PART FIVE
WHAT CONSTITUTES a cultural tale of food? Anthropologists would give a staggering variety of answers to such a question, but we’ll say simply that any story about food and its relation to social life and social practice will do. The writings we have assembled here examine both the most ordinary ways in which a culture consumes its food and the most extraordinary, even bizarre. In the latter category, consider America’s fascination with what is called “competitive eating.” Every so often newspapers regale us with stories of how a man with an apparently expanding stomach crammed fifty hamburgers into his maw in fifteen minutes, or of a salubrious slurper who slid eight dozen raw oysters down his gullet in a mere ten minutes (brave man, indeed). Jason Fagone reports with relish on a grilled cheese-eating contest, featuring one sandwich that appears to have an image of the Virgin Mary stamped on the toast, “the culinary version of the Shroud of Turin.” Turning to more routine modes of consumption, two writers meditate here on the humble chopstick but turn those simple sticks into cultural signs of the highest significance. Thus the literary critic Roland Barthes compares the Japanese way of gently lifting food into the diner’s mouth to the manners of a mother animal delicately picking up its young by the scruff of the neck, and he contrasts this practice with that of Western eaters whose implements gouge, rip, tear, and otherwise savagely attack their food. More generally, Margaret Visser, a historian and anthropologist of everyday life, gives us a brief history of Asian chopstick use, showing how that device dictates a certain way of eating, as diners nimbly pick from a common platter but because of that very communality are practically forbidden to lick or bite their chopstick, or to fish around for a morsel before definitively deciding what piece they desire.
What comprehensive account of cultural tables would omit the most horrifying of all meals—not fried grasshoppers or raw witchetty grubs—but human flesh? Felipe Fernández-Armesto edifies us with the “logic of cannibalism,” the need to absorb the soul or the courage of the ingested other, or to take drastic revenge on one’s enemies. On a less scarifying note, when Jonathan Gold sings the praises of an L.A. hot dog joint, who could not think of the ballpark frank, the stadium Polish? On an equally quotidian matter, Bill Buford’s mordant report of the Food Network’s round-the-clock culinary fantasies discusses what is regularly piped into America’s hungry homes—involvement with food by proxy, a media substitute for the thing itself. But if we’re tired of looking at mere images of the reality, think of Anya von Bremzen, whose émigrée mother spent months replicating in New York not only the crowning dishes of tsarist Russia but also the more poignant concoctions of Soviet cuisine. Unlike the youthful Julie Powell painstakingly struggling to cook her way through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, von Bremzen’s mother Larisa is to the heritage and the manner born.
Finally, we offer here two essays on the place of culture in food. The French sociologist Luce Giard looks at the role of women in the kitchen, seeing them as crucial nourishers and providers, but at the same time resisting the common sociocultural assumption that women’s essence is to be cooks. Rather she shows how culture, politics, and history have placed women in that culinary role. A burden or a joy? Giard wishes to claim the importance of female intelligence, imagination, and memory as crucial ingredients in the cultural story of gastronomy. Similarly, Massimo Montanari, an Italian cultural historian also opposed to culinary essentialism, argues that the phenomenon we call “taste” occurs not on the tongue but in the brain, by which he means that culture, not anatomy, conditions us to receive certain foods with pleasure or to dismiss them with displeasure. Taste, for humans, is a function of education, not just physiology; and it is collective as much as subjective. From the perspective of the culture critic, as these writers show, food is valued according to how society regards it. Inevitably our tables are set as they are because of the tales that have made us who we are.
Curnonsky (Maurice Edmond Sailland) (1872–1956)
THE MAN WHO called himself Curnonsky was born Maurice Edmond Sailland in France, but assumed a Russian-sounding name to lend himself a kind of exotic stature. He looked not unlike James Beard, and like Beard a half-century later he became the most trusted gastronome in his country. He was in fact known as “the Prince of Gastronomy,” and it was said that Michelin’s famous restaurant guides were due to his early advocacy of the motorcar in French gastro-touring. Curnonsky (whose name means “Why not?” in Latin along with the Russian suffix) was the author of some sixty-five books on food, including a memoir, Literary and Culinary Memories, and the classic Larousse Traditional French Cooking. Not all of his work was universally admired. Julia Child, for instance, described him as a “dogmatic meatball . . . just a big bag of wind,” and indeed he ballooned to such girth that he had to be carried by several friends into his favorite restaurants! In our witty selection Curnonsky aligns political divisions of right, center, and left with various cooking and eating preferences. As one who advocated simple, even rustic foods, he would doubtless place himself on the culinary left.
from The Almanach of Gourmets:
Gastronomy and Politics
THE UNINITIATED IMAGINE a gourmet as an obese, gout-ridden, and single-minded sexagenarian, who lives only to eat, always stuffing himself, someone who does hardly a stitch of work between meals.
But that’s not right at all, and it’s important to question such hasty generalizations. There are gourmets of all ages, even of both sexes, and I know several “gourmettes” who can show many men a thing or two.
Among all gourmets, there is only one common trait: an open mind. Their harmless passion demands, in effect, a good stomach and perfectly balanced health, for everyone knows the degree to which health influences character. No doubt the greatest of orators must have proclaimed “A generous heart is always master of the body it inhabits.” But between eloquence and reality there is room for some uncertainties. If you suffer from a kidney attack, or even a simple toothache, your view of the world can change to the point where you begin to quarrel even with Divine Commandments, some of which are indeed debatable.
But this is not to suggest that all gourmets have identical ideas about everything, particularly not about cuisine. Ever since I have been around them—and not just recently, since my father and my two grandfathers all enjoyed the good life—I’ve become convinced that one can categorize both gourmets and politicians in similar fashion.
Just reflect for five minutes, and you will soon and clearly realize that gastronomically speaking there is an extreme right, a right, a center, a left, and an extreme left.
The Extreme Right: The enthusiasts of “Haute Cuisine,” a cuisine that is informed, refined, and quite complex, the cooking of which demands a great chef and first-class ingredients; this could be called “diplomatic cuisine,” to be served at formal banquets in embassies or palaces, compared to which the cooking served in deluxe hotels is only a parody.
The Right: The defenders of “traditional cuisine,” who will accept only wood-burning stoves and slowly simmered dishes, who believe on principle that you eat well only with home-cooked food and in the company of no more than six or eight people, and where the cook is an elderly woman who’s been with the family for thirty years. These people have a wine cellar with bottles from before the phylloxera epidemic, brandies selected by their great-grandfather, a kitchen garden, and their own chicken coop.
The Center: The lovers of bourgeois and regional cuisines, who will admit that you can still eat well in restaurants and that everywhere in France there remain good inns and excellent hotels that refrain from fancy sauces, and where butter is still butter. These centrists preserve and hold dear the tastes of France’s traditional dishes and local wines. They demand that ingredients keep their original taste, are never blandly watered down nor excessively dressed up.
The Left: The partisans of food without affectation or complications, food good enough so to speak for a quickly prepared snack made with the means at hand. These folks happily content themselves with a nicely turned out omelet, a seared cutlet, a steak cooked to perfection, a rabbit stew, even a slice of ham or sausage. They don’t turn away from canned foods, and declare that a good sardine in oil has its charm, while a particular brand of canned green beans can be at least as good as fresh beans.
They seek out small places where the owner himself does the cooking. They love to discover, for example, a simple restaurant run by a man from the provinces who gets his meats and sausages from home. They promote country cooking and its pleasant little regional wines. They are the itinerants of gastronomy, and for them I’ve invented the neologism: “Gastronomades.”
The Extreme Left: Those whimsical folks, restless fellows, innovators, whom Napoleon would have called ideologues. Always questing after original sensations and unfamiliar pleasures, curious about all exotic cuisines, all foreign and colonial dishes, they would love to sample old and new dishes, foods from everywhere.
But what really characterizes them is their love of inventing new recipes. In this group sometimes we also come across personalities who are highly prominent yet a bit unsettling, free spirits all—but with one difference: these anarchists are horrified by bombes, a dessert they regard as too traditional and outmoded. In other words this group also has its saints and its martyrs. Some thirty years ago a gastronome of this ilk decreed that peas were of a very ordinary shade of green, so he decided to develop peas that were grass-green. He treated them initially with oxygenated water, in order, he said, to dye them with a fixative followed by a strong dose of green malachite mixed with a few flakes of iron. Satisfied at last with the result, and hungry from his all-night vigils, he ate a full pound of these homemade peas. . . . When I went to see him, a week later in the hospital, he was slowly beginning to recover; but owing to his poisoning our researcher barely avoided pushing up the daisies.
Let us not overdramatize this one example. Good cooking, as with many other endeavors, flourishes only by renewing itself and adapting to changing human needs. And it would be unfair of me to reject all new dishes and all innovators, since, for the past thirty years, eminent chefs have honored me by lending my name to a dozen original dishes. In 1928 I even created, along with my friend Marcel Dorin, a vertical skewer that has been adapted by numerous caterers and gourmets.
