which the napkins, too, were made; the knives were gold and their hafts set with diamonds. Alternatively, the same effect can be contrived, with greater economy, by variety and refinement.

The apotheosis of prestige cuisine is, perhaps, kaiseki ryori, the courtly food of imperial Japanese tradition, in which tiny slivers and cubes and shoots and buds—a single small egg, a trio of beans, “a curl of carrot, a fried gingko nut”—become individual dishes, selected and presented for aesthetic pleasure, as much for the eye as the palate and for the mind rather than the stomach: “fourteen courses of airy-fairy fantasy,” as the distinguished American food critic M. F. K. Fisher puts it. The effect of a meal in this tradition can be as sensual as a gross blowout, if more subtle. A great chef such as Shizuo Tsuji, renowned for the school of cookery he runs today in Osaka, can select fish for the table by texture “like the bloom of youth on a young girl.” In default of a “suitably artistic” platter, he advocates a piece of fragrant wood or “a flat stone, with a
few leaves at one side
.” The leaves, will, of course, symbolize the season, like the mood of a haiku.

Gustatory delicacy and understatement, restraint of appetite, refinement in food—these have been indices of rank in Japan at least since the late tenth century, when Sei Shonagon, the famous diarist, affected revulsion at the way workmen guzzle their rice. The dishes which pleased her best were duck eggs—the only food she mentions repeatedly—and “shaved ice flavoured with liana syrup
on a silver bowl
.” So the aesthetic behind kaiseki ryori goes back to the Heian period. Dietary austerity, of course, is most conspicuous when honored in the breach—for instance, by a fictional monk of the thirteenth century, who would have been worthy of a place in the
Canterbury Tales,
and who listed with affected distaste the dishes his patroness might be expected to provide “until my brief existence draws to its close”: aromatic pears, branches of nuts and acorns, sweet seafoods, rice cakes and rice paste, prize turnips, “those splendid dried melons from below Komatsu,” pine seeds, dried shrimp and mandarin oranges. “If, however, you cannot supply all this, give me some simple things such as
dried beans
.”