Near a Thousand Tables (31 page)

Before French colonization, Vietnamese food, despite long permeation by Chinese influence, had no great international esteem. The first meal Thomas Bowyer reported on his pioneering journey there in 1695 was of
boiled snake and black rice
. The Vietnamese cookery which reached France in the postcolonial era was already influenced by French gastronomy. Baguettes and crêpes remain part of the repertoire. Essentially, it is a typical Southeast Asian cuisine, based on a kind of fish sauce even stronger than that of Thailand and alive with the flavors of tamarind and lemongrass. But soigné preparation gives it an edge. The cuisine has obvious potential for the fast food industry, for its highlights include “finger foods”: little parcels of savory stuffings coddled in lettuce leaves and spring rolls wrapped in translucent rice noodles; but the Vietnamese tend to share French solemnity about food and to believe that it must be prepared with care and enjoyed at leisure.

Gordon West's expedition “by bus to the Sahara” in the 19205 involved a lot of meals in which—as it were—the colonial moment of Moroccan cuisine seemed captured. He encountered two coexisting cooking and eating styles, French and native, which were only just beginning to exchange influences. He began his odyssey in kabob bars in Tangier, eating crisply grilled bits of liver and meatballs sandwiched in flatbread, followed by mint tea. In Meknes he dined on crème St. Germain, omelette aux fines herbes and a fowl roasted quickly for crispness. By contrast, in Fez, an eminent caid fed his guest from his own hand, in the traditional manner, with bits of chicken made meltingly friable through long, slow cooking; wild ducks followed, stuffed with rice and herbs and accompanied by a salad of radishes, orange and raisins. Then came “a great roast of mutton.” All the meats were cooked to the point of collapse, where knives and forks are superfluous. The diners shredded them with their fingers and fed one another with the tastiest morsels. Couscous with almonds, green beans and raisins taxed West's dexterity. Little balls of it had to be rolled against the palm of the hand for ease of eating. The end of the meal—a course of sweetmeats—was signified by the polite belching of the guests.

When West's bus descended from the Atlas, at the edge of the desert, in the old Berber fortress city of Ksar es-Souk, the local hotelier in his mud bungalow proudly served

Consommé

Filet de Truite Sidi Ali

Poulet de Grain en Cocotte

Haricots Verts

Cotelettes de Veau Zerhoun

Pommes Mignonettes

Caramel Ziz. Fruits Variés

M. Berujon, whose cooking attracted “all the custom of the camp”—even humble Legionnaires, spending a week's pay on a meal—evidently gave his dinners a calculatedly exotic zing. Unfortunately, the meaning of the Arab names he threaded through the menu is unrecorded. Presumably, they indicate the beginnings of gradual assimilation of local flavors to the saucing and seasoning of French food. Trout “Sidi Ali” must surely have owed something to the sweet almonds of the country, perhaps with the addition of raisins. In the name of veal “Zerhoun” my imagination detects a garnish which might include red pepper and barley sprouts. To West's teeth and palate, the contrast of textures marked the difference between the food of the colonials and the natives, more even than the contrasts of flavor. “The further south we travel, the tougher becomes the meat.” Poor grazing and the need, in the Sanaran climate, to eat slaughtered meat quickly, without hanging, makes it essential to imitate the natives but the French “obstinately” preserve “their national
methods of preparation
,”

The last great category of expatriate cuisines is that of exiles. Outside lands contiguous with China, emigration has never been promoted by the Chinese state. The spread of Chinese cooking around the world has therefore been colonial but not imperial, carried by peaceful migrants in self-imposed “
economic exile
.” At least, this is true of most recent Chinese migration, though that of the last century was genuinely imperial in another sense, as European governments shunted the conscripted labor of coolies and laundrymen around their own empires. It has produced hybrids of its own, of which the most notorious is “chop suey”—a mixture, say, of bamboo shoots, bean sprouts, water chestnuts and other vegetables with slivers of meat or chicken: an invention of pioneer Chinese restaurateurs in
nineteenth-century North America
. Most of the Vietnamese who have carried their cuisine to the West since the 1950s have been political refugees. So were the victims of the Russian Revolution who made Russian food fashionable in Paris after the First World War. The opportunity for this Russian invasion of the capital of haute cuisine arose from the long-standing reputation of Russian tables for great luxury. In the second and third quarters of the nineteenth century, a style of service attributed to Russian origins, and called
service à la russe,
became fashionable in Western Europe: first in France, from where it seems to have spread to
neighboring countries. Instead of varied courses of dishes being placed on the table for guests to help themselves in the manner then traditional, each dish would be handed around separately by a servant. This allowed for the doubling of mealtime spectacle: the festive board, vacated by food, could now house more magnificent tableware and flowers. The multiplication of footmen was itself a display of wealth. The balletics and discretion of service was a new form of theater, under the patronage of the wealthy, with its own specialized training. “Franco-Russian” cuisine had already become an acknowledged subset in the chefs' repertoire before the Revolution, thanks to the exchange of cooks, maîtres d'hôtel and diners across old Europe. Still, when George Orwell, playing at being “down and out in Paris,” worked in the kitchen of a Russian restaurant in the 1920s, he joined other staff in watching anxiously for their first French client and hoping against hope that the establishment would acquire a reputation among the natives.