BARTHES WAS A French literary critic interested in the way language and ideologies represent cultural systems and social practices. He was fascinated by the way such systems and practices could be understood through an investigation of objects and behaviors identified with them. The meditation on chopsticks that we include here is taken from his work Empire of Signs, which narrates a trip he took to Japan. An unusual travel book, it is concerned less with his voyage than with how the smallest gestures, signs, buildings, and even packaging all “signify” the meaning of Japan. For Barthes chopsticks are eminently interpretable phenomena, telling us not merely about the way Asians eat but how their use distinguishes the East from the West. In his view, all aspects of cuisine, from its preparation to its mode of consumption, allow us to see deeply into the culture for which foodways speak.
from Empire of Signs: Chopsticks
AT THE FLOATING market in Bangkok, each vendor sits in a tiny motionless canoe, selling minuscule quantities of food: Seeds, a few eggs, bananas, coconuts, mangoes, pimentos (nor to speak of the Unnameable). From himself to his merchandise, including his vessel, everything is small. Occidental food, heaped up, dignified, swollen to the majestic, linked to a certain operation of prestige, always tends toward the heavy, the grand, the abundant, the copious; the Oriental follows the converse movement, and tends toward the infinitesimal: the cucumber’s future is not its accumulation or its thickening, but its division, its tenuous dispersal, as this haiku puts it:
Cucumber slices
The juice runs
Drawing spider legs
There is a convergence of the tiny and the esculent: things are not only small in order to be eaten, but are also comestible in order to fulfill their essence, which is smallness. The harmony between Oriental food and chopsticks cannot be merely functional, instrumental; the foodstuffs are cut up so they can be grasped by the sticks, but also the chopsticks exist because the foodstuffs are cut into small pieces; one and the same movement, one and the same form transcends the substance and its utensil: Division.
Chopsticks have other functions besides carrying the food from the plate to the mouth (indeed, that is the least pertinent one, since it is also the function of fingers and forks), and these functions are specifically theirs. First of all, a chopstick—as its shape sufficiently indicates—has a deictic function: it points to the food, designates the fragment, brings into existence by the very gesture of choice, which is the index; but thereby, instead of ingestion following a kind of mechanical sequence, in which one would be limited to swallowing little by little the parts of one and the same dish, the chopstick, designating what it selects (and thus selecting there and then this and nor that), introduces into the use of food not an order but a caprice, a certain indolence: in any case, an intelligent and no longer mechanical operation. Another function of the two chopsticks together, that of pinching the fragment of food (and no longer of piercing it, as our forks do); to pinch, moreover, is too strong a word, too aggressive (the word of sly little girls, of surgeons, of seamstresses, of sensitive natures); for the foodstuff never undergoes a pressure greater than is precisely necessary to raise and carry it; in the gesture of chopsticks, further softened by their substance—wood or lacquer—there is something maternal, the same precisely measured care taken in moving a child: a force (in the operative sense of the word), no longer a pulsion; here we have a whole demeanor with regard to food; this is seen clearly in the cook’s long chopsticks, which serve not for eating but for preparing foodstuffs: the instrument never pierces, cuts, or slits, never wounds but only selects, turns, shifts. For the chopsticks (third function), in order to divide, must separate, part, peck, instead of cutting and piercing, in the manner of our implements; they never violate the foodstuff: either they gradually unravel it (in the case of vegetables) or else prod it into separate pieces (in the case of fish, eels), thereby rediscovering the natural fissures of the substance (in this, much closer to the primitive finger than to the knife). Finally, and this is perhaps their loveliest function, the chopsticks transfer the food, either crossed like two hands, a support and no longer a pincers, they slide under the clump of rice and raise it to the diner’s mouth, or (by an age-old gesture of the whole Orient) they push the alimentary snow from bowl to lips in the manner of a scoop. In all these functions, in all the gestures they imply, chopsticks are the converse of our knife (and of its predatory substitute, the fork): they are the alimentary instrument which refuses to cut, to pierce, to mutilate, to trip (very limited gestures, relegated to the preparation of the food for cooking: the fish seller who skins the still-living eel for us exorcises once and for all, in a preliminary sacrifice, the murder of food); by chopsticks, food becomes no longer a prey to which one does violence (meat, flesh over which one does battle), but a substance harmoniously transferred; they transform the previously divided substance into bird food and rice into a flow of milk; maternal, they tirelessly perform the gesture which creates the mouthful, leaving to our alimentary manners, armed with pikes and knives, that of predation.
SOUTH AFRICAN-BORN, THE Canadian writer and broadcaster Margaret Visser defines her “subject matter” as the “history, anthropology and mythology of everyday life.” In such incisive studies of culinary manners and mores as Much Depends Upon Dinner, The Rituals of Dinner, and The Way We Are, all influential best-sellers, she has analyzed a range of topics, from the history of corn to the distinction between chopsticks and Western cutlery, from the dislike of offal to the legend of the Easter bunny. She divides her time between Toronto, Paris, and the southwest of France, but also taught classics for nearly two decades at York University.
from The Rituals of Dinner: Chopsticks
THE ULTIMATELY RESTRICTED—and therefore it may be thought the ultimately delicate—manner of eating with one’s hands is to use the thumb and two fingers of the right hand, only the tips of these ideally being allowed to touch the food. This gesture, refined even more by artificially elongating the fingers and further reducing their number, is of course the origin of chopsticks. Once people become accustomed to fingers remaining clean throughout the meal, napkins used for serious cleansing seem not only redundant but down-right nasty. Father João Rodrigues observed in the seventeenth century that the Japanese were “much amazed at our eating with the hands and wiping them on napkins, which then remain covered with food stains, and this causes them both nausea and disgust.” Napkins laid on knees are still an “ethnic,” Western affectation in China and Japan. There is, however, a tradition of supplying diners several times during the meal with small rough towels wrung out in boiling water, for hand- and face-wiping.
Chopsticks seem to have evolved in the East specifically for use with rice: the staple grain in China was originally millet, which the Li Chi insists must be eaten with a spoon, not with chopsticks like rice. Chinese rice is not loose and dry like that chosen by Indians, Arabs, and Africans, who prefer eating it with their hands, but sticky and slightly moist even without sauce; it is easily handled with chopsticks. The earliest word for chopsticks seems to have been zĭ, related to the root meaning, “help.” This is pronounced, however, like the word for “stop,” or “becalm” used of boats. Chinese boatmen are said to have renamed them kuaì-zĭ,” which sounds like “fast fellows,” because Chinese think of chopsticks as swift and agile, the very opposite of halting and being becalmed. This is now their Chinese name; “chopsticks” is of course a Western barbarism. In Japanese, chopsticks are called bashi, “bridge,” because they effect the transition from bowl to mouth.
Chopsticks are thought of as fast, then, and helpful. Meals in China often surprise visitors by the speed with which they are eaten; chopsticks enable the Chinese and Japanese to eat food which is sizzling hot, but because it is often served in small pieces it gets cold if people dawdle. Chopstick-users remain more likely than we are to use their hands as aids in eating—but it is not at all advisable to get them greasy: chopsticks, and especially the lacquered chopsticks common in Japan and Korea, are extremely difficult to manage with slippery fingers. Porcelain spoons are used for soups and the more liquid dishes; children are allowed to use spoons for everything until they are about three or four years old, when chopstick training begins.
Chinese tables are round or square rather than oval or oblong: diners sit equidistant from the dishes of cài (meat, fish, and vegetables), all set out in one “course,” in the middle. Each diner gets a small bowl for fàn, literally, “food,” meaning rice. The rice is the substance of the meal; the cài is merely relish, unless the occasion is a banquet. The host, or the mother, doles out the rice into the bowls. Each guest must take the filled bowl in two hands: receiving in one hand shows disrespectful indifference. You never eat cài before being served rice, because that looks as though you are so greedy and selfish that you would be prepared to eat nothing but meat and vegetables, which are the expensive part of the meal, centrally placed in order to be shared with others.
When the host gives the sign, you may begin to take cài with your chopsticks. The gestures used by Chinese, Japanese, and others to do this are fascinating for Westerners. They look accomplished, delicate, precise, and gentle—much more polished than our own behaviour at meals. Roland Barthes in Empire of Signs speaks eulogies on the Japanese manipulation of chopsticks: “there is something maternal, the same precisely measured care taken in moving a child . . . the instrument never pierces, cuts, or slits, never wounds but only selects, turns, shifts. For the chopsticks . . . in order to divide, must separate, part, peck, instead of cutting and piercing, in the manner of our implements; they never violate the foodstuff; either they gradually unravel it (in the case of vegetables) or else prod it into separate pieces (in the case of fish, eels) thereby rediscovering the natural fissures of the substance.”
A Westerner feels like a brute butcher before this Oriental delicacy. Barthes says that we are “armed with pikes and knives” like predators rather than gentle mothers, our food “a prey to which one does violence.” B.Y. Chao tells us that the Chinese are aware in themselves of a sequence of commands: “Await, avoid, attack!” You must pause, think of others, consider which piece you want, then zero in on it. You may have to stretch across the path of another’s chopsticks—though Chinese, too, try to restrict themselves to taking from the side of the dish more or less facing them; fellow diners cooperate with each other and are not greatly offended by another’s “attack.” You should never look too intent on obtaining a particular morsel, however. Chinese children are taught that “the best mannered person does not allow co-diners to be aware of what his or her favorite dishes are by his or her eating pattern.”
It is politer to transfer food first to your rice bowl, and eat it from there, than to take it directly from the cài dish to your mouth. Chopsticks must never be licked or bitten. Japanese bad manners include neburi-bashi: licking chopsticks with the tongue; mogi-kui: using your mouth to remove rice sticking to your chopsticks; komi-bashi: forcing several things into your mouth with your chopsticks; utsuri-bashi: one must not break the rule that a mouthful of rice is to be taken between every two bites of meat, fish, or vegetables; saguri-bashi: searching with chopsticks to see if anything you want remains in the dish; bashi-namari: hesitation whether to take one thing rather than another; and sora-bashi: putting back with the chopsticks food you intended to eat.
Mannerly diners with chopsticks never “fish about” for morsels; they must take the bit they touch first. This means that one begins by eyeing one’s target carefully: if you prod it, you must take and eat it. Using chopsticks need in no way mean that people eat food touched by implements which have been in other people’s mouths. Yet a very Western distaste for even the thought of touching the food of all with the utensils of each has spread. In 1984, Hu Yaobang, the former Communist Party Secretary, criticized the traditional Chinese way of eating and urged change on sanitary grounds. A good deal of such concern must in fact be a desire to participate in Western prestige as being somehow more ineffably “modern.” The admiration of people like Roland Barthes for superior Oriental wisdom seems to be less satisfying than the allure of technological hygiene and “modern” metal instruments. A compromise with “modernity” is the Japanese pre-wrapped, disposable set of wooden chopsticks. But unfortunately there is an ecological price to pay for this, as hundreds of millions of trees are chopped down every year to supply throwaway chopstick wood—in 1987, 20 billion chopsticks were used and discarded in Japan alone.
