Near a Thousand Tables (29 page)

They have a sort of foreign unpleasantness about them. They serve you a big dish with five little dishes on it: one with garlic, one with two sea urchins, one
with a sweet bird-pastry, one with ten shellfish, one with a bit of sturgeon. While I eat this, he's finished that; while he's still on that, I've finished this. I want some of this and some of that, my dear fellow.

Archestratus could detect a foreigner by his attitude to aperitifs. “As you imbibe,” he advised,

chew on some such dessert as this: tripe or boiled sow's womb marinated in cumin and sharp vinegar and silphium, and the tender tribe of birds, such as are in season. But have nothing to do with those Syracusans who simply drink, like frogs, without
eating anything
.

This was self-mockery: he was Syracusan, too.

Migrants resist the food of host communities: when Japanese workers were introduced to Fiji in the last century to compensate for the thousands of natives killed by measles, they found themselves in a land of abundance where the indigenous diet was so rich that deficiency diseases were unknown. Yet they eschewed local products and tried to subsist on white rice: as a result, most of them died of beriberi and the rest had
to be repatriated
. During the Korean War American POWs died of malnutrition because they refused to eat rations which, though perfectly nutritious, seemed
to them repulsive
. The mutual farewell of Spaniards during the colonization of an alien hemisphere in the sixteenth century was, “God keep you from losing
sight of bread
.” A Mayan highland chief, refusing Spanish sweetmeats, protested, “I am an Indian and so is my wife, and our food is beans and chile, and when I want a turkey I have that too. I do not eat sugar, nor is candied lemon peel food for Indians nor did our ancestors know
such a thing
.” These polarities lend piquancy to a story which Nicolás de Mastrillo, future Jesuit Provincial of Peru, told in a letter home during his days as a missionary rookie at the Andamaca station in the high Andes. In company with an older priest, he set off on his first mission, a journey of many days through mountains and jungle, in search of unevangelized Indians. When he encountered them, their friendliness and generosity delighted him, as they all sat down together to a banquet under the trees. But then a moment of danger arose, when one of the Indians—who believed the Jesuits and secular Spaniards belonged to different races, so different were their codes and manners—suddenly changed the mood. “I believe,” he said, “that these men are not true Fathers, but Spaniards in disguise.” The tension lasted for a moment, while Mastrillo's life flashed past him. Then, “No,” the Indian declared, with a relaxed tone. “They must be Fathers, for they are
eating our food
.”

A sort of natural multiplication of these effects makes cultures collectively hostile to new culinary influences. Whatever is foreign becomes the butt of excluding prejudices. “National” cuisines are never originally national. They begin as regional cooking habits with ingredients limited by the natural environment. They are open to local exchanges of influence and modification by such new products as can be accommodated in a regional tradition, whether in preserved form or because of natural longevity or traveling properties. When a cooking style acquires a national label, it undergoes a kind of fossilization: its purity has to be protected from alien influence. This is why so much of the literature of food describes revulsion of foreign dishes, or else a fascination with them which readers are invited to classify as morbid.

Traditional cuisines are always definable in terms of a few staples and seasonings which are readily available in the places concerned: these seep into collective tastes and inform palates which remain saturated in memories of them and, commonly, become indifferent or intolerant toward other flavors. Even methods of preparation can become cultural characteristics or badges of identity within regions where the same foods are available throughout. The chickpea is an indispensable product on most shores of the Mediterranean. At one end of that sea, however, people know them as garbanzos, stew them with flavorings, seasonings and sources of animal fat and blood and eat the pale globes hot, when they are tender enough to crush with the tongue against the roof of the mouth. At the other end, or the farther shore, they like to simmer the chickpeas to a pulp and serve them as humus, a cold puree mixed with oil and flavorings which commonly include lemon. An ingredient which, at the western end of the sea, has never escaped from the cooking pots of peasants has been blended and bludgeoned to refinement in the east. Neither way of dressing this pulse has ever appealed in the other's traditional lands.

