Near a Thousand Tables (27 page)

Brown and white bread have swapped social profiles in a way that would surely bewilder an anthropologist from another planet. White bread has enjoyed, for most of history, universal esteem because it seems to embody refinement: compared with its brown and black cousins, it is the product of a longer process, a more intense use of labor, a greater degree of waste and a demand for subtler flavor. It often involves superior—that is, costlier—grains. In the eleventh century, Gregory, Bishop of Langres, did penance by eating
barley bread
. According to a sermon of Humbert of Romans, a postulant at the altar when asked “What do you seek?” replied “
White bread and often!
” In France, until the last generation, to eat pain de seigle was
to lose caste
. In Britain, the superiority of white bread was an unquestioned assumption until industrial baking made it universally available. The upper classes then discovered the virtues of bread the workers would no longer eat. Coarse texture was redefined as “fiber” and to eat it became a sign of discrimination. Royal tables in India of two thousand years ago were furnished with the choicest rice—the most highly polished
grains selected
.

Oysters are commonly regarded as a food which has ascended the social scale in the modern West; but their history is more complex. The oyster was a sublime delicacy in antiquity and Middle Ages. Pliny rated it “the most delicate morsel of the sea.” It was boiled in spiced almond milk and wine in fifteenth-century England. In sixteenth-century Italy it was baked in pastry in elaborate savory custards. It was stuffed in soles in
seventeenth-century France
. It was proletarian food, on which Tiny Tim could dine with freedom, only during a brief era of abundance in the nineteenth century. While oysters have risen socially, chicken has fallen. It is hard now to recapture the longing evinced in a son's reproach to his honest peasant father in a thirteenth-century tale by Werner der Gartenaere, “Father, I eat polenta but I want what they call
roast chicken
.” Today, it seems, we have to recontrive socially distinctive forms of chicken by privileging rare breeds, insisting on poulet de bresse, or inflating the prices of the products of free range or organic farming. Similarly, something like a socially differentiated range of pasta has been created by artificially adjusted pricing. Yet even pasta, which we think of as universally accessible nourishment, was once a luxury item. In 1600 in Rome, vermicelli cost three times as much as bread; even in 1700 the price of pasta was still double that of bread. Seventeenth-century Romans affectedly denigrated pasta as a foreign,
Neapolitan invention: the real motive for eating bread instead may have been rational economy rather than
patriotic preference
. The descent of pasta to the rank of a universal food occurred in eighteenth-century Naples as the result of a technological innovation—the kneading machine and
mechanical press
.

There was a time when caviar was popular. Pierre Bellon reported it as a commonplace foodstuff in Constantinople soon after the Latin conquest. Throughout the Levant, it was said, “there is no one who does not eat it except Jews, who avoid it because the sturgeon
has no scales
.” The increasing cheapness and popularity of salmon today represents a regression to former habits: by local statute, apprentices in Gloucester in 1787 could not be forced “to dine off salmon oftener than
twice a week
.” Meanwhile, in France, the potato registered a slow but relentless social ascent from a stomach filler for the poor to a garnish of universal esteem. In 1749, “Les gens d'un certain ordre mettair au-dessous d'eux d'en voir paraitre sur leur table”; by 1789 “ce poison commence a se glisser jusque chez les
personnes aisées
.” The same tuber followed a quite different trajectory in Cordoba, Argentina, where it began as an innovation favored by the rich, as garnish for meat or as an entrée, stuffed or boiled; it then spread down through the ranks of society. In the early nineteenth century it cost as much as meat. By 1913 potatoes cost twelve cents a kilo, while beef was at fifty-five or
sixty cents
. Food always feeds class differences, but how, and with what dishes and ingredients, from time to time and place to place, seems impossible to predict.

Courtly cuisine is the high point of socially differentiated eating and in much of the world kingly kitchens have set the standards of high-class cooking. Indeed, in most of Eurasia and North Africa, the evidence is overwhelming: the development of peculiar cooking techniques and eating habits was a feature of court life in every instance we know about. In some parts, at least, of the Americas, similar generalizations can be supported by documents.

