In the Devil's Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food (9 page)

Humble Pie

So here I am in some subterranean dive in Manhattan’s East Village. Everywhere you look, there are Japanese hipsters in hornrim glasses sucking on Sapporo beers and munching omelets covered in writhing bonito flakes that look like barf monsters from a bad sci-fi flick. I take a mouthful of my
motsu yakitori
.
Motsu
means cow intestines. I love ’em, which is just as well, since each
yakitori
—a kind of Japanese shish-kebab—is only three inches long, and I am determined to choke down an entire cow intestine. There’s approximately 150 feet of digestive tract per animal, which means I have another six hundred
yakitori
to go. The divine Nina J. is my companion in this adventure. She looks as if she’s going to throw up. She’s a dainty one, that Nina, who doesn’t eat meat, and is restricting herself to a shrimp.

“That,” I say defensively, pointing to the pink body on her spear, “is a bottom feeder. Do you know what
it
eats?” Happily, I remember her brother Jerry certifies kosher restaurants for his synagogue. “Jerry would rather be strangled than put one of those in his mouth.”

Nina ignores me and continues eating. I change tactics. Sure, I say to her, few self-respecting Americans would be caught dead eating cow intestine or heart or liver—at least not publicly—but organ meats like these were once the sacrament of the world’s most powerful priesthood, the Etruscan haruspex. The Etruscans were the original inhabitants of Italy’s Tuscany region. They taught Imperial Rome not only how to read and write but how to foretell future events, and no Roman emperor worth his salt made a political decision without ordering an Etruscan haruspex to read the future in a sheep’s entrails. I describe the scene to Nina: the bleating animals, the incense, the priests pulling the organs out of the beast’s still-steaming body to examine it for prophetic markings. Then, if the lower intestine gave the go-ahead, the politicians would send an army out to conquer, say, Asia Minor and the haruspex priests would sit back to enjoy a snack very much like the one before me now. Charred heart and liver shish-kebab, salted and eaten with the grill’s ashes still sticking to it.

But that was all a long time ago. Ancient history.

Or so I thought.

The guinea pig took another sip of his beer and rolled his eyes in exasperation—was this never going to end?

“He works better when he’s drunk,” Señor Villanova explained. “You’ll see, señor.”

My personal journey into the mystic realm of variety meats began in the village of Husao high in the Peruvian Andes. Peru is probably the last place in the world to continue a Tuscan-like reverence for entrails. The only real difference is that the Etruscan priests used sheep. The Peruvian priests,
curandernos,
prefer guinea pigs.

Villanova poured another mouthful of beer into his pet’s maw. Not all
curandernos
get their guinea pigs drunk, but Villanova had been highly recommended. And that was good, because I was beginning to feel skeptical. For one thing, his pants didn’t fit. He also seemed tipsy, at least judging by the incomprehensible mix of Quecha (the native Inca language) and Spanish that he mumbled out of the corner of his crooked mouth. In fact, his whole face looked vaguely out of kilter. Nor did his office décor help—nothing but two rickety wooden stools and a table covered with dirty leaves. Every other witch doctor I’d visited had displayed a healthy supply of gods and talismans. Hell, I thought, if the walls had been painted white instead of raw cement I could have been in the office of a Western doctor, God forbid. The most impressive thing about Villanova was how he got his pet to drink the beer. He held the animal by the skin around its shoulders and, when it was time to administer a chug, pulled back on the skin to force its little mouth open. Then he dunked its head straight into the mug. The guinea pig had a helluva foam mustache, but in minutes they’d gone through half a large bottle of
Cuzco cerveza
, although I couldn’t say whether Señor Villanova or the pig had done most of the drinking.

He explained tomorrow’s procedure to me. First, he would enchant his pig and rub it over my naked body so it could absorb my illness. This normally kills the beast; then, amid prayers and chanting, Villanova would cut it in half to examine the inner organs for signs indicating the best way to heal me. Villanova compared it to taking an X ray without the dangers of radiation.

Very Etruscan, I thought. Straight out of
Bella Tuscany
. I asked Villanova if he’d ever heard of Tuscany. Frances Mayes? Risotto? He didn’t seem to understand, so I pulled out a picture of the Piacenza liver, a two-hundred-pound, three-dimensional bronze reproduction of a sheep’s liver made by the Romans around the second century B.C. to teach priests how to prophesize in the Tuscan way. It shows forty-four sections, each of which is sacred to a particular divinity. The idea was to look for prophetic polyps. A distended gallbladder, for instance, was considered propitious for war because martial gods like Hercle (Hercules) dominated the area. I presume that’s why we used to say, “she’s got a lotta gall” about someone with an unusually fiery temperament, but I could be mistaken.

