In the Devil's Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food (3 page)

Likeness of a Roasted Crab

All anyone can definitively say about the Celts’ sacred apple juice is that it was probably similar to the tipple called Lamb’s Wool. The name is a corruption of the Celtic
lama nbhal
or
la
mas ubhal
, or Feast of the Apple Gathering, which was held in the fall, and the drink’s curious wooly texture, which comes from using mashed roasted apples, toast, and sometimes eggs. It seems to be an attempt to re-create the texture of the original drink, which might have been an alcoholic porridge similar to the fruit beers still served in parts of Africa. These are as much food as drink and, like Lamb’s Wool, are traditionally served in a bowl.

The drink’s religious antecedents are clear from the accompanying rite known as “wassailing,” a custom that may have once included the sacrifice of a young boy. It’s still extant in parts of Great Britain, where people fling some of the drink on the roots of the oldest apple tree in the area while shooting guns and shouting, “Here’s to thee, old Apple Tree/Whence thou may’st bud/and whence thou may’st blow/Hats full, Caps full/Bushel bags full!/And my pockets full too!/Huzzah!”

6 apples
2 quarts hard cider, or a mix of cider and ale
Up to
¹
⁄4 cup honey or
¹
⁄2 cup brown sugar
¹
⁄8 teaspoon ground nutmeg
¹
⁄4 teaspoon cinnamon
¹
⁄4 teaspoon ground allspice

Core the apples and roast at 400° F for 45 minutes, or until they are soft and beginning to burst. Put the cider/ale into a large pot and dissolve the honey or sugar in small increments, tasting for desired sweetness. Add spices. Simmer for about ten minutes. Lightly mash apples and add one to each mug and pour hot cider on top. Sprinkle with cinnamon. Serves six.

Love Apple

The naming of the humble apple as the Fruit of Forbidden Knowledge is the most unlikely bit of propaganda the Christians have ever cooked up. Everyone knew that so sinful a fruit would be a voluptuous pearl glistening amid a tangle of tropical greenery, and that it would grow in a land far, far, far away where naked bodies and free sex were as common as flies. It would come from Eden, in short, which every educated person of the 1400s could find by looking at a map—there it was, right next to India. Christopher Columbus was so sure of Eden’s location that he brought two crew members fluent in Chaldee and Hebrew, the languages thought most likely spoken by the Garden’s inhabitants, just in case his ships wound up south of their destination in Asia. When he bumped into South America, Columbus mistakenly identified the Orinoco River in Venezuela as the gateway to Eden, but refused to sail up it lest the flaming cherubim God had hired as security guards attack his ships.

So when Columbus brought a particularly luscious new-comer back from the New World, everyone jumped to the obvious conclusion. We call it the tomato, but most Europeans originally dubbed it
poma amoris
, or the love apple. The Hungarians came straight out and named it
Paradice Appfel
, the Apple of Paradise. The tomato was everything the Forbidden Fruit ought to be—a slut-red fruit oozing lugubrious juices and exploding with electric flavors. Clearly an aphrodisiac. But what made it particularly terrifying to the Europeans was its similarity to a plant called the mandrake, also known as Satan’s Apple or the Love Apple. It’s basically the fruit from Hell and has the distinction of being the aphrodisiac with which Leah seduces Jacob in the Bible, saying, “Thou must come in unto me, for surely I have hired thee with thy son’s mandrakes.”

Herbalists in the fifteenth century were well aware that the mandrake had natural narcotic powers. No real problem there. What really earned the plant its ghastly reputation was the way its roots resembled a withered, shrunken human body (or penis, depending on your personal obsession). Medieval Europeans believed the roots were alive, demon sprits that whispered secrets in their owner’s ear, and Joan of Arc’s alleged possession of a mandrake root was one of the crimes that sent her to the stake. Witches claimed mandraks grew best beneath gallows trees, where the semen dripping down from executed criminals produced appropriate fertilizer, and that when cut the plant emitted bloodcurdling shrieks that drove bystanders insane. The only safe way to harvest a specimen was to tie a black dog to the stem, block your ears with wax, and lure Fido toward you with fresh donkey meat until the shrieking plant was torn from the soil. The dog, of course, expired in drooling agony.