As a means of the interpenetration of widely separated cuisines, the only activity to rival imperialism and colonization is trade. Trade hovers and shimmers like a waiter at the table of world food, carrying surprising dishes to unsuspecting diners, or shuffling seating for unexpected guests. Global circulation of ingredients by way of trade is assisted by what I call the “stranger effect”—the tendency many peoples have to revere the exotic. Ingredients brought from afar at trouble and cost, or exchanged as gifts with alien plenipotentiaries, derive prestige from their journey out of all proportion to their intrinsic value or their practical merits as foodstuffs. They are received as flavors of the divine horizon, or treasured as mirabilia or prized, initially, for their exclusivity. This is similar to the added interest which travelers acquire as they go, according to how far they journey: pilgrims gain sanctity, leaders charisma, warriors fearsomeness and ambassadors attention if they come from afar. Unfamiliarity forestalls contempt. Sometimes
the stranger effect
is strong enough to overcome the ingrained hostility that most cultures have for foreign food.

Indeed, one measure of a great cuisine is the diversity of the provenance of its ingredients. This was a fact already appreciated in antiquity. “Tell me now, muses,” commanded Hermippus, “how many good things Dionysus has brought here to men in his black ship since he has plied the wine-dark sea.” From Cyrene, came silphium (a curious flavoring, to which we shall return in the next chapter); from the Hellespont, mackerel and all sorts of salt fish; from Thessaly, wheat meal and ox ribs. “The Syracusans send pigs and cheese … Rhodes raisins and dreamy figs.” Pears and fat apples came from Euboea. “The Paphlagonians send the chestnuts
and glossy almonds which are the ornaments of the feast.” Phoenicia provided dates and
wheat for baking
. The same values, in the context of the increasingly generous range of trade, were evinced by Brillat-Savarin, for whom of the

various components of a connoisseur's dinner, the principal parts are of French origin, such as the meat, fowl and fruit; some are imitated from the English, such as beefsteak, Welsh rarebit, punch, etc., some come from Germany, such as the sauerkraut, Hamburg smoked beef, Black Forest fillets; some from Spain, such as the olla podrida, garbanzos, malaga raisins, Xerica pepper-cured ham, and dessert wines; some from Italy, such as the macaroni, Parmesan cheese, Bologna sausages, polenta, ices, and liqueurs; some from Russia, such as the dried meat, smoked eels and caviare; some from Holland, such as the salt cod, cheeses, pickled herring, curaçao and anisette; some from Asia, such as the Indian rice, sago, curry, soy, Shiraz wine, and coffee; some from Africa, such as the Cape wines; and lastly, some from America, such as the potatoes, pineapples, chocolate, vanilla, sugar, etc.; all of which provides sufficient proof of the statement … that a meal such as may be had in Paris is a cosmopolitan whole, in which every part of the world is represented
by its products
.

This should give pause to those who think of “international” cuisine as “new.”

For most of history, however, long-range trade in food has been limited to luxury items. Every society grows its own staples, unless and until they can be imported cheaply. A common motive for the expansion of empires is the program of diversifying diet by imposing ecological collaboration on regions specializing in different foodstuffs. Andean imperialism, from the age of Tiahuanaco, to that of the Incas and Spaniards, has always been based on enforced exchanges of food and, when necessary, labor between producers at different altitudes or among the different microclimates which are characteristic of terrains of mountains and valleys. For much of Chinese history, the empires that have united the contrasting environments of northern and southern China have been bound by the supply of southern rice for northern consumption. The Roman world worked because provinces specialized in the supply of basic products to the rest—Egypt, Sicily and the North African littoral were the “granaries” of the empire, Betica its olive grove. In the Aztec Empire, shifts of tribute between ecologically specialized zones supported the hegemony of a few communities in and around Lake Texcoco. Over seven thousand feet above sea level, where local agriculture was confined to garden mounds dredged and piled from the lake bottom, the lakebound environment was incapable of feeding the huge population—variously estimated but probably at
least eighty thousand people—concentrated in the capital at Tenochtitlán, The city's tribute rolls show 240,000 bushels a year of maize, beans and amaranth levied from subject communities. The cacao needed for the elite drink, essential for every ceremonial occasion, would not grow in the region at all and had to be brought in vast quantities by bearers from the “hot lands” of the far south.

