In the Devil's Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food (5 page)

Haquetzalli

Perhaps the most fabulous chocolate drink in history was the one enjoyed by Aztec nobility. There appears to have been two main types. The more sacred version involved a massive head of foam, the precise nature of which has been debated for centuries. The only recipe I know of is in
The Food and Life of
Oaxaca
by Zarela Martínez, who claims that the secret is a special kind of cocoa beans called
pataxtle
which are buried in the ground for about half a year until it turns a chalky white. The beans then go through an elaborate process that results in an
espuma
or foam, akin to beaten egg whites, which is then spooned cold atop a cup of a warm corn drink called
atole
. The beans are impossible to obtain outside Oaxaca but according to Martínez can be replaced with an equal amount of white orchid flowers.

There was also a cold brew called
tlaquetzalli
(“precious thing”) which was heavily laced with chili peppers. The drink seems to have become extinct and there are no recipes, but some of the early European versions of chocolate appear to be closely related. The following is adapted from a 1652 recipe attributed to Captain John Wadsworth of London. Purists will be furious—for one thing, I use skim milk instead of the water—but the combination of sweet/spicy/cold is surprisingly refreshing.

2 dried ancho chilies
4 cups very cold skim milk
1 teaspoon fennel seed
8 wedges of Ibarra or other Mexican chocolate containing sugar and cinnamon

Soak the ancho in warm water until softened, about 20 minutes. Remove stem and seeds. Cut into smaller pieces. Put them and all the other ingredients into a food processor or blender and blend on highest setting until all ingredients are completely pulverized. Spoon off the particulate matter floating on top into a large bowl and pour the remaining liquid into it from a height to create a bubbly, frothy surface. Drink immediately. Alternately, strain and discard the solids. Whip to create a froth. Makes three cups if strained. Serve in chilled, gold-lined tortoise shells.

Gay Gourmand

In her prize-winning essay
How to Eat, Drink, and Sleep as a
Good Christian Should
, Margaret Sidney tells the heartbreaking tale of a family watching their young boy turn into a homosexual at the dinner table. “Father often looks up from his own dinner in concern, or thinks it over during his hard day’s work at the office. He wonders if ‘Mother’ is on the right track,” she wrote in the 1886 piece for
Good Housekeeping
magazine. “Both parents know that little Tom should be helped up into a sturdy boyhood and not have all his girlish fancies indulged. But how can they make him love the rare, juicy tender roast beef, the hot baked potato that he now turns away from?”

Real Men, the moral goes, eat only meat. That’s Man with a capital
M
: Man the Magnificent, Man the Macho, the Meat-Killer and Lord of the Jungle who thrives on “hero sandwiches” and Manhandler beef stews. No queers need apply. But if men like meat, then why shouldn’t men like men? Greek heroes like Milos of Croton boasted of eating a whole bull in one sitting and then a young boy for dessert, because the classical Greek cultures considered both dishes excellent ways to fortify one’s machismo. This was particularly true for the warrior nation of Sparta. “A seventh-century Dorian (Spartan) nobleman through his phallus transferred to a boy the essence of his abilities as a man,” writes historian Thorkil Vanggard. “Through the pederastic act the grown man’s valuable qualities, which were incorporated as these people saw it in his phallus, were transferred to the boy. . . .”

The Spartans did this anally (preferably in Apollo’s temple), but other cultures believe that true masculinity was best ingested orally. At the age of eight or so, Sambian boys in Papua New Guinea are forced into all-male households similar to those of the Spartans, where they eat only “men’s food” in order to counteract the effect of all those years of “women’s food.” The food in question is sperm, which they get fresh by giving older men fellatio as often as possible. The Sambians consider this a form of breast-feeding, and when the boys reach the age of fifteen they in turn “nurse” the younger boys toward manhood. It’s a carefully controlled process, according to field psychoanalyst Robert Stiller, and if an older boy attempted to give head to a younger boy it would be “a perversion, shocking; it would be, in our terms, homosexuality.” When they get married, the men refill their manly juices by drinking the white sap from a certain type of tree.

There’s actually a long history of banning foods that provoke not only lust but the “wrong” kind of lust. An early version of the New Testament banned eating rabbit because it was believed that they grew a new rectum every year and that eating their flesh would fill the diner with an urge to sodomize. The same text claimed eating a weasel instilled an insatiable urge to perform oral sex because the animal procreates through its oral cavities. Hyena sandwiches were a complete no-no because the beast’s well-known habit of changing its sex at the full moon inevitably induced bisexual impulses in the unsuspecting gourmand.

