In the Devil's Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food (8 page)

The Joy of Fat

“You are so fat!” exclaims a member of Canada’s Ojibwa people, meaning “looking good”: healthy, wealthy, and oh so fine. Most of the world still thinks fat is beautiful, and as little as a century ago, B. Johnston, the American author of the famous
Eat and
Grow Fat
, was making a bundle by advising frantic maidens (and men) who “are prepared to go to any reasonable length to acquire a few extra layers of fat.” Books like these were by no means directed at anorexic types. “Every woman who is thin likes to be stouter,” wrote French dietician Brillat-Savarin. “It is a wish we have heard a thousand times.” Savarin’s remedy was to feast on sponge cakes, macaroni, and grapes, combined with hot baths and “lots of naps.” Those lacking the willpower to stick to the Savarin Regime cheated by padding their clothes. In fact, the word
diet
as we know it—referring to an interminable Hell on Earth—didn’t even exist. The closest thing were nineteenth-century cults like Fletcherism, whose American devotees prided themselves on chewing each morsel thirty times before swallowing.

This passion for cellulite extended beyond the human form. Ancient Egyptians wore discs of scented animal fat on their heads that would create lovely perfumes as they melted during dinner. But the big demand was on the dinner table itself. “Some persons,” wrote John Trusler in his eighteenth-century
The Honors of the Table
, “prefer the soft, the other the firm, and each should be asked what [fat] he likes.” He advised that while pork had delicious marrowlike flab, there was also a “nice, gristly fat to be pared off about the ear” of a calf. Because venison fat was “very apt to cool,” Trusler urged thoughtful hosts to provide heated dishes to keep it nice and runny, “a sight which never fails to give pleasure to your company.” Carvers distributed these delicacies by holding the carcass aloft with one hand and artfully slicing with the other, so that the juicy translucent gems drifted down like rose petals to fall in perfectly overlapping patterns onto the guest’s waiting plate.

Fat, in fact, is Jehovah’s preferred dish, and the Bible specifies that the “fat of the beast” should be burned in the temple for His consumption. We mere mortals had to make do with the lean cuts. It was often used as a kind of sauce, and every roast came with a side of grease. Roast lamb was best served with bits of quivering tail fat, which Trusler says “may be readily divided into several pieces” to accommodate the salivating hordes. Middle Eastern cultures had a particular fondness for sheep-tail fat and bred animals with tails so gargantuan—up to eighteen inches across—that mini carriages were harnessed to their behinds to keep the precious appendage safe from bruising. Tail fat is essential for delicacies like
qawarma
(lamb confit), and was once the secret ingredient in the best baklava. The Dutch doted on the marine-flavored fat of young herons, which was obtained by shaking fledglings out of their nest. When a foreign dignitary visited Holland’s Zevenjuizen Forest in the early 1600s, more than five hundred birds were shaken from their nests for lunch. Perhaps the most famous French fat (excluding Norman butter) is the
sots-l’y-laisse
, which translates as “only idiots don’t eat it,” found near a chicken’s buttock. When
New York Times
critic Craig Claiborne took his famous thirty-two-course, $4,000 meal in 1975, one dish consisted of dozens of the gelatinous morsels.

Truly fat-free foods, like people, tend to lack personality. Fat is comparable to the volume knob, because without it our taste buds are incapable of distinguishing flavors but in and of itself it is almost flavorless. How then did it become the food taboo of the modern world? It isn’t, of course. It’s only the
idea
of fat we loathe. Westerners, particularly Americans, love it to death, and they spend enormous amounts of money to create artificial replacements that give them a thrillingly opulent mouthful without the caloric penalties. For the true fat haters, we have to go back to the Native Americans. When asked in the 1600s what were the three greatest evils Europeans had introduced to the New World, the

Mayans first mentioned torture and genocide. But third on the list was the conquistadors’ propensity for “basting with lard.”