It has never been acceptable to return bitten morsels of meat, vegetables, or fish to the common dish; but because the bowl of rice is “private territory,” a piece of meat or vegetable may be held in chopsticks and bitten, and the rest put down on the rice in the bowl, to be finished later. One must never, in Japan, stick the chopsticks upright in the rice. This is done only when offerings are made by Buddhist mourners for their dead: standing chopsticks are rather like our own taboos about an empty chair at table.
With perfect propriety one lifts the small china bowl in the left hand and sweeps the contents into the mouth with precise, busy movements of the two sticks together, held in the right. Barthes’s delicate gestures suddenly become swift and purely efficient; the bowl held under the chopsticks is moved dexterously about so as to prevent food spills. We ourselves are surprised to see this done because we are never allowed to lift dishes containing solid food—and we count soup, unless it is in a cup, as “solid food”—to our lips; we gave up doing this when we agreed that formal politeness involves using our cutlery. The Chinese may be thought of as treating the little bowl like a cross between a teacup and a large spoon, with the chopsticks as “helpers.” Table manners always impose difficult restraints: “If you rattle your chopsticks against the bowl,” says a Chinese proverb, “you and your descendants will always be poor.” Whatever happens, however, at an ordinary meal every single grain of rice in one’s bowl must be eaten before dinner is over. Leaving rice is disgusting behaviour, because it shows a lack of knowledge of one’s own appetite in the first place, together with greed for meat and vegetables, and no respect for rice—its culture, its history, and the hard work that has been involved in getting it to the table.
Rice is never to be gripped, lifted, and eaten grain by grain, as Western novices in the art of chopstick-handling find themselves doing with so much frustration and so many complaints. “Picking” at one’s food is very rude, in fact, for Oriental manners, more than our own, demand demonstrations of delight and pleasure in eating, and inept fiddling with one’s chopsticks is apt to be interpreted not merely as a want of competence but as a depressing unwillingness as well. The problem that Westerners experience is often the result of attempts to eat rice with chopsticks from flat plates: the small bowl raised towards the face is far easier to manage with the proper zest. Chinese themselves, given food on a flat plate, prefer to use a porcelain spoon (to stand in for its sister, the bowl). This spoon, like a bowl, has a flat bottom, so that it can be laid down without spilling the contents.
The kind of food we ourselves eat, together with the way we cook and serve it, predisposes us to use knives, forks, and spoons, and our idea of what constitutes a “place setting” also influences our food choices. Oriental food is cut up in the kitchen so that it can be eaten with chopsticks—but also, as Barthes points out, chopsticks came into being because each mouthful is regarded as comestible partly because it is small; being confronted with a large slab of meat on a dish can be a disgusting experience for people from rice-and-chopstick cultures. In addition, rice-growing is a land use which reduces the amount of fuel available, so that meat and vegetables must usually be cooked quickly to save wood. Cutting them up small facilitates stir-frying and other quick-cooking methods.
ONE OF THE world’s foremost experts in the growing field of food history and culture, Montanari teaches medieval history at the University of Bologna and is director of the journal Food & History. Among his book titles are Italian Cuisine: A Cultural History and Food: A Cultural History. He is interested in all aspects of food as a sign of class and identity, whether institutional, cultural, or personal. He is as likely to write about the use of the fork and how it replaced hands as a utensil as he is to discourse on how certain foods became identified with particular holidays, or why other foods became markers of bourgeois aspiration. In the present selection Montanari insists that taste is never arbitrary or subjective, but a product of a specific culture that celebrates and promotes it, a private experience whose origins are inevitably collective and communal, historical and geographical.
from Food Is Culture: Taste Is a Cultural Product
FOOD IS NEITHER good nor bad in the absolute, though we have been taught to recognize it as such. The organ of taste is not the tongue, but the brain, a culturally (and therefore historically) determined organ through which are transmitted and learned the criteria for evaluations. Therefore, these criteria vary in space and in time. What in one epoch is judged positively, in another can change meaning; what in one locale is considered a tasty morsel, in another can be rejected as disgusting. Definitions of taste belong to the cultural heritage of human society. As there are differing tastes and predilections among different peoples and regions of the world, so do tastes and predilections evolve over the course of centuries.
But how can one presume to reconstruct the “taste” in and of food for eras so distant from our own?
The question in reality hearkens back to two distinct meanings of the term taste. One of these is taste understood as flavor, as the individual sensation of the tongue and palate—an experience that is by definition subjective, fleeting, and ineffable. From this point of view the historical experience of food is irretrievably lost. But taste can also mean knowledge (sapere vs. sapore): it is the sensorial assessment of what is good or bad, pleasing or displeasing. And this evaluation, as we have said, begins in the brain before it reaches the palate.
From this perspective, taste is not in fact subjective and incommunicable, but rather collective and eminently communicative. It is a cultural experience transmitted to us from birth, along with other variables that together define the “values” of a society. Jean-Louis Flandrin coined the expression “structures of taste” as suitable for emphasizing the collective and shared “values” of this experience. And it is clear that this second dimension of the problem, which does not coincide with the first but in large measure conditions it, can be investigated historically by examining the memoirs and the archeological finds constituting the traces that every past society has left behind.
Let us take medieval and Renaissance society. What are we able to learn from the documents surrounding the patterns of taste and food consumption from a thousand or even five hundred years ago? What variants stand out in comparison to today?
To a retrospective investigation moving from today in quest of the medieval, it seems suddenly clear that our concept of cuisine and the system of tastes that seem to us so “naturally” preferable are very different from those that for a long time (and not only in the Middle Ages but as recently as two centuries ago) were judged as good and therefore to be sought out.
Today’s Italian and European cuisine has a predominantly analytical character. By that I mean that it tends to differentiate tastes: sweet, salty, bitter, sour, spicy . . . reserving for each of these an autonomous space, either in a specific food or in the sequence of the meal.
Tied to this is the notion that insofar as possible, cuisine must respect the natural flavor of each food component. The quest is for a flavor that is different each time and unique, thanks to its having been maintained as specifically distinct from others. But these simple rules do not constitute a global archetype of an “Ur-cuisine,” always extant and consistent unto itself. These rules are the fruit of a minor revolution that took place in France between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
“Cabbage soup should taste of cabbage, leeks of leek, turnips of turnip,” Nicola de Bonnfons suggested in his Letters to Household Managers (mid-seventeenth century). In appearance it is an innocent enough declaration, disconcerting in its banality, but in fact this notion overturned ways of thinking and eating that had been firmly held for centuries.
Renaissance taste, as well as medieval taste, and going back even further, that of ancient Rome, had indeed developed a model of cuisine based principally on the idea of artifice and on the blending of flavors. Both the preparation of individual foods and their placement within the meal answered to a logic more synthesizing than analytical: to bind together more than to separate. This also corresponded to the rules of dietetic science, which considered a “balanced” food as that which contained in itself all the nutritional qualities, each displayed in turn, rendered by perceptibly distinct flavors. The perfect food was considered that in which all the tastes (therefore all the virtues) would be simultaneously present. Specific to this end, the cook was obliged to alter the products, changing their characteristics in a more or less radical fashion.
A typical example of this culture is the sweet-salty taste dynamic characterizing many of the medieval and Renaissance food preparations. Or take the bittersweet, a mixture of sugar and citrus fruits (thanks to two new products brought to Europe by the Arabs), which reinterpreted and refined the old combination of honey and vinegar already typical of Roman cuisine. These tastes have not completely vanished, however, since even today they can be found in more conservative European culinary traditions, as in the Germanic countries and, more generally, those of eastern Europe.
Think of blueberry jam, the pears and apples used as garnishes for meats, and especially for game: that is medieval cuisine. To remain in Italy, recall products like Cremona mustard (chutney) which blends the sharpness of spices with the sweetness of sugar: that is medieval cuisine. Think of casseroles or timbales of macaroni (a pastry crust filled with a salted dough flavored with sweet spices), traditional in various Italian regions and cities. Think of pepper and sugar in panpepato (pepper bread) and of other Christmas sweets. To wander further afield, think of the sweet and sour in Chinese cooking, of the honey-crusted pigeon in the Moroccan tradition: that too is medieval cuisine. This cuisine of flavor contrasts is a quest for balance, for a zero degree in which the distances between tastes are cancelled out.
This “structure of taste,” strongly correlated with dietetic science, and in some way as well with the philosophy and worldview of each age, has been totally transformed in Europe during the last two centuries—first in France, then in Italy. This structure constitutes the greatest barrier for us to understanding a reality so different from our own.
Another basic characteristic of premodern gastronomy, one that keeps it remote from our own, is the extremely sparing use of fats. The cuisine of half a millennium ago was fundamentally lean. To assemble sauces, the inevitable accompaniment to meat and fish, one used above all acidic ingredients such as wine, vinegar, citrus juice, and the juice of sour grapes—ingredients to be bound with soft bread crumbs, liver, almond milk, and eggs.
Fatty sauces, based on oil and butter, are far more familiar to our taste. By that I mean mayonnaise, béchamel, and all the gravies typical of nineteenth- and twentieth-century bourgeois cooking. These are modern creations, dating from the seventeenth century, which have profoundly transformed the taste and appearance of foods.
If we want to propose a contemporary parallel to medieval European cooking, I suggest that we look rather at the sauces of Japanese or Southeast Asian cuisines, which are lean and, to be precise, completely without dairy products or oil.
