In the Devil's Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food (4 page)

Venomous Green

Some people like to grow flowers. Some like cacti. I grow herbs. Right now I’m looking at my little basil bush. It stands only about six inches tall, but it smells divine—sweet and deep green. I water it carefully, and, when I pluck a few leaves for my
tagliatelle
, I make sure to scream obscenities at its fuzzy little head just like the Italians used to. It just tastes
soooo
much better that way.

Basil was brought to Europe by Alexander the Great when he returned from a war near India around the fourth century B.C. With the plant came a little tale about a girl named Vrinda. It’s a complicated story full of jealous gods and demons and angelic seductions, but in the end our heroine, Vrinda, discovers her husband has been killed. This so distresses her that she throws herself on her husband’s funeral pyre and is burned alive. The Hindu gods commemorated this psychotic act of devotion by turning her charred hair into a sweet-smelling plant named
tulsi
, or basil, which they order their priests to revere. Some Indian courts still make people take the oath by placing their hand over a basil bush, just as we swear by placing our hand on the Bible, and millions of devout Hindus begin their day with a prayerful circumambulation around the household
tulsi
plant. In the evening they leave a sacred butter lamp burning by its side.

The basil bush Alexander the Great brought to Europe went through a variety of genetic modifications. So did the story of Vrinda. First the gods were lost. Then Vrinda’s horrible suicide was deleted. By the final version, Vrinda had become a girl named Lisabetta who, unable to bear parting with the body of her dead lover, cuts off his head and buries it in a pot containing a basil bush. Lisabetta waters it faithfully with her tears until she dies of a broken heart. The plant, thanks to the nutrients afforded by its special fertilizer, grows so large that people make pilgrimages to visit it. It’s the same basic story line—girl loves boy/boy gets killed/girl goes crazy/plant makes the headlines— only transformed by European values. While the Hindus focused on love and devotion, the Euro-Barbarians were more interested in madness and decapitation. This more morbid flavor is in tune with the Mediterranean view of true love as a “grave madness, a powerful force that knocked people off balance and caused them to do dangerous and terrible things,” according to historian Margaret Visser. In his poem “Isabella,” the poet Keats underlines this attitude by writing that the dead lover’s rotting head gave the plant a particularly pleasant fragrance.

Whence thick, and green, and beautiful it grew,
So that it smelt more balmy than its peers
Of basil-tufts in Florence: for it drew (nourishment) . . .
From the fast moldering head there shut from view

This connection between basil and insanity led the Europeans to rename
tulsi
as
basilicum
, a reference to the mythical scorpion, the basilisk, which they claimed grew in the brain of those who had smelled the plant. Hence the curious Italian custom of “going mad” and screaming obscenities when plucking its leaves. They may have been on to something about the plant’s unsettling effect. The oil lamp that Hindus light next to their basil plants represents not only Vrinda’s undying love, but also her body writhing in the flames of her husband’s pyre—a love sacrifice that started the tradition, called
sati
, of burning widows alive with their dead husbands. It’s still practiced today in parts of India, not always voluntarily. Part of the tradition calls for the widow to die with a sprig of basil clasped in her hand.

Tulsi Ki Chai

Basil is considered too sacred to be used much in Indian cooking. There is, however, a fragrant tea called
tulsi ki
chai
which is thought to ward off colds. The following recipe was given to me by Bhoopendr Singh, of the small town of Orchha in Madhya Pradesh.

To make:

Bring about two cups of fresh water to a rolling boil. Add a half cup of whole basil leaves. Lower heat and let brew for about four minutes. Add two teabags, or the equivalent in loose tea, and approximately 6 teaspoons of sugar. Bring to a quick boil and remove from heat. Crush one or two basil leaves and add to each cup. Pour tea over leaves and serve. This is usually served black, but if you want milk, you should add it with the tea and sugar. Please note that tea in India is usually lightly spiced with cloves, pepper, and nutmeg, so you could use one of the chai tea leaf blends now available in lieu of regular tea. Makes two cups.