I told Señor Villanova all about the Etruscans. I waved my Xerox of the Piacenza liver at him and asked if
curandernos
had similar learning aids. But my Spanish must not have been up to the task, because he just gave me a pitying look.

“Please stay calm,
señor.
” He patted me on the shoulder. “When you come back tomorrow you will see my wife. She specializes in these kinds of conditions.” Then he poured us both out a glass of the beer. “I suggest you drink this,” he said, gulping his down. “It will make you feel much better.”

The Romans came to depend on the Etruscan prophets in much the same way we depend on tabloid journalists. It was a haruspex named Spurinna who came up with the famous “Beware the Ides of March!” headline, and Caesar’s personal priests warned him to stay home the day Brutus struck because they had disemboweled an animal without a heart. The flavor of these rites is captured nicely by the Roman chronicler Silicus Italicus in a scene in which the great general Hannibal consults a
haruspice
(a female haruspex) prior to declaring war on Rome. The divination takes place in a blood-splattered cave full of hissing gases and wailing spirits. “Then a black victim was sacrificed to the goddess of triple shape; and the priestess, seeking an oracle, quickly opened the still-breathing body and questioned the spirit, as it fled from the inward parts that she had laid bare in haste.” Consulting the entrails she plops on the table, the priestess prophesies, “I see the Aetolian field covered far and wide with soldiers’ corpses, and lakes red with Trojan blood . . . the river Po runs blood.” She was describing the events of the Second Punic War, the most significant conflict in Roman history.

The abrupt disappearance of Etruscan culture around the fourth century B.C. has long baffled some historians, but some now think that when their priests divined their culture’s demise in a sheep’s liver, the race simply merged with the Romans rather than fight the inevitable. Tuscany’s love of chopped-liver, however, seems to have lived on in Europe. The ancient Irish
Vision of Mac Conglinne
tells in great detail how the king could be satisfied only with “son of fat, son of kidney, son of slender tripe,” and how the tribute to the royal ladies consisted of sweetbreads and pig hearts. Organ meats fetched significantly higher prices than chops in the markets of seventeenth-century Paris. The French called these delicacies
parties nobles
, and every hunter carried a ritual set of knives with which to remove them. He would then present them, on a forked stick, called
la fourchie
, to the most powerful person present and they would be grilled on the spot in a little ceremony meant to honor the nobleman’s bravery. We still say a brave man has “guts” or “pluck” (a kind of intestine). Cowards, of course, are “gutless” or “lily-livered.”

In fact, the entire world seems to be riddled with a perverse reverence for variety meats. The Scottish have made entrails wrapped in entrails (stomach), called haggis, a national dish, which they eat in a ceremony filled with pomp and bagpipes. The Tongans believed the liver was the finest part of the meal because it was where the animal’s courage resided, which is why they gave it to the chief. The heads of the African Masai eat nothing but milk, honey, and roasted livers, for similar reasons. The Turkish high holiday Kurban Bayrami, the Day of Sacrifice, culminates in the ritual eating of a bowl of tripe stew called
iskembe corbasi
. The ancient Greeks claimed Achilles’ courage came from a diet of lion intestines. The nomad tribes of Sudan make a delicious dish from giraffe innards that they claim allows them to communicate telepathically with their revered giraffe.

And then, of course, there was the Inca empire of Peru and their sacred guinea pigs.