When Bernal Díaz reported his part in the conquest of Mexico, for instance, he was anxious for his readers to know the greatness of Montezuma. In part, this was for the usual conquistadors' reasons: to enforce or inflate their own achievements in subjugating impressive empires. He had an additional, personal reason. He was sensitive about the modesty of his origins—his greatest boast was that his father had been a town councilor. He was a minor figure among Cortés's men, and is virtually unmentioned in the early annals of the conquest, except those he wrote himself. He was therefore inordinately proud of his claim that Montezuma had hailed him as a gentleman: from a truly majestic sovereign, this would be almost equivalent to an
accolade. So he took every opportunity to write up the magnificence of Montezuma's person and the luxury of his court. Nevertheless, Díaz's description of Montezuma rings true. It accords with other accounts of Aztec palace life and the prodigal ethic of conspicuous consumption which dazzles readers of Aztec tribute lists.

The chieftain ate behind a painted screen in a hall illuminated by scented torches of smokeless wood, at a table laid with white cloths and napkins. Three hundred dishes, kept warm by burners, contained thirty different preparations, including chicken, turkey, small songbirds, doves, ducks both wild and domestic, rabbits and hare, game birds which Díaz calls pheasants, partridges and quails, “and many kinds of birds and things they grow in this country that are so numerous that I would not have time to name them all.” Díaz “heard say that they used to prepare the flesh of boys of tender age for him” but witnessed no such thing. After Montezuma had washed his hands, tortillas were served and bitter chocolate in a gold cup. Fruits from all over the empire were also offered but with a proper sense of abstinence the chief tasted little of
any of them
. The large snakes which were featured at other
lords' feasts
seem not to have featured on Montezuma's menu. Of course, Montezuma's meals were not merely a display of indulgence, wealth or power, but part of a system of lordly giving and redistribution of resources. When he had finished eating, a thousand dishes of the same food were distributed among his entourage. The ingredients came from the stupendous weight of tribute delivered to the major cities of the Aztecs' predatory empire, every day, on the backs of carriers. At the palace of Montezuma's ally, the chief of Texcoco, enough tribute was delivered daily to feed over two thousand people with maize, beans, tortillas, cacao, salt, chilies,
tomatoes and squashes
.

As in Europe and the great civilizations of Asia and North America, the courtly model was imitated by the aristocrats and plutocrats of the Aztec world. According to the Franciscan compiler of Aztec memories, Bernardino de Sahagún, “When one of the merchants made a fortune and thought himself rich he laid on a feast or banquet for all the principal merchants and lords, for he held it a mean thing to die without undertaking something splendid and costly to add luster to his name and to give thanks to the gods who had given him his wealth and gratification to his
relatives and friends
.” Offerings of flowers, songs, incense and dances accompanied the feasts. Guests arrived at midnight for banquets which might last three days. The menu customarily opened with hallucinogenic mushrooms, served with honey, which induced visions “and even provoked lust.” The meat of about a hundred chickens and between twenty and forty dogs might be needed for a typical entertainment, with corresponding quantities of chili and salt, maize and beans, tomatoes and cacao. At the end, washing bowls, cacao and smoking
tubes would circulate, and flower gifts and hundreds of blankets would be distributed to departing guests.

The regions conventionally credited with “great civilizations” in Mesoamerica and the Andes had similar traditions. Where there is little evidence about courtly cuisines, chieftainly eating styles can be inferred, at least, from the existence of privileged foodstuffs—the marlins shown in depictions of rulers' hunting parties among the Moche, for instance, or the sea fish borne inland across the mountains by runners for the Incas' table at Cuzco. In parts of the Americas there were surely societies where the differentiation of cuisine was arrested by poverty or by the limitations of an unvaried environment. Yet even in places where people at all social levels ate the same kinds of food, evidence of courtly cuisines in the making can be glimpsed in such practices as selecting relatively rare or well-esteemed foodstuffs for chiefs' entertainments and for the reception of ambassadors or leaders from outside. A chieftainly feast was offered, for instance, to William Bartram at Talahasochte, Florida, in the 1770s. Bear's ribs were served, together with “venison, varieties of fish, roasted turkeys (what they call the white man's dish), hot corn cakes, and a very agreeable cooling sort of jelly, what they call conte and what they prepare from the root of the
China brier
.”

