Near a Thousand Tables (24 page)

The modern repertoire of kaiseki dishes—in which the main ingredient is often disguised and sometimes crafted from tofu or red bean paste to resemble something else—seems to date only from the period of Zen influence on aristocratic lifestyles, from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Thereafter, almost all visitors attested that frugality was genuinely embraced as a virtue, even by diners who could afford to eat copiously. “The rich, as well as the poor,” observed a Russian captive who made extensive observations of eating habits in the early years of the nineteenth century, “spend but little in
eating and drinking
.” Queen Victoria's envoy, Sir Rutherford Alcock, attributed to aristocratic abstinence the extraordinary abundance of unkilled game. “Think of that, ye epicures,” he taunted his fellow Europeans,

and instead of a shooting or a fishing season in Norway with its hackneyed fjelds [sic] and fiords, come to Japan to catch salmon, hunt the deer, the boar and the bear and, if you like it, shoot the pheasant, snipe, teal, and wild-fowl without stint. It is rather far off—some sixty odd days—but then think of the game and the novelty—to say nothing of the chance of being becarved by the two-sworded samurai in pursuit of
their
game
.

Visitors who arrived in this spirit could be deceived by generous hospitality. An insensitive American tourist in 1921 got the impression that, for quantity, a Japanese meal was “simply stupendous.” Having eaten his way through pickled vegetables, terrapin soup with quails' eggs and onions, baked fish with sea urchin paste, sushimi, fried prawns and eels, steamed cakes of duck, fish and vegetables, and
roast duck, he was surprised to be offered a “second table” of vegetables, fish consommé, grilled eels with rice, and fruits. “I am told,” he concluded, that indigestion is a prevalent ailment of the Japanese…. The toiling coolie is the only man in Japan who might reasonably be expected to digest an elaborate Japanese meal, and he, of course, never gets one. This observation was made where the visitor's uncharacteristically big feast was consumed: in a
club for foreigners
.

Today, a myth of a golden age, when all Japanese took aesthetic and ascetic pleasure in their food, stirs dismay at the encroachments of inelegant eating. M. F. K. Fisher imagines “a porter or streetcar vendor,” at a street stand, ignorant of the symbolism of “the significant tangle of the
udon
in their clear broth, the cloud-form of steam that rises” to heaven, pushing the noodles into his mouth and slurping his soup before hurrying back to work: this seems directly related to Sei Shonagon—s revulsion of the “truly strange” way in which the lower orders gobbled their rice and “dived into” their soup bowls; but the kaiseki ryori tradition would be meaningless without its opposite. In reality, it is probably stronger than ever today, because rich bourgeois are reviving it and encouraging restaurateurs to
recapture its spirit
.

Like kaiseki ryori, all the earliest recorded courtly cuisines emphasized painstaking preparation. Surviving Mesopotamian recipes advise browning meat or birds before boiling in water with thickenings of blood, and flavorings of garlic, onion, leek, turnip and dressings of cheese or butter; or braising is recommended in
fat and water
. From ancient Egypt no direct evidence survives but medical treatises sometimes echo courtly recipes, such as the minced pigeon cooked with liver, fennel, chicory and iris recommended by a physician from Krokodilopolis on the grounds that the broth was thought to be
good for stomachache
. Dishes to celebrate the completion of the harvest and tempt the souls of the dead to earth were listed with obvious yearning by a Chinese poet of the second or third century
B.C.:
“the cunning cook slices pigeon and yellow heron and black crane with peppered herbs into millet pies.” He concocts badger stew, fresh turtle, sweet chicken cooked in cheese, pickled suckling pigs and the flesh of newborn puppies floating in liver sauce, with radish salad and Indian spices, roast daw, steamed widgeon, grilled quail, boiled perch and sparrow broth “in each preserved the separate flavor that is
most its own
.” Since feasts for the dead had to be of unblemished food, this suggests that elaborate preparation, in the writer's opinion, left ingredients uncompromised and even, perhaps, enhanced in purity. Around the turn of the second and third centuries
A.D.,
Athenaeus of Naucratis combined all the elements of emerging haute cuisine into his sketch of the most luxurious meal he could imagine: copious amounts, distinctive dishes, exquisite service, impressive variety and
inventive cookery. In the banqueting room he envisaged, on well-rubbed tables, under hanging lamps which “shone on festive crowns,” “well stuffed conger,” was served, in a glistening dish “to delight a god” with snowy-topped loaves. Course by course, there followed soused ray, shark, stingray and squid and sepia-coloured polyps with soft tentacles; then a fish “as large as the table, exhaling spirals of steam”; then breaded squid and toasted prawns. “The navel of the feast” was a sweet course, intruded at this point: “flower-leaved” cakes, spiced sweetmeats and puff pastries. Next came tuna, sliced “from the meatiest part of the belly.” The courses paraded so fast that “I almost,” said the poet whose account of the banquet Athenaeus quotes, “missed out on the hot tripe.” A home-bred pig provided chitterlings, chine and rump with hot dumplings; then came a milk-fed kid's head—boiled whole—and more pork delicacies: boiled pettitoes, skin-white ribs, snouts, heads, feet and a tenderloin spiced with the rare African relish, silphium; then roast lamb “and the tenderest morsel of underdone entrails” of lambs and kids, “such as the gods love”; then jugged hare, young cockerels, partridges and ringdoves, before a dessert of yellow honey,
clotted cream and cheese
.