Cooking techniques follow this tendency to superimpose and to blend flavors, rather than to separate and deconstruct them. Boiling, roasting, frying, stewing, brazing, were obviously differing ways of cooking. But they were also, in many cases, different stages of the same cooking process, superimposed or so to speak “cumulative,” like successive phases in the preparation of the same dish. In some cases this might have been to answer practical exigencies: preliminary boiling of meats (a process that remained in use until at least the eighteenth century) also helped to preserve the meats until, with a few finishing touches, they were later worked into more complex dishes. Boiling might also have served to tenderize meats. But, like all gastronomic choices, it all ultimately came down to a matter of taste: by combining various cooking techniques, one could obtain particular flavors and special textures.
One element that was very well known to ancient and medieval sensibilities, so much more accustomed to a tactile relationship with foods than our own, lay both in the gustatory approach and in the physical relationship to foods directly handled (literally) without intermediaries, thus reducing to a minimum the use of cutlery. Only the spoon was really necessary—for liquid foods.
The fork appeared either as a form of extreme (and long controversial) refinement of the habits of social etiquette, or as a sheer necessity when approaching foods like piping hot and slippery pasta, which were difficult to manage with the hands. It is no accident that the development of the fork first took place in Italy rather than elsewhere, because it was above all in Italy, and as early as the final centuries of the Middle Ages, that the culture of pasta took on a prominence unknown elsewhere. But for meat-based foods, even well into the modern era, the use of the fork continued to seem unnatural and hygienically debatable.
Finally, our relationship to food was radically transformed by the spread toward mid-nineteenth century of the so-called service à la russe. This was the custom of serving guests a succession of courses preselected and the same for all. “Service à la russe” is the norm today and seems to us somehow obvious.
The model adhered to until then was quite different, rather more like what we still find today in China, in Japan, and in other countries of the world. Courses are served on the table simultaneously, and it was up to each guest to choose his food and to sequence dishes according to his own taste. In simple meals there would be one dish; in more complex and prestigious meals, a series of hot (kitchen-prepared) dishes or a cold (buffet) succession of dishes, the number depending on the lavishness of the banquet. In any case it was up to individual dinner guests to choose according to their own pleasure and their own need—two notions that, as we have seen, premodern dietetic science tended to bring together, interpreting desire as revealing a physiological need.
Felipe Fernández-Armesto (1950–)
A BRITISH-BORN HISTORIAN who has taught at numerous universities in Europe and the Americas, Fernández-Armesto has also written a history of food, titled Near a Thousand Tables, from which our excerpt is taken. His book focuses on the major revolutions in history that change the way humans came to regard food, including the origins of cooking, the inception of herding, the invention of agriculture, and the industrial revolution. Our selection centers on the way a particular consumption of food may be understood as ritual and magic, namely cannibalism. Fernandez-Armesto’s account barely touches on the dire circumstances with which we often associate such practices—the horrors of the Donner Party expedition, for example, or those of the survivors of a plane crash in the Andes; rather, he discusses the apparently joyful banqueting on humans reported in early modern travel writings up to accounts as late as the early nineteenth century. His most controversial claim may be that since cannibalism is regarded by its devotees as a way to acquire bodily health, it paradoxically has something in common with veganism!
from Near a Thousand Tables:
The Logic of Cannibalism
Cannibalism is a problem. In many cases the practice is rooted in ritual and superstition rather than gastronomy, but not always. A French Dominican in the seventeenth century observed that the Caribs had most decided notions of the relative merits of their enemies. As one would expect, the French were delicious, by far the best. This is no surprise, even allowing for nationalism. The English came next, I’m glad to say. The Dutch were dull and stodgy and the Spaniards so stringy, they were hardly a meal at all, even boiled. All this sounds sadly like gluttony.
—PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR
IT WAS OFFICIAL. The anthropophagi, humans who fed on human flesh, really existed. Long fabled, and long supported by hearsay, they were now reported as fact, backed by an incontrovertible weight of eyewitness corroboration from virtually the entire crew of Columbus’s second transatlantic expedition. The shipboard physician wrote home with an account of Arawak prisoners, liberated from the man-eaters’ power on the island now known as Guadeloupe.
We inquired of the women who were prisoners of the inhabitants what sort of people these islanders were and they answered, “Caribs.” As soon as they learned that we abhor such kind of people because of their evil practice of eating human flesh they felt delighted. . . . They told us that the Carib men use them with such cruelty as would scarcely be believed; and that they eat the children which they bear them, only bringing up those whom they have by their native wives. Such of their male enemies as they can take away alive they bring here to their homes to make a feast of them and those who are killed in battle they eat up after the fighting is over. They declare that the flesh of man is so good to eat that nothing can compare with it in the world; and this is quite evident, for of the human bones we found in the houses, everything that could be gnawed had already been gnawed so that nothing remained but what was too tough to eat. In one of the houses we found a man’s neck cooking in a pot. . . . When the Caribs take away boys as prisoners of war they remove their sexual organs, fatten them until they grow up and then, when they wish to make a great feast, they kill and eat them, for they say the flesh of women and youngsters is not good to eat. Three boys thus mutilated came fleeing to us when we visited the houses.
On his previous voyage, Columbus had misheard the Arawak word “Cariba,” and rendered it “Caniba.” The terms “cannibal” and “Caribbean” both derive from the same name.
Many similar accounts followed and as European exploration spread, reports of cannibalism multiplied. The cannibals encountered by Odysseus or reported by Herodotus, Aristotle, Strabo and Pliny gained credibility with each new find. The “Renaissance Discovery of Man” included the discovery of man as man-eater. The earliest editions of Vespucci’s Voyages were illustrated with woodcuts of cannibal barbecues. The Aztecs, according to a sympathetic observer, who made strenuous efforts to gather his information at first hand, had feasts specially supplied with slaves purchased for the purpose and fattened “so that their flesh should be tastier.” The bellies of the Chichimeca were a “sepulchre of human flesh.” The Tupinamba were said to consume their enemies “down to the last fingernail.” Hans Staden’s account of his captivity among them in the 1550s was a best-selling spine-chiller and cliff-hanger because of the way the author’s own immolation at a cannibal feast kept getting postponed. His description of the cannibal ritual was menacingly memorable. The victim had to endure the women’s boasts and tend the fire on which he was to cook. He was slaughtered by a blow which dashed out his brains. Then the women
scrape his skin thoroughly and make him quite white and stop up his arse with a bit of wood so that nothing may be lost. Then a man . . . cuts off the arms and the legs above the knee. Then four women carry away the severed pieces and run with them round the huts with shouts of joy. . . . The entrails are kept by the women who boil them and make a thick broth called “mingau.” This they and the children drink. They devour the bowels and the flesh from the head. The brains, tongue and whatever else is edible is given to the children. When this is done all go home, taking their share with them. . . . I was there and have seen all this with my own eyes.
Toward the end of the century, scenes of human limbs butchered for the grill, or of cannibal women supping blood and biting entrails, enlivened many of Theodore De Bry’s popular engravings of scenes from American travels. The seventeenth century produced little that was new in the tradition, for the horror was familiar and no major new cannibal peoples or customs came to light. Eighteenth-century Europeans, however, found their fascination revived, as more cannibals were encountered and philosophy strove to reconcile the practice with the emerging theory of the nobility of savagery. Even in the highly civilized Christian empire of Ethiopia, Europeans imagined specialist vendors of human butcher meat. In the Indian wars of eighteenth-century North America, a soldier of the Massachusetts militia was alarmed to discover that his adversaries roasted their enemies bit by bit “at a most doleful rate.” The greatest concentration of new cases arose during the exploration of the South Seas by ever more ambitious voyages. Melanesian cannibalism, of which many stories accumulated in the eighteenth century, seemed more practical than most: no edible organ of a captive foe was untasted, and the bones made good needles for sewing sailcloth. When Captain Cook first met Maoris, they mimed how to pick clean a human bone. His account was doubted by skeptics in Europe, but confirmed at the cost of captives’ lives. Fijian cannibalism, in accounts made familiar in Europe by missionaries’ reports in the early nineteenth century, seemed to exceed all previously known cases in depravity because of the scale on which it was reported and the routine nature of cannibal repasts, bereft of any culturally extenuating context, “not indulged in from a species of horrid revenge,” as Methodists averred in 1836, “but from an absolute preference for human flesh over other food.”
Taken one by one, the veracity of all these reports was open to question. Cannibalism can be a useful source of the comfortable horrors which boost sales of an otherwise boring travelogue. In the late Middle Ages and, with diminishing force, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was an extremely useful attribute to ascribe to one’s enemies; for cannibalism, like buggery and blasphemy, was classed as an offense against natural law. Those who committed it put themselves beyond the law’s protection. With impunity, Europeans could attack them, enslave them, forcibly subject them and sequester property from them. Sometimes, the “man-eating myth” was a reciprocal fantasy: white enquirers were surprised to find themselves suspected of cannibalism by “natives” who also regarded it with horror. Raleigh in Guiana was mistaken for a cannibal by his Arawak hosts. The Mani of the Gambia supposed that the apparently insatiable Portuguese demand for slaves was caused by their inordinate anthropophagous appetites. When George Vancouver entertained inhabitants of Dalco Passage to dinner in 1792, they refused his venison on the suspicion that it was human flesh. The Ku Waru of highland New Guinea assumed that their Australian “discoverers” were “people who eat other people. They must have come around here in order to kill us and eat us. People said not to go walking around at night.” Allegations of cannibalism should be discounted like any other crime statistic: some of them must be supposed to have been invented and others to have gained horror in the telling.
Nevertheless, the numbers of well-authenticated cases put the general question beyond a peradventure. Cannibalism existed. The reality of cannibalism as a social practice is not in any genuine doubt. To judge from archaeological evidence, moreover, it has been extremely widespread: human bones snapped for marrow seem to lie under the stones of every civilization. And as the tally of observed cases grew, the assumption that cannibalism was an inherently aberrant activity, abnormal or unnatural, became ever harder to sustain.