Both the tomato and the mandrake belong to the nightshade family. Both have bright red or yellow fruit. But although people have bred them together to produce narcotic tomatoes, they’re quite different from each other. The general population, however, considered them one and the same, and called both love apples for centuries. This confusion was reinforced by a maze of stories that seemed to connect the two plants to Eden. For instance, medieval writers believed that mandrakes were God’s first attempt to make humans (hence those weird roots). This meant they originally came from Eden, which the popular imagination by the 1600s had firmly located in the tomato’s native South America. This fit rather nicely with the belief that the Italian name for the tomato,
pomodoro
(literally, golden apple), referred to the golden apples that grew in the Pagan Greek Garden of the Hesperides. It seems Christian scholars had decided that The Garden of Hesperides—a walled enclosure guarded by spirits—was actually Eden, and that its magical fruit was actually Eve’s famous snack. One popular tale even told how two elephants representing Adam and Eve were thrown out of paradise for eating mandrakes. Some people went so far as to claim that the tomato was actually Eden’s
other
forbidden fruit: When an obscure Jewish-Portuguese immigrant named Dr. Siccaary brought tomatoes to North America in the early 1700s, he peddled them as being from Eden’s Tree of Eternal Life, claiming that “a person who should eat a sufficient abundance of these apples would never die.”

Medieval people
believed the
mandrake root was
the first attempt to
create humanity and
came from the
Garden of Eden.

So cautious Christians snubbed the tomato for at least 150 years, and it wasn’t until the early 1700s that it began to gain acceptance, mainly in Italy, as a decorative puree or garnish. But the rest of the West continued to drag its feet. They claimed tomatoes made your teeth fall out. Its smell was said to drive people insane. Many Yanks thought them just too ugly to eat. In the 1880s, the daughter of a well-known British botanist named Montague Alwood wrote that the highlight of an afternoon tea at her father’s house had been the “introduction of this wonderful new fruit—or is it a vegetable?” As late as the twentieth century writers like Henri LeClerc still classed tomatoes with mandrakes as an “evil fruit . . . treacherous and deceitful.”

Christian trepidation did not derive solely from the love apple’s connection to the mandrake. The fruit’s intrinsic morality was also in doubt. Consider the potato. Both it and the tomato arrived in Europe from the Americas at the same time. Both were associated with the mandrake. But what a different reception the potato received! Dull, brown, heavy-on-the-belly, the elite immediately fell in love with it—but only for the peasants. They spent the next two hundred years shoving it down the throat of every proletarian they could lay their white gloves on. This was particularly true in Catholic countries, where the tuber seemed to have a halo floating over its scrubby little head, possibly because its Inca name,
papa
, is also the word for “pope” in Italian. Literally translated,
papa
, the potato, became “the pope’s fruit,” or the “pope-ato,” and everybody sang its praises, like the Catholic officials who pleaded with the Vatican’s morality czar to make the peasants “try and try again this delectable food.”

Meanwhile, their brethren were putting the tomato on their lists of “disapproved dishes.” “There is nothing more evil,” wrote the well-known Catholic moralist Abbot Chiari during the tomato sauce
naissance
of the mid-1700s, “than [the growing habit] of foods that are covered in drugs [spices] from America.” The fact that the tomato first gained wide acceptance as a sauce was another strike against the fruit. That it was often not meant to be eaten, but only to glorify a dish, was even worse. “Man is, by nature, not a sauce eater,” wrote the influential St. Clement of Alexandria in the third century, and he wasn’t referring to a lack of spoons. Sauces were considered insidiously Satanic because they glorified the act of eating, which led to gluttony, which in turn led to every one of the deadly sins of lust, pride, greed, etc. The tomato’s unearthly brilliance, its zesty flavor, its lugubriously dripping succulence, were all anathema to the clergy. It “inflamed passions” in ways that the grubby brown potato could hardly be accused of doing. The potato’s chaste nature was further proven by its method of asexual reproduction: it has no seeds but instead creates offspring directly from its body. Botanical Immaculate Conception. The Love Apple, dripping unctuous juices and seeds, soft and delicious, inviting the unwary to bite deep into its harlot-red flesh and let the juices flow, was an entirely different class of being: immoral, lascivious, and decidedly un-Christian. This was serious stuff back then. When a foreign princess introduced the fork to Venice in the eleventh century, local religious leaders called divine wrath down upon her for the nicety. When she died of a particularly vicious disease, prelates sermonized that it was the “punishment of God” for the way she’d tried to glorify eating by conveying “morsels to her lips by means of little golden forks with two prongs.”