In some cultures, fastidiousness vies with excess in the world of noble values and obligations. Some elites—or, sometimes, conflicting factions within high-consuming elites—have tried to challenge the heroic ideal of eating with a subtler ethos, advocating an alternative approach, which condemns unrestraint as barbarous and exalts the nobility of austerity and simplicity. Confucian foodways represent a gentlemanly ideal. According to the sayings attributed to the sage, austerity is not breached by food which is perfectly fresh, expertly cooked and finely presented. On the contrary, it would be bestial to compromise standards in any of these respects. But meat should be eaten sparingly—not so much as to be detectable on one's breath; robust seasonings, such as ginger, should be applied with prudence; and wine must not be
taken indecorously
. Mencius denounced the self-indulgence of the rich in the presence of needy poverty. He recommended “the reduction of the heart's desires” as the best means to true happiness. A small appetite is a sign of Buddhahood. The Quran says, “The greater part of celestial and terrestrial pleasures consists of the consumption of desirable dishes and drinks,” but in Arab court cuisines, the simplicity of the desert opposes the luxury of the town in
ever creative tension
. Brahmins are supposed to affect indifference to food, like Professor Godbole in
A Passage to India,
who encountered it “as if by accident.” Pythagoras enjoined abstinence. Moderation was a stoic virtue. According to Epictetus, eating, like copulation, “should be done in passing.” In the circle of Christ, five barley loaves and two small fishes were as good as a feast. Few, if any,
of these sages seem to have had much immediate impact on upper-class eating; but abstinence gradually established itself as evidence of refinement in all the societies touched by their influence.

The effect, in part, was to nourish another paradox typical of the history of high-status food. Lavish entitlement becomes a sign of true aristocracy only when it is voluntarily renounced. The true leader shares his people's hardships. Augustus Caesar was supposed to be an archetype of frugality. His successors showed their inferiority in proportion to the amount by which they exceeded his diet. He “preferred the food of the common people”—coarse bread, hand-pressed cheese, figs from the second crop. He snacked in the saddle rather than respect time-wasting mealtimes. He claimed to fast “more rigorously than a Jew on his Sabbath” and reputedly used cucumber and sour apples as a digestive instead of wine. Genghis Khan never allowed the cultures of his conquests to seduce him from the “harsh life of the north.” Bonnie Prince Charlie was loved by his men because “he could win a battle in four minutes and eat his dinner in five.” It is impossible to know whether Napoleon's preference for fried potatoes and onions was a real demonstration of taste or an affectation contrived to signify his self-perception as the embodiment of popular sovereignty.

There are three ways of reconciling the ideals of austerity and excess. The first is by selecting choice or rare or frankly bizarre foods, conspicuous enough in themselves to count as ennobling in small quantities. The second is by elaborate preparation of unostentatious amounts. Both these methods encourage what is now called foodism—connoisseurship, which can, in the words of Juvenal, “pinpoint a
sea-urchin at a glance
,” and which makes eating esoteric. The last method is by developing peculiar rules of etiquette, which can be practiced only by select initiates: this liberates the eaters from eating particular sorts of food, served in large quantities or prepared by special means. What matters, instead, is how it is eaten.