Fat-tailed sheep, seventeenth-century
engraving.

Mitterrand’s Last Supper

When French president François Mitterrand realized he was about to die of cancer, he invited his friends over for a final New Year’s Eve dinner: December 31, 1995. The first course was oysters. Then came foie gras. Then roast capon. But no dessert course, no cheese: the last flavor Mitterrand wished to savor belonged to the flesh of the endangered
ortolan
, a songbird the size of a human toe that is a crime to buy or hunt, and is certainly illegal to eat. Mitterrand devoured it in the traditional manner, first covering his head with an embroidered cloth, then inserting the entire bird into his mouth.

If guilt is a flavor, and it definitely is, then
l’ortolan
is one of the world’s greatest dishes. The lemon-colored songbirds, called buntings in English, originally appeared in French chansons as symbols of innocence and of the love of Jesus. Then a tribe near Bordeaux began trapping them as they migrated south to Africa, pulling them out of the sky with little wooden traps called
matoles
hidden high in the treetops. The birds must be taken alive; once captured they are either blinded or kept in a lightless box for a month to gorge on millet, grapes, and figs, a technique apparently taken from the decadent cooks of Imperial Rome who called the birds
beccafico
, or “fig-pecker.” When they’ve reached four times their normal size, they’re drowned alive in a snifter of Armagnac. This sadistic
mise en scène
has transformed the bird from a symbol of innocence to an act of gluttony symbolic of the fall from grace. In Colette’s novel
Gigi
, for instance, the tomboyish main character prepares for her entry into polite society with lessons in the correct way to eat lobsters and boiled eggs. When she begins training to be a courtesan, however, she is said to be “learning how to eat the
ortolan
.” Not that it was only courtesans who indulged. The tradition of covering one’s head while eating the bird was supposedly started by a soft-bellied priest trying to hide his sadistic gluttony from God.

Cooking
l’ortolan
is simplicity itself. Simply pop them in a high oven for six to eight minutes and serve. The secret is entirely in the eating. First you cover your head with a traditional embroidered cloth. Then place the entire four-ounce bird into your mouth. Only its head should dangle out from between your lips. Bite off the head and discard.
L’ortolan
should be served immediately; it is meant to be so hot that you must rest it on your tongue while inhaling rapidly through your mouth. This cools the bird, but its real purpose is to force you to allow its ambrosial fat to cascade freely down your throat. When cool, begin to chew. It should take about fifteen minutes to work your way through the breast and wings, the delicately crackling bones, and onto the inner organs. Devotees claim they can taste the bird’s entire life as they chew in the darkness: the wheat of Morocco, the salt air of the Mediterranean, the lavender of Provence. The pea-sized lungs and heart, saturated with Armagnac from its drowning, are said to burst in a liqueur-scented flower on the diner’s tongue. Enjoy with a good Bordeaux.

What could be more delicious? Nothing, according to initiates, who compare the banning of the
ortolan
to the death of French culture and continue to eat them despite fines of up to $2,000. “It is the most incredible thing—delicious!” says Jean-Louis Palladin, a French chef who once smuggled four hundred
ortolans
into the United States for a dinner at his restaurant in Washington’s Watergate Hotel (he hid them from customs in a box of diapers). Palladin sneers at the idea that the covering of the diner’s head is to hide their shame from God. “Shame?
Mais
non!
It is for concentrating on the fat going down the throat. It is really like you are praying, see? Like when you take the Mass (communion wafer) into your mouth from the priest’s hand in church and you think about God. Now that is what eating
l’ortolan
is really most like.”

President Mitterrand appears to have agreed. Although so ill that he was passing out between courses, France’s last truly great leader broke the traditional limit of one bird per diner that night in 1995. He ate two. It was the last thing he tasted. The next morning Mitterrand began refusing food. He died within the week.

