Near a Thousand Tables (30 page)

The scale of everything in the palace attests to the size of the empire and the reach of Ottoman rule but the statistics of the kitchen management beggar all others. In the sixteenth century, the kitchens were equipped to serve five thousand diners daily and ten thousand on holidays. The head cook had a corps of fifty sous-chefs, the chief confectioner thirty assistants and the chief taster a hundred subordinates. These figures grew as the empire got bigger, the dishes grew more refined, the range of culinary influences expanded and the work became more specialized. By the mid-eighteenth century there was a dedicated kitchen for each of six kinds of halva, each with its own chef and a hundred assistants. The number of staff
rose to 1,370
. Wood for the kitchens was carried in daily by a hundred carts. Daily deliveries were taken of dates, plums and prunes from Egypt, honey from Romania or—for the sultan's own table—from Candia, oil from Coron and Medon and butter from the Black Sea, packed in ox hides. In the early seventeenth century the daily intake of meat comprised two hundred head of young mutton and one hundred lambs or kids in season, 330 brace of fowl and four calves for the eunuchs' anemic meal.

The cookery of the Topkapi was genuinely at once both imperial and metropolitan—a sort of fusion food—because it combined ingredients from all over the empire in new dishes. I see what is now called “Tex-Mex” food as a typical frontier cuisine. The hybrid name suggests colonial miscegenation and the heartlands of Southwestern cooking are all lands which the United States effectively wrested from Mexico during America's great nineteenth-century expansion. The fulfillment of “manifest destiny” was an imperial enterprise like other white empires of the time. The fact that America's was an empire contiguous with the existing territory of the state does not make it any less of an empire than the far-flung dominions of West European countries. Britain, France and Germany had to acquire their empires by long-range maritime outreach because there was no room to expand in their own hinterlands (though France had tried it under Napoleon and Germany would try it again under Hitler). America's effort had a close contemporary parallel in Russian imperialism, which, over a rather longer period, built up a similar land empire at neighbor's expense. The role played by territories seized, in America's case, from Canada and Mexico, was played in Russia's case by conquests from Finland, Poland, the Ottoman Empire and Muslim Central Asia; the Russian equivalent of America's Indians were the indigenous nations of Siberia and the Russian tundra and taiga, whom Russians called “small peoples of the
north.” Both empires grew in similar ways—by marginalizing, exterminating or acculturating the victim-peoples. When Russia and America became Cold War enemies and rivals in the twentieth century, Americans adopted a censorious attitude to Russian imperialism, forgetting or ignoring how similar the two countries' nineteenth-century trajectories had been.

Imperial worms always turn and some of the peoples America conquered in those days have begun to take suitable revenge. “Hispanics” recolonize the wrested lands and—indeed—spread beyond them to constitute a big countercolonial presence in much of the United States. Meanwhile, the food of the Southwest had been re-Mexicanized, as the defining ingredients of Mexican cuisine stake out ever more of the culinary territory. Chili is the hot brand of this cuisine, corn and black beans its solid symbols; limes provide its lashings; filmy expanses of cheese form its flag. Chili—con carne, which, in its common form, consists of whole black beans slow-cooked in water with plenty of chili powder, cumin, which perhaps represents the Spanish contribution to the evolution of this cuisine, and ground meat—could fairly be called its signature dish. It is also the official State Dish of Texas, where purists do not use beans.

The chilies come in many fresh varieties, from the fairly mild anchos to the stingingly hot habaneros and scotch bonnets. They get their kick from a pungent alkaloid called capsaicin: according to the rate at which this substance disperses in a mixture of alcohol, sugar and water, the varieties are ranked in America on a scale calibrated in “Scoville units.” The relatively unaggressive cayennes rate up to four thousand units, the mind-blowing habaneros can attain 300,000 units. However, in making chili con carne, powders are used, frequently in a combination which, like “curry,” is not a unique spice, but rather a mélange. The origins of the dish are much disputed: with varying degrees of plausibility, they have been assigned to vaquero cooks of the mid-nineteenth century, Mexican “chili queens”—street vendors of San Antonio—and promotionally minded Dallas restaurateurs. Whatever its origins, however, it clearly uses part of the repertoire of ingredients which predated the American annexation of the Southwest and which, since then, have gradually conquered the conquerors. Taco Bell has mass-marketed Mexican snacks all over the American heartland. In a popular science fiction film, this was portrayed as the restaurant chain that would take over the planet.