The most shamelessly homosexual of dishes, however, is freshwater fish. It seems the Egyptian deity Osiris lost his penis during one of those cosmic battles way back when. It fell into the Nile, and a fish called
oxyrhynchus
gobbled it down, an act that the heterosexual patriarchy found so appalling they made the fish shape the hieroglyph for loathing. They even used to encourage fish bashing by beating the aforementioned guppies to death at religious ceremonies, crying, “Horus [a.k.a. Osiris] of Edfu triumphs over all evil ones.” The saying “Don’t speak to me with that mouth that eats fish” is still used to call someone sexually false and a liar in neighboring Somalia. Even so-called modern cultures still view fish as a more feminine food than meat.

The same is true for foods thought to threaten a woman’s “feminine” nature. Women today explain their passion for green salads as a way to achieve a slimmer figure. In fact, the association between leafy greens and the feminine gender goes back to a muddled series of Greek myths that connected green lettuce with a lessening of animal desire; since women were not supposed to feel these kinds of emotions, salad became the most feminine of dishes. In nineteenth-century America, when slenderness was definitely not in vogue, girls routinely suffered a nutritional imbalance called “green sickness” that came from living on nothing but sweets and salads. Lectures on feminine foods began with fish and salads and moved straight on to dessert, and newspapers still report studies that “prove” expectant mothers who go vegetarian are more likely to have a baby girl, while meat-eating Moms, of course, tend to produce boys. In one case a teenage American girl was put on a diet of two green salads a day by her psychiatrist to “cure” her lesbianism. “I was on a schedule of green salads interspersed with prayer,” wrote “Whitey” in the collection
Word Is Out: Stories of Some of
Our Lives
. “I was full of expectations that . . . it would solve all my problems and make my mother happy.” When this prescription failed, her parents locked her up in an insane asylum for four years. It was while in the asylum that she had her first lesbian experience.

Beijing Libido

The Chinese are the world’s reigning omnivores. They eat cats. They eat dogs. They eat monkey brains, fish bladders, and gorilla paws. They gulp down Tibetan lamas, and it seems just a matter of time before the running dogs of Taiwan slide down the national gullet. But their appetite for what Western minds might perceive as socially unacceptable shines most bright when it comes to aphrodisiacs. It’s almost as if someone had run down a list of protected species and ticked them off one by one. The recent stability of the world’s tiger population, for instance, is now threatened by a Chinese demand for the animal’s penis. You can get tiger penis in capsule form or in the ever-popular “three penis” wine (actually more like a whiskey). Some fifty thousand seals have the same bit of their anatomy hacked off every year for similar reasons, making their little man 500 percent more valuable than the rest of the animal’s carcass combined. The horn of the rhino now sells for $54,000 a kilogram in China. The eggs of the endangered leatherneck sea turtle also rate high on the list.

But the lust for exotic erotica is universal. Seafood of any kind rates high, but whale mucus is particularly popular in the Middle East. Malaysians suck blood from a freshly decapitated rattlesnake to get going. Japanese mix the testes of the poisonous puffer fish with hot sake, and the Romans once fancied the feet of the skink lizard. Everything from cockroaches to leeches to jackal bile to asses’ milk has been vainly rubbed on weary members for so long, it’s a wonder the damn things haven’t been rubbed right off. The only men who considered the ladies’ feelings appear to be the Mongolians, who once used goat’s eyelids as a sexual enchancer; apparently those wiry eyelashes drove the girls crazy. But it’s the English who win the prize for perverse quirks—Elizabethan men found prunes so titillating that brothels kept jars of them on the bedside table. How most of these items came to be considered love engines is anyone’s guess, although many bear a vague resemblance to genitals, particularly the ever-popular sea cucumber, which squirts out white threads when alarmed. None of these aphrodisiacs are particularly effective, which is perhaps their sole virtue; scientists now hope that the proven effectiveness and relative cheapness of the drug Viagra will decimate the market for tiger penii. One species has already made a comeback. Thought to have been exterminated by China’s libidinous appetite for its antlers years ago, a small herd of Tibetan red deer was recently spotted two hundred miles from the Dalai Lama’s former home in Lhasa. Perhaps some of Tibet’s other endangered species will stage a similar comeback.