The Ecstasy of Being Eaten

The first story about Adam and Eve consists of dinner followed by sex, and writers have been fixated on the combination ever since. Some studies claim that dinner precedes 98 percent of all literary seductions. If true, you’d expect the Chinese novel
Dream of the Red Chamber
, with its 971 dinner scenes, to be an outright orgy. You’d be disappointed (it’s a rather stiff read), but that’s because writers tend to sublimate. Nineteenth-century Russian author Nikolai Gogol wrote obsessively about food, but most agree he was really thinking about sex, which he never, ever, wrote about or, apparently, experienced. His story “The Fair at Sorochintsky” transforms a tryst between an unfaithful wife and a priest into a feast of lewdly shaped delights. “Here is my offering to you, Afansy Ivanovic,” cries the woman, bouncing into the priest’s chamber. “Here are curd donuts, wheaten dumplings and cakes!” The priest wolfs down the treats while eyeing her suggestively open blouse. “Though indeed, Kharonya Riniforovna,” he leers, “my heart thirsts for a gift from you much sweeter than any buns or donuts!” In another story, a couple expresses their shared love by feeding each other night and day. There’s smoked sturgeon and kasha and fruit jelly and stewed pears and sausage and pancakes and blinis and sour cream and mushrooms and sage tea and watermelon and, of course, fish head pie. They rack up eleven huge meals every day, and the husband’s last words to his dying wife are, “Won’t you like a little something to eat, Pulcheria Ivanovna?” After his wife’s death, her favorite dishes make him cry.

Gogol obviously had food issues—he eventually starved himself to death—but his muddling of sex with eating is quite understandable because they’re so damn similar. During both we allow a warm (or at least reheated) creature to enter our bodies. Before we begin a feast, our mouths produce thick saliva without which our taste buds would be unable to function, just as before beginning sex, a female produces a rush of mucus that facilitates her having, or at least enjoying, intercourse. During the act itself—of eating, that is—our lips flush and swell with blood in much the same way the clitoris and penis do during sex. All three, along with the tongue, are classified as “specific erogenous zones” because of their mucocutaneous nature and the density and sensitivity of their nerve endings.

So it’s really no surprise that we’re constantly muddling together the acts of sex and eating. What’s interesting is the way the different genders go about it. Where Mr. Gogol makes the kitchen into an arena of bawdy adultery, Willa Cather makes it the “heart and center of the house” full of “the fragrance of old friendships, the glow of early memories.” Kitchens, to Cather, are temples of domestic love, “like a tight little boat in a winter sea.” Her famous novels set during the American pioneer era are fine examples of how female authors tend to write about eating as an act of sharing that is also quite sexual. In
One of
Ours
, an old German widow feeds a man with an excitement that is deliciously lascivious.

“I been lookin’ for you every day,” said Mrs. Voigt when she brought his plate. “I put plenty good gravy on dem sweet per-taters, ja.”

“Thank you. You must be popular with your boarders.”

She giggled. “Ja, all de train-men is friends mit me . . . I ain’t got no boys mein own self, so I got to fix up liddle tings for dem boys, eh?”

She stood nursing her stumpy hands under her apron, watching every mouthful he ate so eagerly that she might have been tasting it herself. . . .

Even when being raunchy most women authors have a different tone than their male peers. In Dorothy Allison’s collection
Trash
, the writer remembers her lovers not only by what they ate, but also by the sex they performed using ingredients from the evening meal. Eggplants dominate this lewd yarn, but it’s still all about soul love. “I remember women by what we ate together,” she writes, “by what they dug out of the freezer after we’d made love for hours. I only had one lover who didn’t want to eat at all. We didn’t last long.”

It seems a woman’s take on eating is the same as sex—a shared experience that tends to fill you up. In a study comparing 489 food stories told by children between three and five years of age, sociologist Carole Counihan found that girls were twice as likely to describe eating in terms of a shared experience. Boys tended to see it as an act of killing and devouring. No wonder they later seem to find the whole thing less than satisfying when they grow up. In
The Gift of an Apple
, Tennessee Williams compares eating to “an act of love . . . draw out the final sweet moment. But it can’t be held at that point . . . it has to be finished. And then you feel cheated somehow.” Ernest Hemingway agreed. In
A Moveable Feast
the ultimate macho says writing reminds him of sex because both leave him “empty.” His cure for this depletion, an aphrodisiacal plate of oysters washed down with a good white wine, helps. “As I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and make plans.”

This sense of emptiness Hemingway and Williams kvetch about might have something to do with the male tendency to eat one’s mate. “No, on thy flesh I will feed,” wrote one Elizabethan poet, setting the stage for centuries of skin-like-whipped-cream, cheeks-like-peaches, lips-like-cherries metaphors, a genre Margaret Atwood spoofed in
The Edible Woman
when she had the housewife character bake a cake shaped like her body so her husband could more conveniently consume her. The eighteenth-century author whose obsession with pain, love, and food gave us the word
sadist
, The Marquis de Sade, would have appreciated the thought. His
120 Days of Sodom
is the crown jewel of the let’s-eat-the-girls genre and includes one scene in which two bound waifs are placed side by side in front of a succulent meal—since they can’t get a bite, they wind up eating each other. Human flesh, we are told, is the ultimate aphrodisiac. But the marquis recommends a simple breakfast: a plain omelet served piping hot on the buttocks of a naked woman and eaten with “an exceedingly sharp fork.”

