Near a Thousand Tables (26 page)

Almonds appear in sauces for chicken, rabbit, pork, pigeons and all the sweet Egyptian stews described by Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi in the early thirteenth century. Fowl, he recommended, should be boiled in rose water on a bed of crushed hazelnuts or pistachios, with purslane seeds, poppy seeds or rose hips, cooked until they coagulated, and then enlivened at the last minute with precious spices, since to cook these for long would diminish their flavor. A characteristic banquet dish should include three roasted lambs, stuffed with chopped meats fried in
sesame oil, with crushed pistachios, pepper, ginger, cloves, mastic, coriander, cardamom and other spices, sprinkled with musk-infused rose water; the spaces between and around the lambs on their dish should be filled with fifty fowls and fifty small birds, which in their turn were best stuffed with eggs or meat and fried with grape or lemon juice. The whole should then be enveloped with pastry, liberally sprinkled with rose water, and baked—presumably in an oven of remarkable size—to “
rose red
.” Aristocratic tables in the West retained some tastes inherited from antiquity and, of course, many local and regional traditions, but the effect of Muslim magnetism is evident in the balance of influences suggested, for instance, by a menu from Richard II's England. Pig's umbles, boiled in stock with leeks, onions, blood, vinegar, pepper and cloves, was a dish which would have done justice to a Roman table. But the rest of the meal was fit for a sultan: small birds boiled in almond paste with cinnamon and cloves, and rose-scented rice boiled soft in almond milk, mixed with chicken's brawn, cinnamon, cloves, mace and
scented with sandalwood
. Dishes prominent in late-medieval Western cookery books regularly betray Muslim influence by these unmistakable signs, or by the inclusion of telltale ingredients, such as pomegranate seeds, raisin paste or sumac berries sweetened with almonds.

The movement known as the Renaissance transformed courtly cookery, as it transformed other arts. In the kitchen, reversion to ancient texts and Greco-Roman sources of inspiration demanded the abjuration of Arab influence. When Renaissance cooks tried to revive habits of antiquity they discarded the old palette of the culinary artist, with its gold hues, fragrant odors and sweet savors. The result, according to the outstanding historian of the process, T. Sarah Peterson, was “a shock” which has reverberated through Western food ever since. It used to be generally assumed among food historians that a new “salt-acid” repertoire of flavors, derived from ancient Rome, came to dominate Western cookery. This seems to be exaggerated. Roman food's reputation for saltiness derives from the ubiquity in Roman recipes of the fish sauce called garum or liquamen—made from red mullet, sprats, anchovies and mackerel mixed with entrails of other large fish, salted, exposed to the sun, concentrated, sieved and stored. The best quality liquamen, however, was not excessively salty: it was used, for instance, to freshen over-salty sea urchins; and when it became too salty with age, cooks were advised to refresh it with honey or
grape must
. Most of the new recipes of the Renaissance were not particularly salty, though they certainly represented a revulsion against the cloying sweetness favored in
the Middle Ages
. I suspect that this has little to do with Roman inspiration and more to do with the fact—to which we shall return in the next chapter—that sugar, formerly an exotic luxury, became a plentiful,
everyday product in the same period. The real era of classical revivalism in food was in the eighteenth century, when the hero of a picaresque novel entertained guests at a reconstructed Roman dinner so accurate that it made them all sick. Later in the same century, Abbé Barthélémy devoted a chapter of
Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grece
to a meticulous description of an Athenian meal; Carême organized Roman meals under Napoleon; Parmentier was hailed “the Homer, Virgil and
Cicero of the potato
.”

Meanwhile, there were certainly other Renaissance effects. Among the most beneficial, though not the most far-reaching, were a new prominence given to dairy products and vegetables and the rediscovery of fungi as food. (They were not universally welcomed: Henri II's physician, Buyerin, called them “phlegmy excretions” and reminded readers that mushrooms had massacred banqueters in antiquity and that Agrippina had murdered Claudius with poisoned morels. He admitted, however, that the “rage of the gullet” could not be
assuaged without them
.) Other vegetables with a certain viscosity of texture received new acclaim. Asparagus and artichoke bottoms were a Renaissance rediscovery, inspired by Pliny's gibes against “cultivated thistles.” A surfeit of them made
Catherine de Medici ill
. The most important effect of the new cookery, however, was that by renouncing the exoticism of “Moorish” food, and reverting to a more familiar Western shopping basket, it made the cuisine of kings and aristocrats more accessible than ever to eaters in the middle ranks of Western society. The embourgeoisement of haute cuisine had begun. The seventeenth century was a critical period, in which the noblest recipes came to be communicated to a wider public than ever before. The point of diffusion was France.

