In the Devil's Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food (11 page)

King’s Cake

Le gâteau de roi,
or the King’s Cake, has the most convoluted, scandal-ridden history in the Annals of European pastry. The trouble comes from the tradition of hiding a bean in the cake. The child who gets the slice with the hidden legume is crowned king for a day. It sounds innocuous, but the attendant rituals are loaded with references to Pythagorean beliefs, like addressing the child as Apollo (Pythagoras was known as the Thigh of Apollo) and treating him or her as an oracle. Christians sanitized these pagan overtones by restricting the cake’s consumption

Spirit in the Bean
porcelain fava in
a fin de siècle
Paris catalog.

to the Epiphany celebration following Christmas. The bean was then replaced with a porcelain figurine that showed a ghostly face emerging from the tip of a fava bean. When this failed to appease the priests, the bean figurine was changed to a crowned head in honor of the biblical three kings. This made the priests happy, but the politicians began to raise a fuss during the French Revolution when a king’s head, whether in a cake or on the guillotine, became controversial. In 1794 the mayor of Paris urged the people to end the holiday and “discover and arrest the criminal
patissiers
and their filthy orgies which dare to honor the shades of the tyrants!” The French, to their credit, ignored him, and he had to settle for renaming the cake
le Gâteau des Sans-Culottes
or “the Cake of the Men-Without-Pants,” in honor of the illustrious beggars of Paris.

Almost every European country has a version of the cake, from the port-flavored
bolo rei
of the Portuguese to the fruitcake preferred by the English. The following recipe is from
La Bonne Cuisine de Madame E. Saint-Ange
, who claimed it came from “a good old cookery book from the time of Louis XV.”

1
³
⁄4 cups (550 grams) flour
1 teaspoon (10 grams) salt
2 tablespoons sugar (optional)
7 ounces (250 grams) unsalted butter
1 egg yolk for dough (optional)
2 egg yolks, beaten with 2 tablespoons water for glazing
About 1 cup water
1 dried fava, broad, or lima bean

Mix flour, salt, and sugar in a slightly chilled bowl. Make a well in the flour and put the slightly softened butter into it with the egg yolk (optional). With your fingers, roughly mix the butter and flour, adding water as needed, gradually incorporating the flour until you have a firm dough. If it is too wet, add more flour. Do not knead. Gather into a ball, flour lightly, wrap, and let rest in a cool place for forty-five minutes.

On a floured surface roll out the dough into a rectangle about 24‘ × 8‘. Fold in thirds, putting the top third on the middle, and then the bottom third on top of that. Let rest in a cool place ten minutes. Then turn it 90 degrees (like turning a book sideways), roll it out again and fold in the same manner. Again, let rest ten minutes and repeat. Now (it should be folded into thirds at this point) fold the corners up over the dough to form a round pad. Roll out to a disc about
³
⁄4 inch thick. Notch rim with knife, and trim to a circle. With the point of the knife make a slit in the edge and insert the bean and reseal. Place on an ungreased, unfloured baking sheet. Brush the top with an egg glaze and score with grillwork or other design (the royal fleur-de-lis would be most appropriate). Prick through in several places.

Bake in an oven at 450°F for thirty to thirty-five minutes. For a sweeter glaze, dust with powdered sugar a few minutes before removing. Cool on a rack and make sure to eat it while warm.

The Wonderful World of English Cookery

Food lovers have long regarded the English cook with awe. His boiled cabbage and overcooked beef. Those cannonball puddings. There is no foodstuff on Earth he has not reduced to an overcooked, flavorless monstrosity. But why? The French believe it’s genetic. “The Englishman is naturally a glutton stuffed with beefsteaks and plum pudding, a boa quasi-asphyxiated by a gazelle he just swallowed,” opined scholar Jean Saint-Arroman in 1852, “whereas the Frenchman is naturally sober . . . so it is to us [the French] the sun, fine weather and the most precious gifts of nature. To the English, fogs, coal, plum pudding, the spleen and consumptive diseases.” It’s a point of view that has some resonance for anyone who’s experienced the splendors of English cookery (green eel pie, anyone?). There are, however, other theories. Historian Stephen Mennell, for instance, believes France’s obvious culinary superiority to the English developed from Louis XIV’s requirement that France’s nobility live with him in Versailles. Louis had merely wanted to keep an eye on rebellious nobles. But by putting all the aristos under one roof, he inadvertently created a gastronomic hothouse where armies of chefs, pâtissiers, sommeliers,
boulangers,
and maîtres d’hôtel competed for the approval of the world’s fussiest eaters. One maître d’, François Vatel, went so far as to throw himself on his sword when the fish arrived a half hour late. Voilà, the birth of French haute cuisine. British nobility, on the other hand, were not obliged to dwell at court, and, living on their own estates enjoyed less-elevated fare. If the fish arrived late, good—it meant two helpings of boiled beef.

