Near a Thousand Tables (25 page)

Still, as a means of contriving exclusiveness without excess, tabletop theater has its drawbacks. Because it is ostentatious it can never seem austere. A better method is, perhaps, to emphasize cuisine over quantity—to try to create dishes which cost time to prepare and suggest aristocratic otium. As with all the other ways in which food is adapted as a social differentiator, this is represented by its apologists as a stage in the civilizing tradition. As the Chevalier Jaucourt said in his entry on cooking in that Enlightenment bible, the
Encyclopédie,
“The art of the chefs consists almost exclusively of the seasoning of dishes: it is common to all civilized nations…. Most seasonings are injurious to health…. And yet it must be granted that by and large only savages can be satisfied with the pure products of nature, eaten without seasoning and as
nature provides them
.”

Alongside seasoning, the essence and evidence of elaborate preparation lies in the saucing. This can also be a means of disguise and mummery. The sauce is supposed in modern cookery to enhance or elicit the flavor beneath it; but it is still a mask, which coats what it complements. The “plain cooking school” derides sauces as a way of concealing poor ingredients. In reality, sauces are most likely to adorn the most select foods because they are a feature of courtly cuisines. They are expensive because they generally require that voluminous ingredients be reduced. They are labor-intensive because they involve combinations of ingredients. They are often impressionistically magical because their chemistry effects surprising transformations on their ingredients—like mayonnaise and aioli, in which, respectively, egg yolks or garlic are emulsified by olive oil; or curry, which makes buffalo fat uncloying; or Thai nam pla, which turns rotten fish into an indispensable flavoring. And they belong in a world of specialized expertise because,
especially in the more ambitious reaches of sauce making, they require practice and informed judgment if they are to be successful. Sauces generate a learned tradition of cooking because the recipes are complex and hard to remember: they therefore have to be written down and become a privilege of the literate. Reputedly, the oldest recipe in the world is for a sauce: a marinade said, in texts of the late second millennium
B.C.,
to have come from the Chou court: slices of raw carp are steeped in radish, ginger, chives, basil,
pepper and knot grass
.

The results of socially differentiated cuisine included the rise of a culinary profession of high status, a litany of techniques and a code of kitchen practice. Livy dated the decline of Rome from the moment when banquets became elaborate. “And it was then that the cook, who had formerly had the status of the lowest kind of slave, first acquired prestige, and what had once been servitude came to be thought of
as an art
.” Cooks became artists or “performers,” according to a
fragment of Alexis
. Though few cookbooks of real antiquity survive, the world they might have documented can be glimpsed in satires, like the cook's dialogue captured by the ear or imagination of Antiphanes:

But no, the bit of bluefish to simmer in brine as before, I tell you.

And the bit of bass?

Bake whole.

The dogfish?

Boil in hypotrimma.

The piece of eel?

Salt, oregano, water.

The conger?

Same.

The skate?

Green.

There's a slice of tuna.

You bake it.

The kid?

Roast.

The other?

The reverse.

The spleen?

Stuffed.

The intestine?

You've
got me there
.

The art of Apicius—the Roman cook so esteemed that his name was appropriated for numerous recipe collections, like Escoffier's or Fannie Farmer's today—was largely consecrated to creating sauces, over 200 of the 470 recipes in the earliest surviving text which bears his name. If Heliogabulus disliked a sauce, he made his chef eat nothing else until the recipe was improved. At the courts of sybaritic Muslim rulers in medieval Spain, recipe research was a serious scientific vocation. The same scholars who worked on horticulture, agronomy and irrigation techniques devised aromatic vinegars, potent garnishes and methods for
improving foie gras
. The cult of the sauce has remained an elite rite wherever it is known, a lashing of aristocratic propriety. According to Brillat-Savarin, the Prince de Soubise is supposed to have had a single ham dressed with sauce made from the concentrated juices of forty-nine others. His steward presented the prince with a bill for fifty hams. “Bertrand, have you gone mad?”

“No, your Highness; only one ham will appear on the table; but I shall need all the rest for my brown sauce, my stock, my garnishings, my …”

“Bertrand, you're a thief and I shan't pass that item.”