The Dirt Eaters

The dirt eater is the ultimate scum of American society. He or she is the outcast, the loser, the one who has not only admitted defeat but made it his daily bread, the lowest of the low, the sucker up of the ground upon which we walk, on which dogs piss and garbage is tossed. “Technically, I’d rather eat dirt than food,” Georgia’s Rena Bronson told the media in 1999. “If I could eat dirt for breakfast, dirt for lunch, dirt for dinner and a little iced tea, I’d be fine.” Bronson is a registered nurse who eats three small bags of clay a week. Not just any old dirt. She’s an epicure who dines exclusively on creamy white kaolin clay, the flavor of which has been described in truffle-ian raptures. Dirt eaters like Ms. Bronson have been around for centuries and, contrary to current American attitudes, generally have been considered quite respectable. Some African Americans still send bags of clay to expectant mothers, and over a million Mexicans every year participate in a Christian/Mayan Eucharist ceremony in which clay tablets are eaten in lieu of the traditional wheaten wafer. As in much clay cookery, the Mexicans bake their mud to get rid of excess moisture and concentrate flavors, a craft perfected by the Australian Aborigines who make a white organic loaf that is kneaded and sun-dried before being wrapped in leaves and baked. Women in northern India used to buy a clay pot that imparted a pleasant odor to their water. When their thirst was slaked, they would consume the cup itself. The Kai people of Papua New Guinea string small balls of clay on a stick and grill them like Middle Eastern kebabs; one would imagine this would go rather nicely with the original potato-chip dip the Peruvian Incas created out of a special riverside mud patch.
Mise en scène
aside, there are three basic dirt varieties: red (rustic), white (creamy and light), and black (comparable to bitter chocolate). The best, though, are the rare “blue earths” which are full of coal-tar air bubbles that tickle the palate with champagne sensations.

Tasty and cheap, these foods are rich in minerals; they often played an essential role in diets worldwide. The extreme denigration of dirt eating is primarily a North American attitude, and it probably developed because the food’s popularity among African slaves led to its being associated with laziness, perhaps because prisoners tend to be undermotivated, or because dirt coating the stomach lining slows absorption of vitamins and can cause lethargy and sometimes death. Some slave owners actually made workers wear iron gags to keep them from excessive snacking. But what makes the American loathing of dirt eating so interesting is that although the habit was heavily associated with Africans, the first literary dirt eater was a white man. His name was Ransy Sniffle, and he appeared in an 1833 magazine story called “The Fight” by Augustus Baldwin Longstreet. The writer describes Sniffle as a flat-headed monstrosity with oversize joints, withered limbs, and a complexion a “corpse would have disdained to own.” The archetypal white trash, in other words; a “clay-eater, his bloated watery countenance illuminated by the exhilarating qualities of rum.” Mr. Sniffle, however, was more than a mere fancy. He was a caricature created as part of a campaign against the Populist democratic movement of Andrew Jackson. There was a whole cadre of writers and magazines involved in this effort, and their primary mission was to portray poor whites as animals whose habits not only made them unsuitable dinner guests but, by association, inappropriate participants in the political arena. By making Sniffle a “dirt eater” like the disenfranchised Africans, Longstreet was indulging in the hallowed tradition of manipulating food habits to exclude a group from political power.