Tex-Mex food has overleapt its historic frontiers—which may account for its adulteration by metropolitan tastes. A frontier cuisine that demonstrates real harmony between indigenous and metropolitan ingredients is that of the Philippines. By the time the Spaniards began their long, slow, painful colonization of the archipelago in 1572, they had learned a thing or two about colonialism. Deliberate
missionary policy ensured that one element of the indigenous cultures—the local languages—would be inviolate. Of the other two great features of culture—religion and food—the first would be transformed completely by a spiritual conquest which was remarkably successful in most of the islands, while the second would end up as a hybrid. The hybrid is exceptionally complex because Chinese colonization, which—despite periodic crises in community relations, punctuated by massacres, expulsions and bans on Chinese immigration—was absolutely vital to the islands' economy in colonial times, has contributed as much as that of the Spaniards, while the Malay foundations of the cuisine have never been compromised by the changes wrought by settlers from outside. Fluffy rice, often flavored with banana leaves, is the basis of almost every dish, but bread is usually served alongside it in perpetuation of the Spanish legacy. Some Filipino bread is flavored with coconut, which, in one form or another, features in most meals and supplies the universal cooking oil. The Spanish presence is detectable in three conspicuous areas: first, the lexicon of the kitchen—prawns are called gambas, for instance, and the aromatic stews are adobos (or, by Malay corruption, adobong), while sweet pancakes are known as turrón (a name which in the Spanish of Spain signifies almond-based candy). Some of the popular dishes in the repertoire are lightly adapted from Spanish models, such as paella, or suckling pig, roasted in the Spanish manner and called lechón, and caldereta, made with kid. Finally, a sweet course ends Filipino meals and the items in it are all of Spanish origin, including crème caramel—“flan,” the only Spanish dessert to have won a place in the global repertoire—with confections of egg yolks and sugar and marzipan cakes.

Frontier cuisines arise not only because of exchanges of migrants between center and periphery, but also because of the way empires shuffle populations around to meet the needs of imperial politics and economics. The name of Cajun cooking derives from that of the “Acadians” deported from Canada in the eighteenth century: but its spicy flavors, typical of other Caribbean cuisines, suggest a long period of acclimatization in the Acadians' new environment. The best traditional cooking in South Africa is that of the Cape Malays, shipped in by the Dutch in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to provide specialized labor which could not be recruited locally. Their Ramadan feasts display influences garnered from the breadth of the Indian Ocean, and the influence of the food the white master class brought from Holland. In Buriyanis, layers of boiled rice alternate with hardboiled eggs and lamb, cooked in onions, ginger, fennel, garlic, cumin and tomatoes, sealed and simmered for hours. Ingelegde vis is fried, snook, pickled in curried vinegar. Smoorvis is salted snook braised to a pulp with onions,
chilies and peppers. In bobotie, curried minced meat is baked and covered with a crust of beaten eggs. Sosaties are brochettes of meat in piquant marinade. Pumpkin, slowly cooked in oil with chilies, is the
classic bredie
.

The slave foods of the Americas have a similar character. Some of the characteristic ingredients made the transatlantic journey with the slaves and in the many colonies where slaves were given plots of ground to grow food for their own subsistence, and where they maintained households of their own with individual kitchens, they naturally cultivated tastes of home. Mainstays of the black menu were transplanted from Africa: yams, okra, plantains and watermelons, which became symbols of blackness in a satirical tradition. Other items have a less certain provenance. Collard greens—a kind of mild kale, which in the black tradition of the American Deep South is cooked with pork fat—is not an indigenous New World variety, but its route to America is undocumented. The black-eyed “pea” or cowpea, without which no Southern menu could be called complete, was probably introduced alongside the slaves, though there is no clear evidence that this was a food in parts of Africa which supplied plantation labor. The pigeon pea, known as the no-eye, was certainly brought from Africa to feed slaves, but has not established a place in the repertoire to rival the black-eyed. In any event, most of the menu now called “soul food” was created in the new American environment, much of it borrowed from the Native Americans. Hominy grits bear a certain resemblance to the fine-ground millet porridge widely eaten in West Africa, but in America it is made with maize. Corn bread was a hybrid which owed nothing to Africa—made of native meal, laboriously raised in the white men's manner by the addition of lime to make up for the lack of gluten. Molasses, the ingredient which, together with the suppurating fat, makes the food of the South, both black and white, characteristically cloying and comforting, was a New World intrusion, but probably had no background in the native cuisines of Africa until white traders introduced it. The greens and black-eyed in slaves' stewpots were flavored with cuts of pork the whites disdained—cheeks, feet, chitterlings.