Of course, many stories concerned rogue cases which have arisen in Western society contrary to the accepted norms: what might be called “criminal” cannibalism, practiced with a conscious commitment to outrage. Here “Demon” barbers double as pie-men. Maniacal tyrants, seeking exquisite extremes of sadism, serve enemies at table with concoctions of the flesh and blood of their wives and children. There are even practitioners of cannibalism for kicks: individuals who get intellectual pleasure from transgressing convention, perverts who get sexual thrills from ingesting flesh. The most bizarre and ghoulish story is of the Rocky Mountain prospector who called himself “Alferd” Packer. In a notorious case in 1874, he split his companions’ skulls open while they slept—except for one whom he shot in the back—before robbing their corpses and feeding on their remains: after eighteen years’ imprisonment, he was released into a changed world, where he was welcome as a curiosity and even honored as “an old mountaineer.” Pilgrims still visit his grave and, with a kind of irony which some find appetizing, the Alferd Packer Memorial Grill at the University of Colorado in Boulder is named after him. Hannibal Lecter has other real-life predecessors, including “Liver-eating Johnson,” who targeted Crow Indians in revenge for the murder of his wife in 1847, and Isse Sagawa, “the cannibal of the Bois de Boulogne,” who disposed of an unwanted girlfriend by eating her in 1981. In 1991 in Milwaukee, Jeffrey Dahmer, whose tastes comprised gay necrophilia and sadism as well as cannibalism, had a fridge full of human body parts when the police came to call.
Even in the modern history of the Western world, a form of social cannibalism has been recognized, practiced and, for a long time, licensed in law. In the extremities of siege or retreat, the quick feed off the dead. Not infrequently, living victims of shipwrecks and air crashes stay alive on the strength of dead comrades’ flesh and sometimes end up, in extremis, drawing lots to sacrifice their lives to their comrades’ hunger. In the early modern era, the age of long and perilous sea journeys under sail, survival cannibalism became a “socially accepted practice among seamen,” the “custom of the sea.” In 1710, for instance, survivors of the wreck of the Nottingham Galley turned “fierce and barbarous” after nourishing themselves from the corpse of the dead ship’s carpenter. Further cases were reported at intervals during the nineteenth century. Géricault included scenes of cannibalism in sketches for the most famous of all images of nautical disaster, The Raft of the Medusa, though in this instance the evidence was not conclusive. Fiction strove to exceed fact. Captain Ahab’s obsession with Moby Dick was motivated by memories of the demoralizing experiences which followed the lash of the whale’s tail: his story was based on the real-life saga of the wreck of the Essex, whose men drew lots to determine the order in which they ate each other after a similar incident in 1820. In 1835 the homonymous captain of the capsized Francis Spaight was rescued, allegedly “in the act of eating the liver and brains of his apprentice.” In 1874 a boat from the abandoned collier Euxine was rescued in the Indian Ocean, with the remains of the butchered carcass of a crewman in its locker. Conrad’s sinister hero Falk had plenty of real-life counter-parts. In 1884 “the custom of the sea” was at last outlawed when two survivors of the foundering of the yacht Mignonette were sentenced, to their genuine surprise, for killing a shipmate for food during twenty-four days without succor in an open boat.
The custom of the sea had its landward parallels, though conventional morality has never been unequivocal about it. In 1752, for instance, a party of deserters from the colonial militia fled New York for French territory; lost on the way, they ran out of provisions. Four or five of them were eaten by the others. In 1823, Alexander Pearce, a convict in Tasmania, admitted killing a comrade for food, not to survive but to satisfy an appetite acquired during an earlier attempted escape, when he alone of eight companions returned alive from the bush. Apart from depraved cases like Alferd Packer’s, practical or opportunistic cannibalism accounted for many dead among lost miners and wagoners of the North American frontier in the nineteenth century, satirized by Mark Twain’s story of respectable passengers’ recourse to cannibalism in a delayed railway journey between St. Louis and Chicago. The most recent recorded instance of this sort occurred in 1972, when an aircraft carrying the Old Christians rugby team from Uruguay crashed in the Andes. The survivors stayed alive by eating those who died.
It has never been enough simply to assert that “eating people is wrong.” Being “contrary to nature” does not seem a strong enough sanction when people are really hungry. Any more than sanctions against homosexuality on board ship (or in prison) or onanism when alone . . . and no one ever died from a lack of sex. If it seems abnormal to some, it represents normalcy for others. Cannibalism has always had apologists. Sometimes, as in the case of defenders of the custom of the sea, they appeal to necessity: in other words, they explain cannibalism by representing human flesh as a source of food, ultimately morally indistinguishable from other food sources. In other contexts, the defense is based on cultural relativism and the recognition that, in some cultures, human flesh is more than food: its consumption is justified not because it sustains individual lives, but because it nourishes the community, invokes the gods or harnesses magic.
In the early modern period, when Western thought was obliged to come to terms with social cannibalism, reformers intent on saving “primitives” from exploitation and victimization produced ingenious defenses. Bartolomé de Las Casas, who plagued the conquerors of the New World with denunciations of their injustice, argued that cannibalism was merely a phase of development which virtually all societies went through: he cited convincing evidence of it in the remote past of Greece, Carthage, England, Germany, Ireland and Spain. Jean de Léry, who survived captivity among cannibals in Brazil, thought their sensibilities would be offended to hear of the massacre of St. Bartholomew. Montaigne’s essay On Cannibals is often cited as an example of how Western self-perceptions were revolutionized by the cultural encounters of the conquest of America and the “Renaissance Discovery of Man.” He suggested that the morality of cannibalism was no worse than the cant which enabled Europeans to butcher one another with every conviction of self-righteousness, despite the advantages of Christian education and philosophical tradition. The tortures and burnings which confessional foes inflicted on one another in France “ate men alive” and “I consider it more barbarous to eat a man alive than dead. . . . We are justified in calling these people barbarians by reference to the laws of reason but not in comparison with ourselves, who surpass them in every kind of barbarity.” Robinson Crusoe was able to purge Friday of his cannibalism by kindness. His first impulse was to shoot any cannibal he encountered for “inhuman, hellish brutality” but reflection made him realize that “these people do not commit this as a crime; it is not against their own conscience’s reproving, or their light reproaching them. . . . They think it no more a crime . . . to eat human flesh than we do to eat mutton.”
As knowledge of cannibalism grows, the problems it poses seem increasingly acute. The really interesting question concerns not the reality or even the morality of cannibalism, but its purpose. Is it part of the histoire de l’alimentation—a feeding practice designed to supply eaters with protein? Or does it belong to the history of food, as presented in this chapter—a ritual practiced not for a meal but for its meaning, nourishment for more than material effect? The literature on the subject is vast. But though a practical line through it leads to a secure conclusion that cannibals may and sometimes do eat people for simple bodily nourishment—that is not why cannibal practices become enshrined in some cultures. Most cases concern other aims: self-transformation, the appropriation of power, the ritualization of the eater’s relationship with the eaten. This puts human flesh on the same level as many other foods which we eat not because we need them to stay alive but because we want them to change us for the better: we want them to give us a share of their virtue. In particular, it aligns the cannibals with their real modern counterparts: those who eat “health” diets for self-improvement or worldly success or moral superiority or enhanced beauty or personal purity. Strangely, cannibals turn out to have a lot in common with vegans. The tradition which links them is the subject of this chapter.
In New Guinea, many former cannibals—and some practicing ones—still alive with memories of their raids and feasts, tell anthropologists that their enemies are “their game.” In 1971 a court exonerated Gabusi tribesmen who had eaten the corpse of a neighboring villager on the grounds that it was normal practice in their culture. The fact that cannibalism can be socially functional may coexist with the exploitation of human flesh for food. “Famine cannibalism” is still—or was until recently—a regular feature of life in the islands of the Massim near New Guinea and of some other societies of Southeast Asia and the Pacific. But most peoples who tell ethnographic enquirers that they eat their enemies “for food” seem to have concealed the symbolic and ritual logic underlying the act, like the Papuan Orokaiva, for whom it is a means of “capturing spirits” in compensation for lost warriors. There were no obvious ritual features in the cannibal meals of the Onabasulu: the meat was prepared in the same way as for pig or game, except that intestines were discarded; but they ate no fellow humans except witches—an instance of discrimination which suggests that some other motive than protein acquisition was at work. The Hua of New Guinea eat their own dead to conserve nu, the vital fluids that they believe to be nonrenewable in nature.
The women of the Gimi of the Papuan highlands used to eat their dead men-folk. The practice continued until the 1960s and is still reenacted in mime with dummy corpses. Their explanation recalls the famous story of Alexander and the sages, who ate their honored dead out of respect. “We would not have left a man to rot!” protest the women. “We took pity on him!” “Come to me, so you shall not rot on the ground. Let your body dissolve inside me!” More is at stake in the ritual, however, than the decorous disposal of corpses, or the macabre recollection of sex. According to one theory, this is a classic case of protein substitution: as men have progressively monopolized the diminishing resources of the forests, women supplemented their diet by eating men. Yet, as part of the ritual, men distribute pork rations to the women in proportion to the amount of male flesh consumed. So the men seem to acknowledge the women’s generosity: if they had wished to assuage their hunger, they could simply have handed over the pork without inviting the cannibalism. The cannibal feast takes place only after four or five days of collective grieving. It takes place in the men’s house, where, in normal circumstances, women are excluded, and where, during the feast, the women are treated as men. The symbolic meaning of the meal therefore seems connected with the fact that women can encompass and include masculinity by bearing a male child: the immolation of dead men in women’s bodies is a restoration to the womb, a magical guarantee of the cycle of fertility.