Although this theory does explain the absence of a truly British high cuisine, my personal favorite relates to the so-called invention of childhood during the Victorian era of the 1800s. The Victorians were the first to completely embrace the notion that children are fundamentally different from adults. Juveniles were strictly segregated, dressed in funny clothes, and told specific bedtime stories. They also had special dietary needs, i.e., old potatoes. “New potatoes are
acceptable
,” wrote Pye Henry Chavasse in his 1844 bestseller
Advice to Mothers on the Management of Their Offspring
, “but old potatoes, well cooked and
mealy
, are the best a child can have.” Chavasse preached that children under ten should breakfast exclusively on lukewarm milk poured over stale bread that was “preferably seven days old.” Sweets were “slow poison,” as were green vegetables. Once children had reached their second decade, they could be served old mutton—never beef or pork—and weak beer. Onion and garlic were absolutely forbidden. “Meat, potatoes and bread, with hunger for their sauce is the best, and indeed should be the only dinner, they should have,” he wrote. Chavasse was the Dr. Spock of his day, and middle-class Victorians followed his advice religiously. Children were shoved full of a gruel made of milk, crushed biscuits, and flour that had been boiled for seven hours. The students of Eton ate nothing but old mutton and potatoes 365 days of the year for both lunch and dinner until a compassionate graduate left a bequest to provide them with a plum pudding every Sunday. Their peers in France may have had to choke down an unreasonable number of baguettes, but almost a quarter of what they ate consisted of vegetables, eggs, and fish, not to mention half a bottle of wine every day. Even the boarding school in Provence that served nothing but cabbage soup 125 days of the year ranked above the English programs.

This sadistic approach to child nutrition was a perfect match for the theories of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, who believed children were “natural atheists” because they enjoyed nature instead of God. He recommended bringing this under control by reminding them that “they are more ignorant and wicked than they could possibly believe,” and breaking their spirit at every turn. Withholding pleasant food was considered a particularly plum way to do this because it trained them out of the expectation of “natural” pleasure at the table. Add this food guilt to the insanely bland food expectations created by Chavasse, and you have the pleasure-free cuisine that some claim helped create the stoic Victorian personality that led to Great Britain’s domination of the world. It also explains why Victorian brats were so fond of American children’s literature. It was the scenes of kids gorging on buckwheat pancakes with maple syrup, eggs, and sausage that they really liked.

Toast

Fresh-baked bread is as soft and warm as a newborn baby. It’s like eating a living creature. No wonder Christians use bread to symbolize the flesh of Christ or that the Jews call it the Staff of Life or that the Mayans’ thirteen-layer loaf macerated in honey mead, called
noh-wah
, was said to symbolize Heaven. Most people believe toast’s divine status derives from its role as a dietary staple. It’s more complicated than that, and a better explanation is the way it is made. Like beer, bread is created by allowing grain to ferment and then either baking or boiling the result. Today we know fermentation is just a yeast infection of sorts, but anybody who has seen a barrel of fermenting beer seething like a volcano, or a loaf rising, can understand how the humans who first witnessed it considered the process supernatural and akin to the swelling belly of a pregnant female. Italian women used to stand in front of their ovens gnashing their teeth and contorting their faces in a mock birth delivery to ensure a risen loaf. As late as the 1800s, it was traditional to force an older, unwed daughter to sit atop an oven baking bread to make her more attractive to suitors. The world’s first bakers, in Egypt, actually doubled as gynecologists by selling wheat to women who suspected they “had a bun in the oven.” The ladies would urinate on the wheat and, if pregnant, it would germinate in sympathy. If she was barren, the grain, too, would remain fallow (yes, this is largely effective).