When the tides of empire ebb, returnees travel with them, taking—typically—tropical tastes to Europe. Countercolonization follows up with cooks and restaurateurs who supply those tastes and help to spread them to classes of patrons with no colonial experience. England, France and the Netherlands became, in the postcolonial era, springboards for the worldwide projection of Indian, Vietnamese and Maghribi and Indonesian food respectively. Migrants, as we have seen, tend to resist the food of host communities, but can be forced to adapt. One way migrants survive is by copying the eating habits they encounter, or accepting food offerings in the manner commemorated, for instance, in the American Thanksgiving menu.
Darwin's informant Sir Andrew Smith saw Bechuanas in Southern Africa, who, driven from their homes by Zulus, “looked like walking skeletons.” They learned what was edible from observing
baboons and monkeys
. A few years later, white men forced by shipwreck to live in the Arctic came to appreciate seal as “not fishy but sealy…. With patience and a good deal of sauce piquante” it could even seem “
very excellent
.” As well as a survival strategy, habituation to an unfamiliar cuisine can work, in imperial contexts, as a method of control: of showing solidarity with natives and exploiting their expertise. Consider, for example, the Dutch.

Dutch cooking has a woeful reputation—not least with the Dutch. This is unfair and unfortunate, as it may inhibit gourmets from experiencing the pleasures of a well-structured herring or the freshness of native North Sea shrimps, or the friendly feeling induced by a well-prepared boerenkool of soft green cabbage blended with potato and flavored with well-seasoned meat. On the other hand, Dutch modesty about the national cuisine has made them exceptionally responsive to the food of other cultures. Indonesian rijstafel has some claim to be considered the Dutch national dish—its rival, hutspot, a sort of puree made of scraps of root vegetables in commemoration of the ill-nourished defenders of Leiden during the siege of 1574—has only sentiment to commend it. The rijstafel is as far removed from hutspot as can be imagined: exotic, rather than domestic; celebratory, rather than commemorative; lavish, rather than austere; variegated, rather than limited. Such memories as it evokes are of plenty and privilege, of days when Dutch colonialists shared the feasts of rajahs. When we eat it we reenter the world of Colonel Verbrugge (the “good” character in the great anti-imperial novel of 1860,
Max Havelaar, Or, the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company—
see page 182, who tried to make his spurs jingle on the clay floor of his dining room while entertaining the Regent of Lebak to an abundance of dishes.

Whereas the hutspot evokes the time when the Dutch were struggling for their own independence, the rijstafel belongs to the period when they deprived others of theirs. It is hard to do well, because it involves so many dishes, each of which demands many ingredients. Around the central bowl of rice, upward of a dozen different dishes are served at once, kept hot on small braziers or spirit lamps. Sambal goreng is obligatory—chili, numerous spices, onions and garlic are fried to make a base in which meat or fish is bathed: it is particularly good with squid. Other sambals, usually based on mixtures of chilies, perhaps with citrus zest or shrimp paste, usually appear. Rendang is the essential curried dish in a rijstafel: in Dutch restaurants it is usually made with beef, though the classic version demands water buffalo meat, which is marinated in coconut milk with the native spices of Sumatra—turmeric, ginger, gingery galingale, garlic and salam leaf
(which resembles bay leaf in looks and curry leaf in flavor), as well as the chili introduced in colonial times. It is then simmered in its marinade until almost dry.