Normally—where it is normal—cannibalism occurs in the context of war. This is not like hunting for food: rather, it is a clash of rival predators. Cannibalism is not usually lightly undertaken even by its most enthusiastic practitioners; and the parts of the victims consumed at cannibal meals are often highly selective and sometimes confined to token morsels, most frequently the heart. The whole business tends to be highly ritualized. Among the Aztecs, ingesting the flesh of a captive in war was a way of possessing his prowess: in a complementary gesture, the captor also donned his victim’s flayed skin, with the hands flapping at his wrists like trinkets. Even in Fiji before the coming of Christianity, when cannibalism was practiced on a scale which suggests that some people—the chiefly and warrior elites—were getting a useful dietary supplement from human flesh, the surviving bones are always marked by signs of torture and sacrifice: this distinguishes them from the remains of other animal foods, killed cleanly for speed and efficiency. A visitor in 1847 was told that Chief Ra Udreurdre of the Rakiraki district placed a stone to record each body he ate: there were nine hundred stones. But the very fact that cannibal meals were worthy of such spectacular special commemoration puts them in a category apart from that of ordinary eating. Human meat was the gods’ food and cannibalism a form of divine communion. Cannibalism makes sense as part of a pattern of “metaphors symbolizing dominance.” Alternatively, it is part of a “mythical charter of society” sustained, again in Fiji, by “an elaborate cycle of exchange of raw women for cooked men.”
Cannibals and their critics have always agreed about one thing. Cannibalism is not neutral: it affects the eater. Critics claim the effect is depraving, as on Sinbad’s companions who began “to act like gluttonous maniacs” as soon as they tasted cannibal food and “after a few hours of guzzling” became “little better than savages.” Cannibals, on the other hand, find it a means of self-improvement. In cannibal logic, cannibalism is a conspicuous instance of a universal fact: food reinterpreted as more than bodily sustenance—the replacement of nutrition by symbolic value or magic power as a reason for eating: the discovery that food has meaning. After cooking, this is, perhaps, the second great revolution in the history of food: second in importance, though, for all we know, its origins may even be more ancient than those of cooking. No people, however hungry, has escaped its effects, for there is now no society which merely eats to live. Everywhere, eating is a culturally transforming—sometimes a magically transforming—act. It has its own alchemy. It transmutes individuals into society and sickness into health. It changes personalities. It can sacralize apparently secular acts. It functions like ritual. It becomes ritual. It can make food divine or diabolic. It can release power. It can create bonds. It can signify revenge or love. It can proclaim identity. A change as revolutionary as any in the history of our species happened when eating stopped being merely practical and became ritual, too. From cannibals to homeopathists and health foodies, eaters target foods which they think will burnish their characters, extend their powers, prolong their lives.
A WELL-RECEIVED POET, short story writer, nature essayist, and memoirist, Gonzalez frequently writes about the difficulties he felt growing up as a Chicano in the Southwest and his discovery of Mexican-American literature. In this passage from Memory Fever, his collection of autobiographical vignettes about his early life in Texas, Gonzalez celebrates menudo, the great Mexican soup made with tripe (honeycombed beef stomach), and flavored with lime, cilantro, oregano, chili peppers, hominy, and, in some variants, with pig’s feet. Gonzalez speaks of this dish with reverence, and its designation as “Mama Menudo” is a nod to maternal comfort and something akin to worship, since the soup provides salvation for both his soul and his stomach.
from Memory Fever: Mama Menudo
“¡MENUDO! ¡MAMA MENUDO!” You must go to La Paloma Café and wave your pained face over a big steaming bowl of hot, quivering chunks of menudo. It is an emergency. Your soul calls for it, prays to it, waits for the red spirit of the Menudo God to bless you and save you from the big mescal death.
You know menudo is the greatest thing anyone has ever sunk his teeth into. Nothing else comes close. Nothing else forces you to get into your car to drive a couple of miles down Paisano Street on a day when everyone else is in church praying. They listen to the Padre whose church sells menudo in the dining hall after la misa. Los señores y señoras, sus hijos, los vatos—they all pray first before thinking of eating menudo.
Not you. Your stomach moves like a dying river, a settling of flowing juices needing fresh slices of cow tripe to rise again and be reborn, putting life back into your existence, the magical source of survival in the desert.
Paisano Street is a wide, empty road of newspapers, trash, old tires, and dust. It is nearly empty of traffic, a Sunday morning in south El Paso looking like an abandoned movie lot, cardboard buildings warping in the heat, the parking lot behind La Paloma stinking of dog shit, half a dozen empty bottles of Carta Blanca reminding you of last night, the mescal and the limes.
You enter La Paloma because Mama Menudo is waiting, the sweet smell of a Mexican restaurant dampening your head. You are glad to see the place is nearly empty. The only other customer is an old Mexican sitting heavily at the counter, his huge body pressing into the stool, a bright cloud of steam rising from the bowl of menudo he hugs with thick hands.
You don’t care that your favorite booth has a new tear in the old vinyl seat. None of the springs have popped through yet. It is the right place to sit.
Sylvia, the young waitress, knows what you want. She spots the menudo gleam in your red eyes and smiles beautifully at you. “¿Café y un plato de menudo?”
“Si, por favor.” You smile back, the smell of sizzling chorizo and fresh tortillas sprinkling through your nose, preparing you for the taking of the holy food, a transcendence you have tried to describe to your friends—a state of menudo mind you share with your family, and with only a few converted friends.
Sylvia takes your order and you wait, this period very important, a silent oath of patience calming your heart to ease the hangover. The old man is hunched over his bowl. John F. Kennedy smiles at you from his portrait above the door. The painting of a pigeon, la paloma, reflects over the long mirror that stretches the length of the café.
Sylvia brings the silverware and the revolving cup holder, each container holding the magic ingredients that are part of the ceremony. You look into the cup of freshly cut onion, glad to see it is as full as the cups of oregano, chili piquin, and lemon slices. You set it on the right side of the table, the place it must always be. As you spread your arms over the table, Sylvia comes out on cue with the smoking bowl of menudo.
You hear the bells of the church ring down the street as she sets the offering before you. “Gracias.” She leaves the bowl to steam into your eyes, knows you must eat alone, and quickly pours the coffee. You wait for her to leave.
The ritual begins. Two spoons of oregano flake into the bowl. The menudo is finely cut this morning, thin square strips floating among the posole. The soup is a dark red. You know it is a message from Mama that this mixture comes from a hot chili. Two spoons of chili piquin follow spoons of onion bits. The thing looks like a collage of chili, meat fat, jello, and black and green grains that emerge from the oregano. An innocent, ignorant person would say it looks like dog vomit and leftover cooking grease! But you love it and that person will never know the meaning of life, never understand why eating Mama Menudo is wild ecstasy and greedy pleasure—and most of all—it saves your life!
You slurp it like an anteater slurps ants, like a vacuum cleaner slurps dirt, like a monkey eats a banana, like a man slurps himself into sleep to wake up in search of his mama. Your right hand boasts of great skill. It digs spoonfuls of menudo straight into your mouth. The stuff is hot. You sigh as the chunks burn your tongue on their way down your throat. It does not take long. It never can. No one takes his time eating menudo. It is a creation of consumption, a snortling and grinding of the senses. The chili makes your eyes water, your ears pop, and it magically takes away the hangover. Your pupils blossom awake. Your heart beats proudly into the world. Your stomach flips awake like a dog that spots a cat and sprints for it!
It vanishes in a final gulp. A thin film of red grease that looks like blood glitters over the inside of the empty bowl. You touched the coffee only twice. You came up for air once. Your nose runs. You are safe and happy. Something moves inside you. You sit still for a few moments, arms resting quietly on the table. A huge burp tries to leap out of you. You hiss it through your teeth. Sylvia appears a final time to see that everything has fallen into place. At the cash register, you pay the dollar fifty. As she counts the change, you pull your pants higher at the waist and see the old man waddle toward you, his ancient body having accepted grace from Mama Menudo as boldly as you have.
Sylvia gives you the change. As you tip her, the old man stands behind you to pay. You turn to say “Buenos dias,” and your eyes are filled with the color he wears on his gray shirt, the red badge of courage. A couple of menudo stains shine on his chest and chin.
“Yes,” you cry in your heart, “this man knows.” He is one of Mama Menudo’s lost sons who has returned. You wait in the morning sun for the old man to step out of La Paloma. Standing by your car, you watch him move slowly down the sidewalk. He pauses at the corner, turns around to face you. He raises his right arm slowly and points a friendly finger at you. He smiles and crosses the street as you climb into your car. Before starting the engine, you look down at your T-shirt. It is a clean white, not a single drop on it. You look at the doorway of La Paloma and something moves in your stomach, tells you to come back to reclaim the red badge of menudo stain and wear it on your chest.
RAISED IN BOTH San Antonio, Texas, and Jerusalem, the poet, novelist, short story writer, and children’s book author Naomi Shihab Nye is the daughter of a Palestinian father and an American mother. Now based in San Antonio, she considers herself “a wandering poet,” though she has also been celebrated as an important poet of the Southwest. In her many volumes of prose and verse, she has written vividly of her Arab-American heritage, often examining (as she does in “Arabic Coffee”) the ways in which “our own ancestry sift[s] down to us through small, essential daily tasks.”
It was never too strong for us:
make it blacker, Papa,
thick in the bottom,
tell again how the years will gather
in small white cups,
how luck lives in a spot of grounds.
Leaning over the stove, he let it
boil to the top, and down again.
Two times. No sugar in his pot.
And the place where men and women
break off from one another
was not present in that room.
The hundred disappointments,
fire swallowing olive-wood beads
at the warehouse, and the dreams
tucked like pocket handkerchiefs
into each day, took their places
on the table, near the half-empty
dish of corn. And none was
more important than the others,
and all were guests. When
he carried the tray into the room,
high and balanced in his hands,
it was an offering to all of them,
stay, be seated, follow the talk
wherever it goes. The coffee was
the center of the flower.