Señora Villanova was waiting for me when I returned to the
curanderno’s
house the next day. She was about four feet tall, a hundred years old, and wearing a massive pleated skirt and foot-tall white top hat. Braids to her waist. Now here, I thought, was a witch doctor who knew how to dress the part! She should give her husband some tips. We began the session with some prayers to a pile of coca leaves (the base for cocaine, and considered sacred). These were then laid on a piece of gift-wrapping paper and covered with dried moss, pink cookies, a couple of marbles, the hand off of a Barbie doll, mattress stuffing, and some confetti. This was my symbolic “body.” My mind began to wander. I was already feeling rather spacy from the three days I’d spent sitting in Husao’s single dirt street begging the Villanovas to see me. They actually had quite a following, and I often found myself in a crowd of patients outside—men shaking with palsy, ominously limp infants, boys with purple mold covering their faces. Serious stuff. And not just dirt-poor peasants. Some of these suckers were rich. One even arrived in a BMW. You would think with that kind of money coming in, the Villanovas would spruce up their operation, but no. Roosters wandered in during my séance. A hunchbacked boy stuck his head in the door for a stare. By the single naked lightbulb I could make out some decorative touches. A pink-and-yellow plastic reindeer head. Donald Duck statues covered in muck. Not as grand as the gory altars of the Roman haruspex but an Etruscan priestess would probably find a Day-Glo pink reindeer pretty damn impressive. Only a truly powerful deity, they might reason, would possess such an otherworldly color. That strangely dressed duck was obviously a lesser wood spirit.

I suppose it was sometime during my little daydream that two other women, identical to Señora Villanova in every respect, sneaked into the room. Before I knew it, they were all jabbering away with one another and throwing golden flower petals at me. I felt as if I was on Mars—three sisters bent double with age, their wrinkled faces glowing a bright parchment yellow and dressed in matching white top hats and blue velour dinner jackets.
Blue velour dinner jackets.
Where, I wondered, did they get outfits like that? One of them pulled out a jet-black guinea pig and started pouring beer down its gullet. Another tied a mass of pink and green ribbons to each of its paws. Then a bundle of pink ribbons was knotted about its waist.

Then they told me to take off all my clothes.

“Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with Relish the inner organs of beasts
and fowl. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed
roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs. . . .”

James Joyce
Ulysses,
1922.

It was at some point during the late 1700s that the sacred meats of Tuscany began their long journey into disgrace. The most logical explanation for this demotion was Europe’s increasing urbanization and the propensity of organ meats to spoil. Where in the past the European elite had enjoyed them deep in the forest after a kill, they now became the dish of people who lived near the cities’ enormous slaughterhouses in ’hoods called “shambles,” mazelike arrondisements puddled with coagulating blood and the stench of death. Hearts, kidneys, liver, udders, spleens, and blood pudding became Europe’s soul food, both loved and hated. There were curious remnants of its former glory—it was considered an honored dish on St. Patrick’s Day in parts of Ireland, where butchers would celebrate the holiday by decorating pigs’ heads with top hats and placing a tobacco pipe in their mouths. “I’d bring [it] over and I’d eat it like chocolate. I’d eat it like chocolate,” told one elderly resident of Cork to historian Regina Sexton. “With a hot potato and the cabbage and as for the pig’s tail, I’d eat every bit of the fat on the pig’s tail and I didn’t eat a pig’s tail now for ten years.” Younger generations developed an aversion to their grandpa’s “chocolate,” and some households began serving two separate dinners, one with offal for the elders and another offal-free for the youngsters. The popular seventeenth-century delicacy Batalia pie took its name from
béatillae
, a reference to the small precious things hidden under the crust—cockscombs, sweetbreads, and such. By the late 1800s an identical dish was called ’umble pie,
’umbles
, or
numbles
, being English slang for various organ meats. This treat soon became the symbolic “humble pie” we all enjoy from time to time when abjectly humiliated before large crowds of gloating spectators. Organ meat cuisine today verges on the extinct, at least in the English-speaking world. Americans are so terrified of eating “humble pie” they consume its ingredients only via the alarmingly pink anonymity known as the hot dog. Followers of America’s Nation of Islam have banned this kind of food because of its association with the diet once forced on slaves in the South.

I’ve never had a pet guinea pig, but I must say I quite enjoyed having one give me a massage. The warm fur felt absolutely divine as they ran it over my legs, my chest, the small of my back. Behind my ears. Not only did it feel good, but as the three witches from Husao rubbed the tipsy beast over my body, I felt all bad energies depart and my inner organs fill with a radiant light that sang like a thousand angels. The air above their top hats began to crackle and glow with electrical discharges. The Earth shook. And then it was done. The guinea pig was dead. The ladies laid it reverently on the table and prepared to cut it open to examine its entrails. I grew terribly excited as they whetted an evil-looking knife. Finally I would experience the same thrill of Hannibal, of Caesar, of Nero! Then I looked down at the doll-size body lying still upon the table. Poor little guinea pig, I thought; you have died for my sins. I noticed it seemed to look back at me.