The first method was notoriously exemplified by the third-century Roman emperor Heliogabulus. He was the personification of overindulgence but he was driven neither by gourmandizing—though he is often accused of it—nor by his undeniable passion for luxury. His real obsession was novelty. He sought unprecedented sensations. He wanted to live in a world where strangeness was normal. His appetite was for culinary surrealism. He made conspicuous consumption an art. He fed goose livers to his dogs. His human guests were offered peas laced with gold and lentils with onyx, beans dressed with amber and fish
scattered with pearls
. He is supposed to have created a dish of six hundred ostrich heads. At table, he favored stage management above savor and comedy over cuisine, ordering
fish in blue sauce to resemble the sea. His only rival among Roman emperors in this respect was Vitellius, who designed a “Shield of Minerva,” represented in a platter of livers of sea bass, lamprey and milt with pheasant and peacock brains and
flamingos' tongues
. Of course, reports about these meals should be taken with a pinch of salt. Baroque banquets may have made Romans vomit: the descriptions we have of them usually come from stoically minded critics, who certainly wanted to induce
nausea in their readers
.

Eclat can be achieved by the spectacle of unseasonal dishes—another feature of high-status food which suggests heroism by defiance of nature, “Do not marvel,” wrote a great seventeenth-century cook disingenuously, “if I sometimes order things, for example asparagus, artichokes or peas … in January or February and others that seem at first to be out of season.” The household chef of the Gonzaga of Ferrara, Bartolomeo Stefani, was writing precisely in order to
épater les bourgeois
who were the customers for his cookbook: he prided himself on dishes that demanded “a good purse and good horses.” At a banquet he served to Queen Christina of Sweden in November, the first course was of strawberries with
white wine
. This was a surprise with a certain sprezzatura. Before the Renaissance cult of restraint reached the kitchen, surprises could be unabashedly splendid. At the wedding feast of the Duke of Mantua in 1581 there were venison pasties in the shape of gilded lions, pies in the form of upright black eagles, pasties of pheasant “which seemed alive.” Peacocks were adorned with their tails and embellished with ribbons “which were arranged erect, as in life, with a perfume emanating from the kindled wadding in their beaks and an amorous epigram placed
between their legs
.” Marzipan statues represented Hercules and a unicorn.

Even this was a faint echo of one of the most bravura banquets in Western history, more than a century earlier, in Lille, on February 17,1454, when Philip the Good of Burgundy took the “Vow of the Pheasant,” exacting a crusading oath from the banqueters, rather as modern fund-raisers extort subventions at charity dinners. According to a participant, “there was a chapel on the table, with a choir in it, a pasty full of flute-players, and a turret from which came the sound of an organ and other music.” The duke was served by a pantomime horse and elephant, ridden by trumpeters. “Next came a white stag ridden by a young boy who sang marvelously, while the stag accompanied him with the tenor part, and next an elephant … carrying a castle in which sat Holy Church, who made piteous complaint on behalf of Christians
persecuted by the Turks
.” The tradition of banqueting-as-showmanship continues. Financier James Buchanan, the “Diamond Jim” Brady (famous for his ability to consume four dozen oysters as first course before dinner), was a guest at the legendary “Horseback Dinner,” hosted at
Louis Sherry's New York restaurant, which featured riders and their horses who were lifted to the third-floor ballroom via the elevators.

The taste for bizarre foodstuffs, tabletop spectacle and table-side cabaret was merely gross. Liking for surprise foods—“blackbird” pies in the Middle Ages, modern bachelor night cakes which burst with dancing girls, pollo sorpresa and bombe surprise—illustrates the theater of cookery, but it surely has an intellectual side, too: a surprise is a puzzle and disguised foods are the fodder of intellectual games. In societies where education is an elite privilege, this makes them part of the high-class menu. In old Kyoto, it was the custom for banqueters to vie in attempts to guess
what they had eaten
, rather like the custom of guessing the name and vintage of the wine being consumed at certain tables today. Dorothy L. Sayers made the latter the key to a mystery story Her secret agent, Lord Peter Wimsey, proved his identity in competition with his impostors by his unerring nose, palate and oenological knowledge.