The King’s Chocolate

There were two items that the Marquis de Sade requested most fervently during his stay in the dungeons of the Bastille prison. The first were replacements for the mahogany dildos he kept breaking while amusing himself. The other was “chocolate . . . black like the Devil’s ass.” The eighteenth-century nobleman considered these items complementary because chocolate replenished his sexual fluids that, in consort with those super-strong dildos, enabled him to achieve his ten daily orgasms. Indeed, it was a chocolate-fueled sex-and-whips orgy that landed de Sade in prison in the first place. But his real sin, as we shall see, was to feed chocolate, called
Theobroma
, or the Food of the Gods, to the lower classes and women.

The first culture to fall down in awe before the bonbon was the Olmec people of Central America around 1500 B.C. It might have been the Mayans. We really don’t know; hell, we don’t really know if the “Olmecs” even existed. All we know for certain is that chocolate was revered by almost all early Central American cultures. Cacao beans, the fruit from which chocolate is derived, were used as money. An egg cost three beans. A dalliance with a hooker set you back twelve. The Aztec ruler Montezuma kept a billion pods in his treasury, and archaeologists have discovered caches of counterfeit chocolate currency, porcelain cacao beans so artfully done that nobody realized they were fake until a scientist tried to cut one open. The pleasure of actually consuming chocolate, however, was restricted to the ruling classes, who enjoyed it with an after-dinner smoke much as we do liqueurs today. There were superexcellent
tlaquetzallis
, or blue-green chocolates. There were red chocolates flavored with anchiote, pink chocolates, orange ones, black and white chocolates. Many were flavored with wild honey or blue vanilla or “mad with flowers.” There was also an alcoholic drink made from the sweet pulp surrounding the pod. None of this stuff resembled the dark, gleaming bodies we now so avidly devour. Back then, chocolate was a drink, served cold, honey-thick, and redolent of hot chili peppers. Milk and sugar were unknown.

The only time commoners were allowed a drop of this nectar was when they were about to die. Peasants marked for sacrifice took a tall glass of
itzpacalatl
, a chocolate drink mixed with human blood, just before the priests ripped out their still-beating hearts. The drink was said to render the victims docile, but it also had symbolic significance because the Aztecs believed that the cacao pod represented the human heart, and its liquor, blood. Its long-standing reputation as a powerful aphrodisiac made it particularly taboo for women and priests. Emperor Montezuma, on the other hand, apparently took fifty glasses a day and imbibed a special brew before braving his army of wives.

Although these early Americans believed cacao incited both violence and lust, it is the love connection that has stuck through time. “Chocolate,” wrote the English poet Wadsworth “t’will make Old Women Young and Fresh/Create new Motions of the Flesh/and cause them to long for You-Know-What/If they but Taste CHO-CO-LATE!” Scientists say this is nonsense, because while chocolate contains stimulants like caffeine and theobromine, the amounts are too small to have any significant effect (aside from which, the only sexual enhancement attributed to caffeine is it tends to make sperm swim more vigorously). The euphoria-inducing compounds phenylethylamine and serotonin are present in even smaller amounts.

Despite this scandalous reputation, the cacao champagnes of the Aztecs first became popular with European ladies living in the New World, who liked to take a glass during Mass. When the local bishop realized what his followers were sipping, he condemned it as “a damned agent from the witch’s brew.” He then tried to throw them out of church, but a sword fight broke out, after which everybody decided to observe Mass at home until the priest came to his senses. Which he soon did, in a manner of speaking; someone poisoned him. Appropriately, it seems the poison was administered via the priest’s own hot chocolate. According to the seventeenth-century traveler Thomas Gage, who was in the Mexican highland area of Chiapas where the scandal broke out, the lady suspected of being the killer claimed that since the priest was “clearly an enemy of chocolate in the church” it was really no surprise that it had not agreed with him. This femme fatale then set her sights on Gage, also a priest, and began sending
him
presents of chocolate. When Gage failed to respond to these blandishments, she sent him a more direct message—an oversized plantain (banana) in whose peel she’d carved a heart stuck with “two of blind cupid’s arrows.” Gage returned the plantain with his own message carved below,
Fruta tan fria, amor no cria,
which is to say, “Fruit so cold, takes no hold.” The spurned woman then threatened to slip him a dose of “Chiapas chocolate,” and Gage fled the area.