But the people who took this equation most to heart were the French. The French believed the baker’s oven to be the national womb and the baguette to be the penis, and great care was taken to ensure that only France’s finest were involved in the act of consummation. The baking profession was restricted to devout Catholics. Village priests set aside an entire day each week to hear the confessions of the local
boulanger
, lest his sins be passed on to the bread-eating public, and journalists like George Sand claimed the bakers’ role in shaping public morality was second only to that of the Church. The good people of Paris took the issue so seriously that they almost went to war over a bun called
pain mollet
. A loaf both light and rich, often enhanced with milk, soft as a baby’s bottom,
mollet
had traditionally been reserved for the aristocratic table. (Everyone else made do with stuff that had to be cut with an ax.) By the late 1600s, however, Parisian bakers were baking
mollet
, also known as the “Queen’s Bread,” for the hoi polloi, and alarm bells began going off. “It is thirty years since an element of voluptuousness was introduced into the bread of the French,” wrote one concerned police commissioner in 1710, “and since then, the bakeries have begun to resemble a brothel.”

In his definitive
The Bakers of Paris
, historian Stanley Kaplan points out that the authorities’ concern over
mollet
existed on a number of levels. “Bread became the innocent vector through which ‘sensual pleasure’ conquered (and cankered) the lower reaches of the body social,” he wrote, “. . . blurring distinctions that structured the social order and undermining the sturdy values that had protected the ‘little people’ from the ravages of refinement.” The police considered
mollet
’s luxurious texture its most obvious danger, because it introduced unrealistic expectations into the workers’ daily lives. But they also objected to the way it was produced. Traditional French sourdough, called
au
levain
, is made by “mounting” a huge mass of raw dough and kneading, beating, and massaging it into shape. The intense labor this required was thought to impart a moral character to the loaf, which, when eaten, helped create a race of equally hardworking peasants.
Pain mollet
(which is comparable to a good brioche) was called “fantasy bread” because it almost kneaded itself, a laziness that, of course, imparted equally slothful characteristics to the diner. This was fine for aristocrats, who were lounge lizards by right of birth, but definitely a faux pas for the lower classes.

The other concern related to the yeast used to make
mollet
rise. The historic method of starting the growth of yeast in
au
levain
loaves was to set aside a small piece of uncooked dough from the previous night and add it to new batches. This not only produced a delicious and chewy bread with a wonderfully winey flavor, but the continuous transference of dough from one generation of bread to another gave loaves a pedigree that went back decades, if not centuries, to the baguettes gnawed by French yeoman of yore. In a culture obsessed with ancestry— and one that believed baking was sexual and yeast a kind of semen—this was no small potatoes.
Mollet
circumvented this process by using yeast obtained from Belgium beer to impregnate the loaf—dirty, unnatural, “foreign scum” that the French believed would produce similar unpatriotic characteristics in anyone who ate it.
Mollet
’s seminal fluid was doubly damned because it came from beer, a drink that France’s wine-loving aristocrats traditionally held in contempt.

The controversy eventually split the capital in half. On one side were the Molletists, who indulged in the decadent habit known as “dunking,” and claimed their lighter loaf was more intelligent than the “coarse and ponderous” sourdough. On the other side were the Anti-Molletists, who countered that excessive indulgence in the queen’s bread was creating “a creeping feebleness in the State.” In 1660 the Paris Faculty of Medicine banned
mollet
. The Parisians were outraged—as decadent, lazy scum they demanded the right to start their morning with something appropriately reprobate. A year later the government overturned the ban but proved their patriotism by forbidding the use of “foreign yeast.” The arguments continued on and off for the next one hundred years and were celebrated in this lovely little ditty by Monsieur de la Condamine in the 1700s.

Then Perrault, the antagonist
Said to all, “I am a Pain Molletist!
And Gentlemen, I do insist
This bread is pleasant to digest!”
Patin responded, “but the yeast,
(To say the least)
Is made from a beer of Belgium!
A modern, devilish, bad invention!”

That this should have been published a century after the controversy first erupted gives a pretty good idea with what gravity the French viewed their morning slice. It was, however, just the tip of the iceberg.