A Dinner Party in Kishan Garhi

The use of food to disempower has a long tradition in the American South. “The commonest of these [social] taboos,” wrote John Dollard in his study of southern racial segregation, “are those against eating at a table with Negroes.” Interracial eating was second only to interracial sex among the taboos of the old South, and a disproportionate number of civil rights battles were fought over segregated lunch counters. The American system of culinary segregation, however, is pretty weak stuff compared to the system devised by India’s Hindus, who, at over 1 billion, now constitute about one-fifth of the world’s population. Hindu society is divided into four rigidly segregated classes called castes. At the top are the Brahmins, or the priest class. Then come the Kshatriyas, warriors. Next the Vaisyas, merchants. At the bottom is the servant class of Sudras. Within these four
über-
castes are also thousands of subcastes (many based on profession), all of which maintain their social standing by snubbing one another’s dinner parties. Sociologist McKin Marriott showed what a soap opera this can become in a 1968 study that focused on the tiny village of Kishan Garhi, which, despite containing only 166 families, boasts a whopping thirty-six individual castes. The trouble began when the local goatherds decided to force the village barbers to accept a dinner invitation. Under Hindu social rules, this would have put the barbers below the goat boys. The barbers didn’t seem to care—more free grub for us seems to have been their admirably pragmatic attitude— but it put the top-dog Brahmins in a bind. If the barbers lost caste it meant they would no longer be able to trim the Brahmins’ hair because, as priests, the Brahmins must follow strict regulations not only about what they eat—and with whom— but also which castes are allowed to touch or even breathe on them.

The village elders conferred. A compromise was worked out. They ruled that the barbers could have dinner with the goatherds but could eat only non-
kacca
, or unsacred, dishes. This left the hair stylists just enough social rank to continue as the Brahmins’ barbers. The goatherds, however, were furious. They fired their local Brahmin priest and replaced him with one from a distant village. Then the plot thickened: a
local
Brahmin was seen eating with the goatherds. The village was scandalized. What they didn’t know, however, was that the Brahmin in question was blackmailed into accepting the dinner invite to get a money loan from the goatherds. The village eventually found out, and all hell broke loose. The Brahmins wouldn’t eat with the Brahmins, the barbers were out of work, and the goatherds’ position was so confused that they were virtually (gasp!) without caste.

The caste system is not just fun and food fights, of course. Beneath the four main castes are the so-called Untouchables, or
Dalits
, a group of about 250 million people who are completely
without
caste, and so . . . well, untouchable. They get to clean the latrines, but that’s about it. If they take water from the communal well, they are sometimes killed. If they try to eat with caste members, the food is pushed off their plates until they leave in tears. This horrific repression (now illegal) is said to stem directly from the sense of separation caused by the dietary rules enshrined in the ancient laws of Hindu society. “The feelings of Untouchability in the caste system,” writes Sundar La Sar in
Hindu Culture and Caste System
, “had their roots in the compulsory separation of food-habits among the people.” The upside for the Untouchables is that they can eat anything they want without losing social status—beef, caviar, foie gras, even truffles. Compare that to the menu of poor, pitiful Brahmins, who not only must follow a strict vegetarian diet, but also must abstain from things like garlic and onions. No booze, of course. Some are not even allowed carrots or tomatoes because their origin in foreign lands means they have no caste and are therefore “untouchable.” Nor is the conversation at dinner likely to make amends for the cuisine. “One should take one’s food alone and not in the company of even one’s relatives,” suggests the three-thousand-year-old Laws of Manu, “since who can know the secret sins of a person in whose company one eats?” Some high-caste Brahmins dine in a room devoted exclusively to that purpose, or at least set up screens to keep impure influences at bay while eating. True blue bloods purify the dinner table with cow dung or, better yet, eat straight off the karma-enhancing excrement by “pouring water over a spot and plastering [leaves] with cow dung.”