Like clothes on a line saying
you will live long enough to wear me,
a motion of faith. There is this,
and there is more.
JOURNALIST AND EDITOR Buford is best known for his first book, Among the Thugs, a sociological analysis of football hooligans in England, and for his second volume, Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany. Apprenticing himself to famed chef Mario Batali as “kitchen bitch” in the New York restaurant Babbo, Buford went behind the culinary scenes to report on the experience of professional cookery and then traveled to Tuscany, where he studied the theory and practice of meat preparation in the shop of Dario Cecchini, a renowned butcher. Perhaps the experiences that went into Heat make its author an especially savvy critic of culinary culture—including the corporate world that shapes the sometimes problematic cooking celebrated by the Food Network, about which he writes so incisively here.
THE FIRST SIGN that I’d been unknowingly affected by cooking shows occurred on a Sunday morning when I realized I was talking to myself. I’d been making toast. “First, we cut our bread,” I whispered. “Do you know why?” I stopped what I was doing and looked up. “Let me tell you why.” It was eight-thirty. It was also Hour 25 of a seventy-two-hour commitment I’d made to watch continuous food television (sleeping only when the shows began repeating at midnight).
I’d begun the venture on a lark, curious about what I’d discover. This, for instance, is what I had learned about the hazelnut: “They grow on hazel trees. . . . They’re super-duper rich.” That was from the Food Network’s Everyday Italian, with Giada De Laurentiis. (The following week, on a show hosted by Sandra Lee, I heard, “Do you know when the first cheesecake was ever documented as being eaten or served? It was in 776, or 776 B.C., by the Greeks at the Olympics. Isn’t that pretty cool? Say that at a dinner party and everyone’s going to think you’re brilliant and well read.”) I don’t want to sound harsh—this wasn’t the History Channel—but, on the evidence, there was a surprisingly strong affinity between preparing food and talking baby talk.
At around Hour 36, a more illuminating sign occurred. It was during a rerun of Bobby Flay’s “Throwdown.” Flay is a veteran food-television personality. “Throwdown” is his seventh show, and it involves Flay’s challenging old hands at their game: making Jamaican jerk chicken with a jerk-chicken diva, say, or taking on Cindy the Chili Queen, whose Cin Chili clearly rocks. Flay is then usually humiliated, and the old hand—Butch the pit master, say, with his secret spice rub—gets pumped beyond reason, the little-guy view of the world is vindicated, and everyone feels good. I set out to prepare some supper, and as I removed a loaf of bread from a paper bag I was struck by an unexpected sound: the dry, crisp noise of the bag being disturbed. I’d never noticed this before. It was loud and crinkly: so utterly brown paper. I shrugged (was it a lack of humidity?) and proceeded to dress a salad, in a bowl next to a candle. I cut up a lemon and squeezed a slice. The fruit, crushed in front of the flickering light, was magically transformed. I squeezed again: juice beaded up and fell in a stream of bright droplets. I squeezed one more time, enjoying what I now regarded as a citrusy translucence, a candle by lemon light. “Veeeeeery pretty!” I said to no one, feeling sixteen and having a late-night-munchies perception moment. I’d been brainwashed, in a fashion, my senses heightened by this long, uninterrupted session of food television. It wasn’t an unpleasant state (apart from the consequences for my salad, now inedible).
I had fallen victim to what is called, by its detractors, “food porn.” Its creators usually refer to it as “making beauties”—as in “Hey, Al, let’s do a beauty of those pecans.” Bob Tuschman, the Food Network’s head of programming, had described the concept when I visited him in his office, above the Chelsea Market, in Manhattan. The point is to get very close to what you are filming, so close that you can see an ingredient’s “pores” (“You should believe the dish is in your living room”), which then triggers some kind of Neanderthal reflex. “If you’re flicking from channel to channel and come upon food that has been shot in this way, you will be hardwired as a human being to stop, look, and bring it back to your cave.”
Earlier in the week, I’d watched that same Al—Al Ligouri—film some of those beauty pecans at one of the Food Network’s studios. Al worked the jib—a high-powered camera at the end of a twelve-foot arm. The pecans, surrounded by five spotlights, were resting on a bent piece of Plexiglas, for a hundred-per-cent reflection (pecans both in a bowl and somehow below it, like mountains on a placid lake), while Al inched closer and closer (“getting tight”). He then manipulated a knob so that some nuts were in focus, while the ones behind, backlit, receded into an arty blur.
Al has shot a lot of food. (“More diced onions than anyone on the planet.”) He is thirty-six and has been behind a food camera for ten years. I’d watched him before, during a taping of Emeril Live, starring Emeril Lagasse, the portly Portuguese baker from Fall River, Massachusetts, who was probably more naturally an evangelist than a natural chef and, after years at the Commander’s Palace, in New Orleans, had been born again as a Creole kitchen crooner. Lagasse was the first to discover that cooking before a bleachers crowd, primed to respond raucously to theatrical additions of garlic or chili flakes or bacon (“Let’s take it up a notch!”), can make for inexplicably compelling television. “The trick,” Al had told me, “is to film during the lunch hour and get close-ups of the audience—they’re crazy with hunger.”
After the pecans, Al shot a cup of milk being measured out. This required three takes and was followed by a “sound pass”—same event, but with a microphone close up to get the acoustic ripples. They would be amplified and edited back into the final version. Milk as waterfall.
“You should talk to Hugh,” Al said, pointing to a burly man with a handheld camera. “Hugh Walsh is the beauty specialist.”
Hugh was filming a carrot. . . .
During a break, I asked [him] what he’d been doing with his camera. It had always been moving (if I hadn’t been studying it, I wouldn’t have noticed): a barely perceptible pan, a slow circle, a gentle back-and-forth.
Hugh was an unlikely beauty specialist: a laconic fifty-one, with what looked like a war reporter’s battered face, a man who seemed to know the world and didn’t much care for it. . . . “I’m trying to get movement.” He paused. He seemed unaccustomed to speech. “It’s not like the old days.”
In America, the old days probably began on a February morning in 1962, when Julia Child, having been asked to promote Mastering the Art of French Cooking on a book show on WGBH, the Boston public TV station, phoned ahead, asking for a hot plate and permission to involve the show’s host, P. Albert Duhamel, a Boston College professor, in a demonstration. The professor couldn’t cook, and, on live television, Child was going to teach him how to make an omelette—a brazen flourish for a novice food writer. Russell Morash, at WGBH, remembers the call, because Child was so unusually well spoken and patrician in manner. It was as though he’d picked up the phone and found Eleanor Roosevelt on the other end. Child was a “hoot,” according to one of the twenty-seven viewers who contacted the station afterward—enough for it to find funding to prepare a three-episode pilot that would eventually become The French Chef. . . .
There had been earlier television cooks—James Beard’s I Love to Cook, Dione Lucas’s To the Queen’s Taste—but they were “experts,” something Child never seemed to be, mainly because what she knew had been learned so recently and so late in life. Child’s culinary education began after she had moved to Paris, at the age of thirty-six, accompanying her husband, Paul Child, a State Department official, and found herself attending the Cordon Bleu. She ended up mastering the national menu, starting a cooking school, and returning to the States with a bulky rough draft that would change the American kitchen. She never lost that new cook’s sense of discovery.
For all the obvious production shortcomings, the show was unlike anything else on television. “You have to remember the early sixties,” Morash recalled. “Broadcasting was a medium of mayhem. Assassinations, war, riots. You turned on your set, that’s what you saw. But if you changed the channel you could watch a soufflé being made.” Child, too, was unlike anything else on television: six-feet-two, virtually hunchbacked, seeming too ungainly for a small screen, with a long, manly face, but one that was also remarkable for its intelligent expressiveness. In it you could see her making connections, finding wonder in the properties of egg whites or the behavior of gelatine, a wonder that was at the heart of what now seems like a natural pedagogical imperative. She made people want to cook, often inspiring them with a single detail. . . .
My seventy-two-hour vigil ended on Monday at midnight, with Rachael Ray’s $40 a Day (go to a city, eat a lot, spend a little, tip cautiously), the fourth Rachael Ray show I’d watched in ten hours. Rachael Ray is probably the most watched kitchen personality in the history of American television. She is available in other guises, too—in a magazine (Every Day with Rachael Ray), as a guide (“Rachael Ray’s Tasty Travels”), and as a morning talk-show host—but her core achievement is 30 Minute Meals, built on the conceit that anyone should be able to cook dinner in the time it takes to watch an episode.
Ray—a likable sales-rep personality, with a me-and-my-mom vocabulary and a smile as instantaneous as a light switch—had been a buyer for Cowan & Lobel, a fancy food store in Albany (previous experience: the candy counter at Macy’s), and had come up with thirty-minute evening cooking classes to help move goods during the holiday season. The classes were popular; she wrote a booklet to accompany them, later picked up by a small publisher, and was promoting it on an Albany call-in show when a media consultant, hearing her on his car radio, called Bob Tuschman, who signed her up. Ray was exactly what he had been looking for. . . .