Henri IV, the king who famously aimed to put “a chicken in the pot” of every peasant in his kingdom, was supposed to have simple, rustic tastes. He liked garlic and nursery food but acknowledged the need for sumptuous banquets as an aid to diplomacy and a lubricant of policy. His heir, Louis XIII, was brought up on a diet of intimidating scale and dazzling variety, recorded in the notebooks of his personal physician. Giblets figured prominently, as did asparagus; but every kind of meat and vegetable also appeared on his table, together with twenty-two kinds of fish, without counting the shellfish, and twenty-eight fruits. But in maturity he lost interest in overeating in consequence of poor health. It was therefore left to Louis XIV to introduce enlightened gluttony to the French court, for he had—as a courtier observed—“a most complaisant digestion, which enabled him to recuperate his strength whenever he so required.” His sister-in-law often saw him “eat four bowls of different soups, a whole pheasant, a partridge, a big plateful of salad, sliced mutton in its juice with garlic, two big lumps of ham, a plateful of pastries
and fruits and preserves.” His meals were usually taken in private but sometimes turned into public performances, rites of majesty conducted before an audience of three hundred members of the royal household and a limitless public, confined
behind barriers
.

Paradoxically, courtly cuisine spread through society, becoming first a standard of aspiration, then—surprisingly quickly—the norm for every bourgeois family at its best. Louis XIV's kitchen kept no secrets: they were diffused by cookbooks, beginning with
Le Cuisinier françois
by François Pierre La Varenne, cook to a noble household, in 1651. By 1691, when François Massialot published a work whose title summed up the process of social diffusion—
Cuisinier royal et bourgeois—
100,000 copies of such works
were in print
.

The
Gesta Romanorum—
a collection of anecdotes apparently intended as a trove for sermon writers—has a story of Caesar's demand for a boar's heart “because the emperor loved the heart best of any beast, and more than all the beast.” But when the cook dressed it and saw how good and fat it was he ate it himself and said to his servants, “Say to the emperor that the hog
had no heart
.” Who knows what moral medieval homilists drew from this? For us, its message is clear: it is hard for elites to monopolize select foods. It is almost equally hard for the underprivileged to claim their stake to their own dishes without exciting elite envy. Appropriations by the aspiring downgrade the creations of high cookery.
Nostalgie de la boue
and affectations of populism spread recipes up the social scale. Goldilocks is always transgressing class boundaries and stealing other people's porridge.

Of course, particular dishes, peculiar ingredients, certain culinary techniques and, indeed, entire menus have their own class profiles. Sometimes these are rooted in dietary restrictions typical of caste systems, like those in India, where foods are ranked in order of pollutant effect, or among Cushitic linguistic groups in East Africa who—if they have proper pride—still refuse to eat fish. More commonly, class differentiation starts with the crudities of basic economics. People eat the best food they can afford: the preferred food of the rich therefore becomes a signifier of social aspirations, pretensions or affectations, like those of the poor knight in Lazarillo de Tormes who went about with a toothpick in his mouth to suggest that he had been eating meat. Some foods become badges of honorable poverty: the fare of hermits or scholars. In Greece and Rome, the okralike mallow, asphodel and fenugreek, with its currylike aroma, were poor men's foods: according to Lucan, if you were served last in a wealthy household, nothing but mallow would be left. Galen told an anecdote of “a young medical student in Alexandria,”
who lived for four years on meals dressed with nothing else, except lupins (which are poisonous in their raw state). “He ate them with garum, of course” or with oil or vinegar. “He was healthy all through these years and his physical state was no worse at the end than
at the beginning
.”