“But, your Highness,” answered the artist, hardly able to contain his anger, “you don't know our resources! You have only to say the word, and I'll take those fifty hams you object to and put them onto a crystal phial no bigger
than my thumb
.”

Soubise is himself immortalized in Sauce Soubise—a béchamel with onions. The recipe represents a tenacious concept among inventors of sauces: that you create them by adding ingredients to a few basic “mother” types—hollandaise, velouté, béchamel, espagnole. This doctrine—which is really rather misleading since most savory sauces are reductions made from the juices exuded by whatever is cooking—was devised by Antoine Carême—a pastry cook by training and talent—whose vocation as chef to the most pretentious of clients was sustained successively in the households of Talleyrand, Tsar Alexander I, the British Prince Regent and James de Rothschild.

Part of the function of a sauce is to make food, in one sense, less foodlike: to replace nutritional value with aesthetic appeal, to remove food from the state of nature and smother it in art. Like the invention of cooking, it is a human act of self-differentiation from nature, a repudiation of savagery, a further step in the civilizing process. Manners are similar—the sauces of gesture. Table manners are our acts of complicity in the cook's attempt to civilize us, signs of our renunciation of the savage within us. Just as the most soigné techniques of preparation characterize the most courtly cuisines, so etiquette grows ever more elaborate as we ascend to the top table. Since cooking turned eating into a socially constructive act, food
has become surrounded with rites of politesse. Etiquette is always in evolution because part of the purpose of manners is to keep outsiders excluded and the code has to change whenever interlopers crack it. Different cultures honor different practices and a lot of modern humor has been inspired by the spectacle of diners trapped by contradictions between cultures: the unwary Asian, for instance, is a robust belcher who delicately refrains from blowing his nose; the Western guest who refuses the dish of honor at an Arab banquet; the ignoramus in Japan who tastes pickles before finishing his soup. A much told anecdote in Madrid society is of the dinner party at the Chinese embassy, where King Simeon of Bulgaria accepted three helpings of rice: in traditional Chinese etiquette, a guest is supposed to flatter his host by affecting satisfaction with the fancy dishes which precede the rice. When Jeffrey Steingarten was in Japan he delayed too long before raising the lid of his soup bowl; the moist heat of the soup sealed the lid and he was compelled to forsake the delicate program enjoined by etiquette—transferring lid to table and bowl from hand to hand according to the approved ritual. Instead, he had to wrench the lid, spill the soup, wreck the artistry of the dinner table and revert to the defensive role of
dumb barbarian
.

The serious barriers of etiquette—those which are actually enforced—exist not between classes but between cultures. In 1106, the disciplina clericalis of Petrus Alfonsi—a former rabbi of Toledo, converted to Christianity—specified a set of table manners that can still guide a modern dinner guest on a pilgrimage of social ascent. He justified them, however, not on grounds of courtesy to others, or of customary inertia, or of obligation to God, but because they served practical self-interest. In any company, he began, eat as if in the presence of a king. Wash your hands in advance. Gobble no bread before other dishes appear on the table “lest men call you impatient.” Do not take big bites or dribble food from the corners of your mouth: otherwise you will be thought gluttonous. Chew each mouthful thoroughly: this will help to save you from choking. For the same reason, do not talk when there is food in your mouth. Do not drink on an empty stomach unless you want a reputation for drunkenness. Do not help yourself to food from your neighbor's plate: this might excite indignation. Eat a lot: if a friend, your host will be gratified; if he is an enemy, you will pile coals on
his resentment
. Within two or three hundred years in the West, codes of manners became more important as social differentiators at table than the food or even the cuisine. Hartmann von Aue, German translator of Chretien de Troyes, “I prefer to pass over what they ate, because they paid more attention to noble behavior than to much eating.” One of our leading historians of food calls this, with a little exaggeration, the “birth of good manners, of a ritual conviviality,
founded upon elegance
.” Where the correct
etiquette was observed the food became irrelevant—at least, it could become irrelevant in a satirical imagination. Lewis Carroll's lampoon had Alice offer a slice off the joint to the Red Queen, who refused with every appearance of shock. “It isn't etiquette to cut anyone you've been introduced to.” Pudding arrived. “Pudding-Alice, Alice-Pudding,” interjected the Queen. “Remove the pudding.”