The question of how widespread is the development of courtly cuisine raises further questions in turn: are cultures which do not have it simply cases of arrested development? Is there a universal model of civilization, of which the progressive sophistication of cooking is an index? Jack Goody, one of our most sensitive and unprejudiced anthropologists, has sought courtly cuisine in sub-Saharan Africa without finding it. It is, he says, almost unknown: “only in Europe and Asia did we find the development of an haute cuisine that was clearly class-based and marked off those continents from Africa
south of the Sahara
.” Among the evidence he has gathered from West Africa are cases of how privileged access to food affects the courtly way of life. Tribute means that chiefs have been able to maintain large households—Chief Gandaa of Biriku, for instance, whose funeral Goody attended, had thirty-three wives and more than two hundred children. But, like other chiefs in the region, he “lived just like everyone else, but with more of everything.” No separate style is apparent, though chiefs normally have to eat out of public gaze. Among the traditional Yoruba, it was a customary obligation for a king to eat his predecessor's heart and other special ritual foods were prescribed; but this hardly seems to have the makings, or to constitute the potential ingredients, of a courtly cuisine. In Gonja, in northern Ghana, feasts of yam or cassava with fish or meat relish are laid on under the chief's auspices at
rites de passage
and, though food tributes have been small during the recorded past, chiefs
have had a historic responsibility for entertaining strangers. Among the LoDagaa heads of household are in charge of daily distributions of grain. The food of their region is porridge and soup of ground
nuts or leaves
.

Yet where large states and wealthy courts have emerged in black Africa, professional cooks have always seized the chance to develop their art. The most spectacular case is that of Ethiopia, where the imperial kitchen has played an exemplary role similar to that of courtly cuisines in Eurasia and North Africa. When Laurens van der Post was entertained at the court of Haile Selassie, the banquet was preceded by fireworks so fierce that they shattered the palace windows. Every pair of guests was served by a footman in green velvet, gold brocade and satin breeches. Two parallel meals were served simultaneously: at every course, guests could select from a choice of French dishes and wines or Ethiopian cooking and the buckthorn-flavored mead known as tedj. Van der Post's meal—he naturally disdained the French offerings in favor of the native ones—combined both kinds of Ethiopian stew: red wat, which is flavored with red pepper, and green alicha, which normally uses ginger but which, on the occasion in question, was seasoned, with uncharacteristic restraint, with “all the spices of Ethiopia.” Since elaborate combinations of spices are considered essential even in modest Ethiopian homes, this suggests an explosive concentration of savors. It would certainly have included the ubiquitous Ethiopian cardamom, which hardly resembles real cardamom and has the scent of camphor. Other peculiarly Ethiopian flavors would have been imparted by the regional variety of black cumin, which tastes like an acrid onion, and carom, which resembles caraway.

Ethiopia, of course, is always Africa's exception: exceptional for the antiquity, longevity and tenacity of its literate traditions, its spectacular monumental culture, its Christianity. It is, indeed, the home of a civilization, distinctive by any standard of comparison, with no close analogs since the fall of ancient Nubia and Sabaea. So perhaps we should not evince surprise at its peculiar cuisine and the unusual courtly pedigree of its elite foods. Yet it does seem to demand special commendation for heroism in this respect because—normally—socially differentiated menus and recipes are impossible, or very hard to contrive, in lands as isolated as Ethiopia is by its highland elevation. Variety is essential for differentiation, except by mere quantity of food. Rarity and expense, which are the usual indicators of elite ingredients, are conferred, most readily, by strangeness and distance, and are therefore supplied by commerce. The story of courtly cuisines leads on, across seas and cultural frontiers, to the subject of the next chapter: the revolution of long-range trade.