Food is not easily communicable between cultures. Yet today, we not only eat high cuisines which call themselves “fusion” and “international.” We also feed in a globalized world where dishes and ingredients are swapped with enthusiasm from one side of the world to the other. “McDonaldization” is mirrored, if not matched, by world conquests which start in Italy (pizza, pasta), Mexico (tacos and “wraps”), China (wontons and spring rolls, for instance), India (curries and poppadoms) and even New Zealand (kiwis and pavlova, the invention of which, though disputed by Australia, is unquestionably a New Zealander's honor). When I visited Madison, Wisconsin, I was taken to Turkish and Afghan restaurants. I knew of no typical Wisconsin dishes except cheese and fudge: even so, it was surprising to find no place that claimed to offer a regional menu, and to realize
that my hosts esteemed only the extremely exotic. It is tempting to represent this as the culmination of a progressive story of horizons widened by improving communications. That would be false—or, at least, oversimplifying to the point of distortion. There is no more intriguing problem in the history of food than that of how cultural barriers to the transmission of foods and foodways have been traversed or broken.

There are forces capable of penetrating cultural barriers and internationalizing food. These include war. Armies are great vectors of cultural influence, and modern warfare, which mobilizes great masses of ordinary people and shunts them around the globe, has had paradoxical effects on international understanding. It is hard to keep servicemen, gastronomically speaking, “down on the farm now that they've seen Paree.” Taste for Indian food in Britain, or Indonesian in the Netherlands, might have been confined to immigrants and members of the former administrative elite if returning servicemen had not spread familiarity with it to other people of their class. Kushuri—a popular Cairo street food of rice and lentils with onion and spices—is presumably Indian kitchri, and was brought to Egypt by British forces. “Colonial circulation” is an older phenomenon in food history than hamburgers and
fried chicken
. Departing conquerors leave behind them an originally foreign conception of what constitutes properly soldierly food. Roast chicken with bread sauce and roast beef with Yorkshire pudding still appear on Pakistani mess menus.

Hunger, of course, or some analogous emergency such as war can dispose people to accept food which in other circumstances they might reject as foreign. In the sixteenth century, sweet potatoes became acceptable in China and Japan after introduction in times of famine. Taste for spam, introduced as American food aid, outlasted the Second World War in Britain. Today, the surpluses that developed countries dole out to the feministic Third World are drawn from wheat “mountains” and dairy “lakes”: they convert lactose-hostile cultures to milk products and gruel eaters to bread. Similarly, economic self-interest can persuade people to change diet in the case of exceptionally exploitable foodstuffs. In the late eighteenth century in New Zealand the Maoris refocused their food production on pork and potatoes—foodstuffs previously unknown to them—to sell to European naval and whaling ships. Tourism in the twentieth century is often credited with effecting mass changes of taste. There is also an unaided power of culture which is capable of transmitting taste: what might be called
cultural magnetism, in cases where communities ape the foodways of cultures of superior prestige.

Even in history as complacent as that of Western Europe, this effect has often been observed. Evidence of the most striking instance accumulated in the high Middle Ages, when influences from Islam infused West European tastes in food. As we have seen (above, p. 119), this was a genuine case of imitation as a form of flattery: the tribute of an inferior to a superior civilization. It was not “acculturation”: on the contrary, parts of Europe which were closest to Islam in the Middle Ages, or reconquered from it, tended to react against it and reject its food. The cookery of most of Spain is dependent upon olive oil, but not because of the medieval Muslim presence. For centuries, the preferred medium of Christian cooks was lard: indeed, it was the defining ingredient of Christian cookery, because Muslims and Jews were forbidden to eat it. The late-fifteenth-century chronicler Andrés Bernáldez was only a parish priest in a peripheral province but, perhaps because of the very modesty of his circumstances, he was a faithful spokesman of his times—the times of the expulsion of the Jews and the final conquest of Spain's last Muslim kingdom. His long catalogue of Jewish and Muslim vices culminates, as if it were worse than their alleged offenses against humanity, morality, decency, honor and truth, in a denunciation of “their disgusting stews, which they
make with olive oil
.” In any case, Christian food was the food of the parts of Spain the Muslims neglected and did not bother to conquer or tenaciously to defend—the forests and mountains and cold plateaus and zones of Atlantic climate, where olives would not grow but where pigs could be reared in great numbers. The present role of the olive in Spain only began after the Jews and Muslims had been expelled, dispersed or converted and the great expansion of the olive industry in the seventeenth century was uninhibited by confessional hatred. Many traditional dishes still use no olive oil. The classic, slow-cooked pot dishes of chickpeas and beans—the cocidos and fabadas—are bound together with silky pork fat.