The Rainbow Egg

The Australian Aborigines say that long ago during The Dreamtime a fisherman found an egg lying on the beach. He was hungry and put it in the fire to cook. As soon as he put the egg in the flames, a terrible storm broke out. Rain fell and fell. Then the egg cracked open and out of it poured more water—oceans and rivers—and mountains and rainbows and suns and moons and stars, all gushing out like a roaring river and washing The Dreamtime away. And so the world was born. But still the rain fell, and more water came from the Rainbow Egg until the world was drowned. So the fisherman had to change himself into an angry duck.

Minus the irate duck, this Australian Aborigine tale of the creation of the universe exists in almost every culture. The Egyptians said the universe was once an egg, which they called the “essence of the divine apes,” and that the yolk was the sun and the egg white the galactic emptiness in which we drift. The pre-Buddhist Bon cult of Tibet believed the world was nothing more than an egg with eighteen layers, an idea embedded in the egg-shaped Buddhist temples throughout the Himalayas. The Orphic cult of Greece, which banned the eating of eggs around 600 B.C., celebrated the omelet most eloquently:

O mighty first begotten, hear my prayer
Two-fold, egg-born, and wandering through the air.
Bull-roarer, glorying in thy golden wings
From whom the race of gods and mortals springs.

All this praising of an egg might seem a bit much to Westerners, but there’s a universal series of beliefs that cast the egg as the Viagra of the gods. Near the Chinese/Indian border a woman who offered a man an egg was proposing marriage. Listless Filipino men eat
balut
, an egg in which a young duck has developed, to restore sexual vigor. For maximum potency you should feel the embryo’s bones and feathers as you chew. German farmers once smeared eggs on their plows to ensure fertile fields. Colored eggs, especially red, are considered particularly powerful from Greece to China, where they are tossed into the laps of women desiring pregnancy. The Koreans claim their first king emerged from a mysterious red egg left by a flying horse. Christianity’s multicolored Easter Egg hunt no doubt relates to all of this, though where the giant rabbit came from is anybody’s guess.

These egg/fertility beliefs have led to rather eccentric behavior. Nineteenth-century German explorer Eduard Vogel was murdered in Chad in part because he “gave general offence by his egg-eating, for no decent person could live on such food.” Many African cultures had profound taboos against egg eating, especially by a woman. Ethiopian ladies were once enslaved for the act, while the Yaka people of the Congo believed that a woman who ate an omelet would lose her mind. If she indulged while pregnant, her children would be born pink and bald, like those egg-eating Europeans, a fate generally conceded to be worse than death.

There’s a very old folktale that explains all this nonsense. Once upon a time, it goes, all women were barren. The girls complained to the goddess of Heaven, sometimes called Eka Abassi, saying how could they have children if they had no eggs? So Eka Abassi went to the hen and asked if it could spare one of her beautiful eggs for the humans. The hen reluctantly agreed, and ever since the women have borne children. But it would be bad manners if the women were to steal another egg from so generous a hen, so bad that the people think Eka Abassi would take back the original egg and leave the world barren once again. Those stories of women going mad and having pink babies? They were just made up by the elders to frighten the uneducated into leaving the hen’s eggs alone. It worked. One study from 1974 showed that 3 percent of the women in rural South Carolina believed that it is bad luck for a pregnant woman to eat an egg.

I believe that the West’s bizarre propensity for painting its eggs in spring relates to the true meaning of that old Aboriginal tale. When I first heard the Australian story, I’d imagined the Rainbow Egg as a kind of tie-dye superball floating in space. But one evening while standing on the roof of my building in New York after a summer rain shower, I turned around and found a huge rainbow arching across the sky. It was The Egg, I realized. The Aborigine storyteller had been saying that the rainbow’s arch was the upper half of a huge, cosmic egg, with the rest of it hidden below the horizon. The sun was setting and there on the horizon, right in the middle of the arch, was a yolk-colored sun fading away. The Rainbow Egg. Europeans had merely memorialized the same concept with an annual rite of rebirth in which eggs are dyed the colors of the rainbow—red, blue, green, and yellow. At least that’s what I thought as I watched the rainbow fade that day, staring at it so long the world seemed to be rushing toward me, the clouds and the sky and the city and the sun’s golden light.