Sometimes, however, even basic essentials have to be brought from afar and cannot easily be forced into an imperial system. The foodstuff of which this is normally true is salt. It is essential to sustain life. Most metabolisms seem to crave it in quantities far above what is strictly necessary. Its role as a preserving agent, which kills bacteria and suppresses decay, makes it essential in seasonal food management strategies. Where there are no mines or salt pans, it has to be extracted from seawater by evaporation or coaxed from plants such as coltsfoot or samphire, which absorb salt from the earth. But some peoples cannot obtain adequate supplies locally; all demographically buoyant communities have to import it as soon as their population exceeds a certain threshold. So salt is one of the world's oldest items of bulk trade. Some of its historic effects are well known. Every student knows the role of salt taxes in the making of medieval monarchies, the triggering of the French Revolution. Anyone familiar with the life of Gandhi knows the impact of salt upon the rise of the Congress Party in India. These episodes seem of slight significance, however, compared to the way the existence of two great salt-deficient markets of the past warped world history into new directions: the West African market in the late Middle Ages and the huge food-salting industry of Northern Europe—especially of the Netherlands—in the seventeenth century. The first of these sustained the medieval gold trade, the second profoundly influenced the course of early long-range imperialism.

Salt was the chief commodity that kept the trans-Saharan gold trade going in the bullion-starved Western world of the late Middle Ages. When Ibn Battuta, the widest-ranging pilgrim of the Middle Ages, crossed the Sahara in 1352, he accompanied a salt caravan from the mining center of Taghaza, The scenes he described can still be witnessed today because the densely populated Niger valley still relies on salt imported across the desert by traditional means. Taghaza, to Ibn Battuta's sophisticated Maghribi mind, was

a village with no attractions. A strange thing about it is that its houses and mosque are built of blocks of salt and roofed with camel skins. There are no trees, only sand in which is a salt mine. They dig the ground and thick slabs are found in it, lying on each other as if they had been cut and stacked under the ground. A camel carries two slabs.

The only people living there, the traveler reported, are the slaves of the chief of the dominant tribe, who dug for the salt and lived on camel meat, supplemented by dates brought to them from Da'ra and Sijilmasa, and a kind of millet,

which is imported from the country of the Blacks. The Blacks come from their country to Taghaza and take away the salt. A load of it is sold at Walata for eight to ten miqtals, and in the city of Mali for twenty to thirty, sometimes forty. The Blacks trade with salt as others with gold and silver; they cut it in pieces and buy and sell with these. For all its squalor qintars of gold dust are
traded there
.

Much of the gold generated by this trade ended up in Christendom, which had little gold of its own. Bullion deficiency in Western Europe was one of the great motors of change in the late medieval world, stimulating the voyages of exploration which eventually led European mariners across the Atlantic and around Africa. An even more urgent shortage, in Northern Europe, was that of salt—especially when the population began to rise in the sixteenth century and the food industry struggled to keep up. In the early seventeenth century, while well-known nutmeg wars were fought between Dutch and English merchants in Amboina for access to relatively rare and luxurious commodities, a less glamorous but more intense drama unfolded in the west: the Netherlanders' efforts to secure their salt supply. The so-called United Provinces of the Netherlands constituted a new country: a republic that began to coalesce in the 1570s, formed by an uneasy alliance of particularists to fight free of the centralizing control of the sovereign they shared at the time: as the result of dynastic strategy and accident, Philip II also happened to be king of Spain and, therefore, to command resources from outside the Netherlands» These threatened the local power of the aristocracy and towns and of the new clerical elite which had arisen in parts of the region as a result of the success of the Reformation. The main industry in the Netherlands as a whole (if one can speak of such an internally divided area as a whole) was cloth making. In the provinces most resolved to fight for independence; however, food processing was of greatest importance: above all, herring salting and the making of salted butter and cheese.