Cases of influence exerted by way of sincere imitation can be surprising because they sometimes reverse the flow of the cultural mainstream. It would be no surprise, for instance, to find Iranian cooking imitated in India because of the high status of Persian learning from what we think of as the Middle Ages onward; Persian was the court language of the Mughal Empire, Yet, in cooking, the preponderant influence has been exerted in the opposite direction and Iranian cuisine has borrowed from India a reliance on rice—despite the fact that the varieties Iranians eat are not suited to the climate. In Iran, expensive varieties are preferred—evidence of the high status rice conferred on those who ate it when it was first
introduced. When grown in the country, these decline in productivity over time and seed has to be imported from India. Cooking methods are elaborate, as befits what began as a courtly foodstuff. After two hours' soaking and boiling to an al dente consistency, the rice is “steamed” in fat for half an hour under a raffia lid. Then the flavorings are added: roast mutton, sour cherries, herbs, dill, saffron or turmeric, to cite only a few ingredients mentioned in Safavid period
recipe books
.

No source of influence in cookery—perhaps, in the exchange of culture generally—has exceeded imperialism. Empires can sometimes be powerful enough to enforce a metropolitan taste on a peripheral area, and they usually promote human migration and colonization. These in their turn transmit eating habits alongside other aspects of culture, or reeducate the palates of expatriates who become vectors of new tastes when they return home. The tides of empire run in two directions: first, the flow outward from an imperial center creates metropolitan diversity and “frontier” cultures—cuisines of miscegenation—at the edges of empires. Then the ebb of imperial retreat carries home colonists with exotically acclimatized palates and releases the forces of “countercolonization,” dappling the former imperial heartlands with enclaves of sometime subject peoples, who carry their cuisines with them. In consequence, there are three types of imperial cuisine: the high cuisines of the nodal points of empire, which sweep ingredients, styles and dishes from all over the regions of conquest into the central menu; the colonial cookery which juxtaposes the food of elite colonists from the “mother country” with the “subaltern” styles of their local cooks and concubines; and the countercolonial effect, whereby the imperial people are introduced to the food of their subject races and former victims when the latter start migrating toward the center.

Of the first type, Turkish cuisine is the outstanding example. Though gourmets and food historians are now rediscovering the delights of regional and preimperial Turkish foods, the menu which has made Turkish food famous and established it as one of the world's great cuisines was concocted in Ottoman Constantinople among a court aristocracy and, above all, in the sultans' kitchens at the Topkapi palace. Today, the palace is palpable evidence of what the empire was like in the era of its greatness, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The throne room is a pavilion and many apartments are scattered through the grounds, like the tents of a nomad's camp—reminders of an imperial lifestyle which never definitively forsook the memory of the ruling dynasty's steppeland origins. The imperial stool is capacious enough for a sultan of morbid corpulence—for the memories of nomadism were sustained through centuries of sedentary overfeeding. In the warren of the harem, with its lavish alleys and secretive culs-de-sac, one can sense the arcane methods by which the empire was ruled:
here pillow talk was of politics, and women and eunuchs conspired to secure the succession for a potential patron from among the sultan's brood. The harem could accommodate two thousand women, the stables four thousand horses.