The battle lines were drawn. A few religious leaders urged all monks to abstain from the dreadful stuff. This irked the Franciscan order, by then making a pretty penny from exporting it to Spain, which then ruled that hot cocoa could even be enjoyed during the fast of Lent. They commissioned paintings of angels offering steaming mugs to fasting saints, urging them yes, yes, take a sip! “Oh Divine Chocolate!” the poets rhapsodized, “They grind thee kneeling/Beat thee with hands praying/and drink thee with eyes to Heaven!” When Marie-Thérèse of Austria (who was actually Spanish) introduced cocoa to the French royalty around 1661, everyone had a hissy fit. Her husband, Louis XIV, banned her from drinking it in public, lest it corrupt the morals of the French ladies, but this was soon overcome and
chocolat
, by now made with milk and sugar and scented with jasmine, became standard court rations. When the puritanical Madame Maintenon came into power, it was again briefly banned amid reports that habitués were giving birth to coal-black babies. The next Louis put his mistress, Madame de Pompadour, on a diet of creamy truffle soup and hot chocolate in order to “heat up” her amorous appetites. Pompadour, however, merely grew fat and was demoted to the King’s “confidential adviser,” a code for her increasingly desperate attempts to find women able to satisfy the king’s peculiar sexual appetites—a quest that would end only with the entrance of the harlot-princess-slut divine, dominatrix bitch, Madame du Barry.

The Aztecs had been proven right: their sacred brew had become the Food of the Gods, or at least the demagogue aristocrats who were the deities of eighteenth-century Europe. By the era of Madame du Barry, Europe had divided into three classes, each of which was identified with a particular brew. Peasants still preferred beer. The hardworking middle class had adopted stimulants like coffee and tea. The aristocrats, to whom work was a dirty word, doted on chocolate. “Chocolate appears as the status beverage of the
ancien regime
,” wrote contemporary historian Wolfgang Schivelbush. It’s a connection recorded in numerous paintings that depict marquises and marchionesses lounging in bed over a cup of cocoa, or in literary characters like Monsignor, whose fastidious chocolate ritual was used by Charles Dickens in
A Tale of Two Cities
to characterize the cruelty of the French aristocracy. There was Cosimo III, the last Medici, who was as famous for raping Tuscany to satisfy his appetite for extravagant delicacies as he was for his secret recipe for jasmine-scented chocolate. He especially enjoyed taking a cup of it while watching infidels being burned alive. The connection between the drink and aristocratic sadism eventually became the phrase “Sadean chocolate,” which scholar Barbara Lekatsas explains was created to celebrate “chocolate as an aphrodisiac that symbolized power: the luxurious sacred beverage stolen from Indians who were massacred, both bitter and sweet.”

At the top of this mountain of heartless luxury, sex, and fudge sits the aforementioned Madame du Barry. The last mistress of Louis XV, du Barry was a common streetwalker who’d gained entrance to the king’s bed and the ultimate circle of power by her ability to sate his lecherous appetites. Her secret tool? Chocolate. In the popular eighteenth-century novelette
Anecdotes sur Mme. La Comtesse du Barry
, she helps the king get an erection with her special hot chocolate concoction and then uses techniques she picked up in the whorehouse to satisfy him. According to historian Robert Darnton, the reason du Barry is portrayed using cocoa to get the king erect was to convey that Louis was impotent as a man
and
as a king, “the scepter having become as feeble as the royal penis.”

Certainly chocolate enjoyed a reputation as an aphrodisiac. There is, however, another possible meaning. Books like the
Anecdotes
were called
libelles
, illegal, politically motivated histories of the royalty’s personal lives—sort of a cross between the
National Enquirer
and the Ken Starr reports—that often made their points via a series of elaborate codes. For instance, in another
libelle
, the king’s earlier mistress, Madame de Pompadour, was lauded for spreading flowers everywhere she went, “but they are white flowers.” According to Darnton, the “white flowers” were a reference to syphilis. The message is that France’s first lady was a whore who was dripping syphilitic discharges upon the marble floors of Versailles. Likewise, when du Barry was repeatedly attacked for using chocolate to arouse unnatural passions in her lovers, it’s worth remembering that Europeans had originally called chocolate
cacao
but had changed the name because
cacao
too closely resembled the word
caca
, slang for feces. So when French
libelles
like 1878’s
La Comtesse du Barry
report that du Barry pulls chocolate out of her robe and “the decadent Parisians go crazy with a Roman orgy,” one can reasonably wonder if this is a discreet reference to some form of anal sex. That is, after all, one of the acts classical Roman/Greek orgies were celebrated for back then. Was this constant harping on du Barry’s insatiable appetite for chocolate a reference to some unusual techniques that the so-called Queen of the Left Hand had acquired at her famous brothel, the House of Gourdan? In the popular pamphlet
Drame en Cinq Actes
, the author writes that du Barry “honeyed the king’s chocolate. . . . Then the royalty consecrate a new verb for the French dictionary.” What was this “new act” they introduced into the French language? It’s hard to believe it was really just a cup of hot cocoa that got the most jaded emperor in Europe going.