More commonly, the food of the poor is imposed by the rich. It is easy, amid the intricacies of class-differentiated menus, to forget the grim fact that for most of history “class-based nutritional inequalities were literally a matter of
life and death
.” One of the “social measures” for which Peter III of Aragon was renowned was that sour wine, stale bread, rotten fruit and acidified cheese be put
aside for alms
. According to an old Romagnol harvesters' song. “The master gets the grain, the peasant
gets the straw
.” Baldassare Pisanelli, a late-sixteenth-century physician, assured readers that “the leek is the worst food, the poorest and most detestable that can be used … it is the food of rustic folk,” who should shun the food of their betters for their own good. “The only harm there is in the pheasant is that it causes asthma in rustic folk. The latter should abstain from eating them and leave them for noble and
refined people
.” Courtly cuisines often have hallmark ingredients, which are forbidden to outsiders, such as swans in England and
honey wine in Ethiopia
, Gradually, however, in almost all known cases, social differentiation becomes a matter not only of what foods are eaten but also of how they are prepared. Messibugo, the arbiter elegantiarum of mid-sixteenth-century Tuscany, distinguished recipes suitable for “great princes” from those for “ordinary use”: though the ingredients were essentially the same, on special occasions, the amount of spicing went up. The poor of industrializing Paris in the nineteenth century were advised to buy fat blended from the leftover butter, drippings, pork fat and poultry fat from bourgeois tables. Not much else was likely to be left over. In
La France gourmande
of 1906, Fulbert Dumontelli recommended scrap meats combined in croquettes—“it perfumes the whole house”—and garnished with slices of truffle
cooked in champagne
.

Limits between eating styles at different levels of society can, in exceptional circumstances, remain unchanged for eons, trapped in continuities which no amount of contact or exchange can unprise. In Emilia, according to the leading authority on the culinary history of the region,

the “fat” cuisine acclaimed in the language of gastronomic tourism is not a dietary reality but a cliché, a convention bordering on mystification, a gastronomic myth, a topos, a commonplace only approximately related to the truth. The “historic” Emilian diet is quite different: it bears a strong peasant stamp—simple, crude, rooted in barbarian traditions.

Peasants ate more or less the same meals in the early twentieth century as when Gregory the Great ruled Rome. A typical Lombard-period family meal in winter comprised a loaf of bread, a pot of minestra and a thick foccaccia made of beans and millet, spread with animal fats or oil. A prodigious amount of wine would accompany it—as much wine, cup for cup, as soup. A modern menu in the same season would be little changed: the minestra would have pasta as well as beans, cooked in water with lard or onions for flavor and herring or bacon and ground chestnuts spread on polenta. “The elegant food many people associate with Bologna … has never belonged to the majority of the city's population. Bechamel sauce, for example, which is cited ad nauseam as a typical feature of the ‘delicate,' ‘smooth' and ‘harmonious' Bolognese style of cooking, has never been known to the ordinary people of the city,” who might, however, add cream to minestra. “Their diet, like their character, is sober and frugal, solid, essential, without too many subtleties and refinements.” Minestra is known in the region as “
the fodder of man
.”

This situation is now over, of course. But even while it prevailed it was not typical of the way foodstuffs changed their social profiles. Foods shift places in the hierarchy of social acceptability with bewildering ease and rapidity. Sometimes, the shift is induced by changes in availability: factory farming in the twentieth century stripped chicken of all rarity value in the Western world. Oysters and cod, on the other hand, leapt up the social scale as their breeding grounds shrank. Sometimes, the mere mechanisms of fashion are responsible: celebrity endorsement, novelty value, the oscillations of chic. Even slow changes—or those discernible to us only over long periods—surprise us by their scale. Educated palates in ancient Rome craved viscous textures: the prestige of pigs' glands and jowls, gelatinous feet, liver engorged by hypertrophy, fungi, tongues, head cheese, brains, sweetbreads, testicles, udders, wombs, marrow: the prestige of these foods is incontestably confirmed not only by the frequency with which they appear in surviving recipes but also by the fact that almost all of them became subjects of
sumptuary laws
. Foie gras was already a delicacy in the time of Homer, to judge from Penelope's pride in the “twenty geese I have at home, eating wheat
soaked in water
.” For an elite experience, Roman eaters had to burrow deep in offal. This preference was never fully revived when the Renaissance restored Roman cuisine, and offal has remained, until recently, poor people's food. In modern Emilia and Romagna, according to reports in the 1960s, “there is a sharp decline in the consumption of offal or ‘trimmings' like tripe, tongue, sweetbreads and filoni (spinal cords); the grilled treccine (plaits) of lambs' guts and the omelettes of lamb bottoni (testicles)—traditionally eaten on Easter Eve in Romagna—have become almost
clandestine delights
.” Now, however, chefs bent on retrieving traditional cuisines are renewing the chic of tongues and
testicles, brains and head cheese, tripes and trotters. Foie gras and calves liver were formerly exceptional—licensed lusciousness which was admitted at refined tables because it was always expensive to produce. Other organ meats remained cheap as long as they were undemanded by the wealthy; now they have caught up in cost with the rest of the edible animal parts.