Both forks and tomatoes eventually carried the day. Ironically, the last place to embrace the tomato was America, the Land of Ketchup. The hero of the tomato was named Robert Johnson, and when he announced in 1820 that he was publicly going to eat one of the devilish fruits, people journeyed for hundreds of miles to his town in New Jersey to watch him drop dead. He mounted the courtyard steps around noon and turned to the throng. “What are you afraid of?” he snarled. “I’ll show you fools that these things are good to eat!” Then he bit into the tomato. Seeds and juice splurted forth. Some spectators fainted. But he survived and, according to local legend, set up a tomato-canning factory.

The Ketchup with a Thousand Faces

Yes, people fell screaming in horror as Robert Johnson bit into the bloodred tomato. There was panic in the streets. Until a few years ago his derring-do was celebrated every August in New Jersey with a reenactment of his feat. The problem is that it never quite happened. Andrew Smith is probably America’s leading love apple historian and in his opus
The Tomato in America
he documents over five hundred versions of the Hero Who Ate the Tomato fable. Thomas Jefferson saves the day in one version, a West African slave in another. The French, of course, have registered numerous claims. Not that Johnson’s role is totally false; it’s just suffered an awful lot of improvement.

Equally fallacious is the belief that tomatoes and ketchup are forever joined at the hip. To the ancient Romans, ketchup was a kind of fermented fish sauce called
garum
made by leaving salted fish intestines, heads, and blood in the sun to ferment for about two months. It was probably similar to contemporary Thai fish sauces and, in fact the word
ketchup
apparently derives from a Vietnamese version called
ketsiap
. In Europe
garum
evolved into a kind of pickle juice containing anchovies. It wasn’t until the 1800s that someone tossed in a couple of tomatoes, but there were still lots of variations until the American government outlawed all fermented ketchup in 1906, thus inadvertently giving birth to the thick, supersweet goo with which the gullible now drown their dinners.

The true heyday of
ketsiap
/
kecap
/ketchup/catsup/catchup diversity was the 1800s. There were lobster-flavored ketchups, peach, walnut, beer, horseradish, and mushroom. There’s a good sampling of these recipes in Smith’s books, but the most divine version is still being made in the Caribbean out of bananas. This stuff is incredible: sweet, hot, and luscious. I learned the following recipe from a Senegalese cook in Paris who claimed it was native to his land, but it’s more commonly associated with Jamaica. Follow the same sterilization procedures you would for making pickles or jams, and keep it refrigerated.

1 dried ancho chile
6 very ripe bananas, peeled and cut into chunks
1
¹
⁄3 cups cider vinegar, divided
¹
⁄2 cup raisins, preferably golden
¹
⁄3 cup coarsely chopped onions
2 garlic cloves
²
⁄3 cup tomato paste
2 cups water
¹
⁄4 cup light corn syrup
¹
⁄2 cup dark brown sugar
¹
⁄2 teaspoon chili pepper
2 teaspoons ground allspice
¹
⁄2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
¹
⁄2 teaspoon grated nutmeg
Big pinch ground cloves
1
¹
⁄2 teaspoons salt
Big pinch black pepper
6 tablespoons dark rum

Soak ancho chile in warm water for 15 minutes. Remove the stem and seeds. Puree the bananas with
¹
⁄2 cup vinegar and put into a heavy saucepan. Puree raisins, onions, garlic, ancho chile, tomato paste, and remaining vinegar in same processor (no need to wash) and add to saucepan. Add 2 cups water. Stir and bring mixture to simmer over medium heat, then reduce temperature to low and simmer uncovered for one hour. If mixture gets too thick, add water as necessary. Add the corn syrup and sugar and all the spices, including salt and pepper, and simmer for another thirty to forty minutes, or until it leaves a thick coating on the back of a spoon. Stir in the rum. Remove from heat and allow to cool. Puree again and strain it through a fine sieve to remove solids. Store in an airtight container in the refrigerator for up to two weeks.