The only other major group with a comparably strict dining etiquette are ultra-Orthodox Jews, some of whom will not use a plate that a nonbeliever has touched. The similarity of the two groups’ food obsessions, plus the fact that the Jews have been called “the Sons of Abraham” (read “A Brahmin”), have led to speculation that both sprang from some prehistoric super-priesthood. While this thought might have some historical basis, what the two really share is a profound awareness of the connection between food, purity, and morality. “The dietary rules [of the Jews] merely developed the metaphor for holiness,” wrote scholar Mary Douglas in her book
Purity and Danger
, by “keeping distinct the categories of creation.” In her view, kosher dietary law forbids the eating of animals like the salamander because the Lord created the world to be in three separate categories: earth, sky, and water. The amphibious salamander violates this organization by living both on earth and in water. Hence, it is a creature created by the Devil and unclean. The Hindu prohibition against castes sharing meals stems from the same concept. Just as God created separate categories of matter, He created separate groups of humans. It would be as immoral to breach the latter as it would the former. This is particularly true about breaking bread together, because eating is so intimately tied to tribal identity and religious worship. Moreover, this concept of “sacred separation,” or boundaries, is the underlying principle of almost all morality, according to Douglas. A lie is only wrong because it pretends to be true, i.e., it mingles two separate categories of nature: falsehood and truth. In Douglas’s point of view, the peculiar dietary laws of the Hebrews and the Brahmins were created to force believers into ritualized daily meditations on these great questions—truth, purity, holiness—and return dinner to its roots “as a meaningful part of the great liturgical act of worship, which culminates in the sacrifice [meal] in The Temple.”

The Last Supper

The New Testament is littered with tales of Jesus’ lousy table manners. He forgets to wash his hands before eating. He takes dinner with hookers. He does lunch with unbelievers. These were more than mere breaches of etiquette; like the Hindu caste code, these rules upheld the society of the time and were taken extremely seriously. Members of the Essenes, a cult that Christ probably studied with, starved to death rather than eat food touched by non-Essenes.

Christ’s déclassé dinner parties were tolerated as long as he held them out in the boonies. But dining out in the big city, Jerusalem, was another matter. In
The Scrolls and Christian Origins: Studies in the Jewish Background of the New Testament
, religious scholar Matthew Black notes a number of odd circumstances surrounding Christ’s Last Supper. First, it appears to have been kept a secret. Christ refused to tell even his apostles where it was to be held, instead making them meet with a stranger who led them to the dinner party’s location. Black believes this indicates that the meal was probably an illegal ceremony of some kind. He then reconstructs the calendar of Jesus’ time and concludes that, although the Last Supper occurred around Jewish Passover, it did not fall on the officially sanctioned holiday. Black then looks at the circumstances leading to the arrest of Jesus, particularly the behavior of the traitor Judas during the meal. The New Testament notes that “having received the sop he [Judas] immediately went out: and it was night.” A curiously bleak turn of phrase, especially when you realize that a sop is just a piece of bread used to soak up gravy. Couldn’t Judas just have wanted something to snack on? Hardly. “In carrying off the sop he took evidence with him to the priests and the Pharisees that an illegal feast had been celebrated,” Black concludes, “[and] that Jesus was challenging Pharisaic law in its stronghold, Jerusalem itself.” Judas took the gravy-soaked crust to prove that Christ was holding an illegal feast—a satanic passover— and that if the police acted immediately they could catch this charlatan Messiah red-handed. In this light, the copious amount of biblical ink spilled on the Last Supper appears quite reasonable. Christ’s reason for coming to Jerusalem seems to have been to provoke a confrontation with the authorities, but he gets arrested before anything happens. Perhaps the Last Supper
was
the planned confrontation. During dinner, he predicts the imminent arrival of the cops. If the soirée had been a deliberate affront, his prophesy is no more clairvoyant than a protester foreseeing jail time after staging a sit-in at the mayor’s office.

Christianity is unique among the major religions for its almost complete lack of food taboos. This was no accident. The New Testament specifically quotes Matthew as saying, “Know and understand; it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a man, but that which comes out.” Christ’s choice of a dinner party to take a theological stand makes sense if you consider that his years of training with the food-obsessed Essene cult would have left him preternaturally aware of the connection between pride and dietary taboos. After all, how can people be truly equal if they can’t all eat the same food at the same table? His manipulation of the Passover feast for political gain, however, was to prove catastrophic; in the ensuing two millenniums, ignorant Christians mourning Christ’s death during Easter routinely massacred Jews because their simultaneous Passover feast—a joyous event commemorating their release from Egyptian bondage—was mistaken as celebration of Christ’s death on the cross.