One reason for the importance of etiquette was the impossibility of preserving hieratic or esoteric foodways. “Secret” recipes are legendary but they usually get divulged. The most ethereal sauces trickle down from kingly tables to become bourgeois treats. Like other forms of technology, cuisine is easily imitated and transferred.

Indeed, courtly eating styles in the West have always been imitated from other cultures. In classical antiquity, upper-class foodways were denounced by Horace as “Persian” and by a Greek proverb as “Sicilian.” When what Gibbon called “the triumph of barbarism and religion” interrupted the continuity of Western civilization, memories of Greek and Roman cuisine grew dim. Western courts looked to Islam for culinary inspiration. This is odd, on the face of it. Christendom and Islam were rival civilizations, formally at war, locked in mutual hatred. Crusading propaganda depicted Muslims as demons. In Islam, Christians were seen as vice personified. Yet at a high level of culture the world of Islam commanded admiration and imitation. In the tenth century, when Gerbert of Aurillac—an emperor's tutor and a future pope—wanted to learn mathematics, he went to Muslim Spain. The same route was followed by would-be practitioners of magic, seekers of the latest medical wisdom and collectors of ancient texts. Thanks to scholars working in Syriac and Arabic since the fall of the Roman Empire, a formidable corpus of manuscripts unknown in the West, including fundamental texts of Aristotle and Ptolemy, was preserved in libraries in lands under Muslim rule.

As general Islamic superiority in science and medicine was then beyond cavil, so, too, the specific advantage in what might be classed as “food sciences,” such as agriculture and practical gardening. For cooking is a kind of alchemy, which transmutes base ingredients into luxuries. And the medicine of the period was, in great measure, a science of diet. Specific prophylactics were few but nourishment was known to conduce to health; the distinction between medicine and good food was inexact and the medicinal properties of foodstuffs were diligently monitored, recorded and reflected in kitchen practice. Science, magic and cookery blended into one another with no formally distinguished limits. The
Picatrix,
a twelfth-century
book of magic, associates flavors (like other sensual associations) with the planets: pepper and ginger for Mars, camphor and rose for the moon. Bad tastes attract Saturn, bitter Jupiter, sweet Venus. This context of scientific admiration, which made Christian cooks wish to imitate their Muslim counterparts, was reinforced by the enviable image of luxury and ostentation evinced by Muslim courts. In Sicily in the mid-thirteenth century, Frederick II incurred opprobrium from Christian apologists for his fondness for Muslim savants and sybarites. Frederick, grandson of Barbarossa and Holy Roman Emperor, was a fanatical amateur scientist, who starved criminals to death in order to observe the physiological effects; he combined science with self-indulgence and enjoyed “Moorish” arts and manners—lounging on thick carpets, dressing in flowing garments. In the next century Peter the Cruel of Castile affected the status of a sultan and surrounded himself with Moorish decorations in his palaces in Tordesillas and Seville. These royal Islamophiles were extreme but not altogether unrepresentative cases of elite values in high-medieval Christendom: there was a strong tendency to cannibalize Muslim wisdom and defer to Muslim taste.

The culinary arts of Muslim courts became the fodder of Western recipe books when these began to appear on a significant scale in the thirteenth century. The West absorbed influences in three main areas: the aesthetics of the table, an accent on certain traditional exotic ingredients and a bias toward rich, sweet flavors. The aesthetics of food in Muslim courts resembled the aesthetics of the sacred arts in the West—a bias toward goldsmithy and jewelwork, which it was the aim of the best cooks to echo. They used saffron for gilding, sugar like diamonds and meat sliced alternately in white and dark “like gold and silver coin,” according to the tenth-century text known as
The Baghdad Cook.
They made dishes to imitate carnelians and pearls. Just as sacred spaces and altars were heavily censed in Christendom, so royal banqueting halls and tables in Islam were perfumed with heavy aromas. Sweet flavors and scented ingredients were the most esteemed. Milk of almonds, ground almonds, rose water and extracts of other perfumed flowers, sugar and all the spices of the East—to which the Islamic world had privileged access by comparison with Christendom—became essential ingredients.