What [special] quality does Ray have . . . ? It is probably more apparent in the early broadcasts. A series on perfect burgers filmed during Ray’s first year (the Food Network has done two hundred and fourteen shows on how to make a hamburger) includes a characteristic menu: a “no-muss-and-no-fuss” salad, like coleslaw (Ray has thirteen slaw recipes), followed by some meat dish—during my extended viewing, these tended to include bacon and blue cheese (Ray has eighteen blue-cheese recipes, among them a blue-cheese spaghetti, with a sauce, probably unique in the history of pasta, made from bacon fat, butter, olive oil, chicken stock, and cream swirled together, smothered with blue cheese, and then sprinkled with bacon bits: an intensely flavored creation, even if a little alarming to look at—a viscous dull yellow). On this occasion, many of the ingredients, typically, had been prepared at the supermarket and included sealed bags of pre-sliced cabbage, to facilitate getting everything done before the thirty-minute deadline. The coleslaw would be dressed with soy sauce (“It’s kinda like balsamic vinegar is to red-wine vinegar—it’s a little bit thicker”), but not before Ray had turned on a burner to heat an oven-top grill: this was for her “awesome” turkey patties (“Yummy!”). Heating the oven-top grill beforehand was a tip. So, too, was the use of a garbage bowl—kept on the counter to save trips to the trash—for vegetable trimmings. In fact, the garbage-bowl tip was offered three times. In between, you heard about Ray’s mom (“She watches news a lot—maybe too much”) and her baby brother, who had just turned twenty-seven (“which is just not possible”). There was also her dog, her dad, a theory about cabbage and cancer, some giggles—an effortless patter that, for all its lack of weight, was not without a goofy charm.
Today, the patter is no longer so obviously aimless, although Ray still believes that having a garbage bowl, now referred to as a “G.B.,” is a good tip—good enough to repeat it on every show, sometimes twice. “Yummy” is “Yum-o” (a branding “trademark” expression; among Ray’s kitchen products is a “Yum-o” T-shirt), “delicious” has become “de-lish,” and her ingredients are often personified, addressed in some form of the third-person butch: a red pepper is a “buddy,” meatballs are “guys,” a sandwich is “Sammy.” “What makes Rachael Ray so exciting to people,” Tuschman told me, “is that she speaks their language, shops at the same places they shop, and uses the same ingredients.” Ray wants to be just like us.
The two essential premises of 30 Minute Meals—no one knows how to cook and everyone is in a hurry—now inform most instructional cooking shows. If you have time to watch a Saturday morning of the Food Network, you will learn that you have time for nothing else. There’s urgency even in the names—“Good Food Fast,” “Quick Fix Meals,” “Semi-Homemade Cooking,” “Easy Entertaining,” “Good Deal”—and a reassuring friendliness in the ingredients, which, like Rachael’s, so uniformly come out of the fridge sealed in plastic wrap that it is impossible not to suspect an executive order. You don’t have to know how to cook, just how to shop; and everyone knows how to shop. The appeal of squash is that it’s a limited time investment, Robin Miller says on Quick Fix Meals, illustrating how to prepare one in under fifteen minutes. Sandra Lee recommends pre-peeled carrots—the ones sold by Dole. (Who has the time to peel carrots?) In the supermarket, you can get your melon already cut up—it’s over there by the salad bar. Near the meat section, Dave Lieberman tells us on Good Deal, you can buy an already cooked rotisserie chicken. (Who knows how to cook one, anyway?)
I found myself taking stock not of what I’d seen during the preceding seventy-two hours but of what I hadn’t. I couldn’t recall very many potatoes with dirt on them, or beets with ragged greens, or carrots with soil in their creases, or pieces of meat remotely reminiscent of the animals they were butchered from—hardly anything, it seemed, from the planet Earth. There were hamburgers and bacon, but scarcely any other red animal tissue except skirt steak, probably, it occurs to me now, because of its two unique qualities: its texture and its name. It cooks fast (two minutes on each side, according to Rachael Ray—less, according to Robin Miller), and it sounds like something you might pick up at the Gap.
Forty-five years after the publication of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, food television is finally and definitively not Julia Child. But the result divides viewers, sometimes quite passionately, into those who have always regarded Child as a good thing and those who may never have heard of her (or what most Food Network executives describe as food élitists and the rest of the country). Although the detractors, including Bourdain, are a vocal bunch—there is a Web site called the Rachael Ray Sucks Community—the Food Network executives are unfazed. They have nothing to defend, and you guys, you just don’t get it. . . .
Ours is a different audience from the one that watched Julia Child. In 1962, “microwave oven” and “fast food” hadn’t entered the national lexicon. And restaurants were more expensive. Tim Zagat, the publisher of Zagat Guides, points out that for more than two decades the cost of going to restaurants or getting takeout has risen less than the annual rate of inflation—that it’s much less expensive today than at any other moment in our history to pay other people to prepare our dinner. Never in our history as a species have we been so ignorant about our food. And it is revealing about our culture that, in the face of such widespread ignorance about a human being’s most essential function—the ability to feed itself—there is now a network broadcasting into ninety million American homes, entertaining people with shows about making coleslaw.
IN THE WORDS of New Yorker writer Dana Goodyear, Gold is the “high-low priest” of Los Angeles cuisine, and he schooled himself for that role by eating his way through hundreds of the sprawling city’s many ethnic restaurants, some of them (like Hot Dog on a Stick) merely food stands or taco trucks, others starred Michelin venues. A graduate of UCLA, he began writing his “Counter Intelligence” column for LA Weekly in 1986, then wrote for the Los Angeles Times and, for a period in the 1990s, moved to New York, where he wrote for Gourmet. In 2007, he was awarded the only Pulitzer Prize ever given to a food writer. An impassioned Angeleno, he insists that his native city is a place where “a great meal is as likely to come from Koreatown or the three-million-strong Mexican community as it is from Beverly Hills, a city where inspiration is often as close as the cold case of the local Vietnamese deli.”
from Counter Intelligence: Hot Dog on a Stick
NEW YORK HAS pushcart dogs and the garlic knobelwurst at Katz’s deli. Chicago has Vienna franks. Rochester has its white-hots, Cincinnati its chili-sluiced coneys. Sheboygan is famous for grilled brats. Santa Monica . . . Santa Monica is the birthplace of Hot Dog on a Stick.
Frankly, as regional hot dog styles go, Hot Dog on a Stick may not rank with Nathan’s Famous in Coney Island or the red-hots served outside Wrigley Field, but no other hot dog stand in the world has a spectacle that comes close to the sight of a mini-skirted Hot Dog on a Stick employee mixing a tankful of cool lemonade on a hot day. Hot Dog on a Stick is yet another gift Southern California has bestowed upon the world.
It would be hard to find a native Angeleno without primal memories of Hot Dog on a Stick: of Cheese-on-a-Stick dribbled on the midway at the long-gone P.O.P., of the smell of clean oil that has emanated from the muddy-red outpost under the Santa Monica Pier for more than fifty years. A summer behind the fryers at Hot Dog on a Stick is almost the archetypal first teenage job, and the garishly costumed employees figure in the teenage iconography as surely as lifeguards or cheerleaders.
The high level of organization and the extremely limited menu—hot dog on a stick, cheese on a stick, fries, lemonade—could almost have been custom designed for the valuable slivers of real estate in the food courts of shopping malls, and at the Westside Pavilion or the Glendale Galleria it sometimes seems as if the Hot Dog on a Stick franchises attract more customers than all of the quickie Chinese and falafel stands combined. One high school senior shimmies to the Spice Girls as she burnishes the kiosk’s metal to a high shine, and a second runs the cash register. A third twirls skewered frankfurters and cheese sticks through vats of pale corn batter, then plunges them into specially designed canisters of boiling canola oil.
Even within the skewed universe defined by Johnny Rockets and Tacones, Hot Dog on a Stick has always stood a little bit apart, bathed in the sort of unearthly glow that comes from underneath the lid of a Xerox machine. The high parabolic curve of the Hot Dog on a Stick cap may (or may not) allude to the elongated shape of the stand’s principal product; the super-bright graphics may (or may not) derive from the cheerful color scheme of an old-fashioned beach ball.
“The hat seems sort of awkward at first,” confesses a veteran Santa Monica dog dipper, “but you really do get used to it after a while.”
You can find corn dogs at county fairs, junior high school cafeterias and—in Oldsmobile-size boxes—at the Price Club, but the model served at Hot Dog on a Stick would be instantly distinguishable in a blind taste test, even if you hadn’t tried one since you were a teenager.
Institutional corn dogs tend to be on the wan side, but a Hot Dog on a Stick is fried to a deep chestnut-brown that is several degrees past the doneness of its competitors—a full city roast, if you’re into coffee metaphors—and the slight bitter tang of caramelization balances out the inherent high sweetness of toasted corn. The outer crust is smooth and crisp, more complexly flavored than you may remember, speckled with gritty bits of burnt grain that crunch under your teeth. The batter is slippery where it touches the hot dog, slightly rubbery, almost crepelike, resilient as the underskin of a really fresh bagel. The thick turkey hot dog inside seems quite bland, essentially a vehicle for garlic and juice.
This is rude food, resisting the attempts of civilizers far more strenuously than, say, the burrito or the triple-deck cheeseburger, though Vida’s Fred Eric can sometimes be seen at chefs’ events, meting out bite-size samples of corn dogs as if they were morsels of sautéed foie gras.
The Hot Dog on a Stick we love is a Space Age variation on the classic pig-in-a-blanket, Victorian-era American comfort food retooled to meet the demands of the California beach.
IN THE COMPANY of her mother, Larisa, an impassioned cook, Moscow-born Anya von Bremzen fled the oppression of the Soviet Union when she was ten years old. After an impoverished stay in the suburbs of Philadelphia, the pair settled in New York, where the young Anya studied piano and, by her mother’s side, was introduced to Russian culinary culture. Eventually, when an injury to her wrist impeded her piano work, von Bremzen turned to cookbook writing: she has produced five acclaimed volumes, and is a regular contributor to such major journals as Saveur and Food & Wine. In 2013 she published Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing, which recounts the almost Proustian efforts that she and her mother—both, now, wonderful cooks—have made to recapture their inheritance. The seed of the book, she has said, was our selection here, “The Émigrée’s Feast,” an essay where she describes an ambitious tsarist dinner the two women hosted in, of all unlikely places, the modest section of Queens called Jackson Heights.
EIGHT GUESTS IN period costume are expected shortly for a six-course dinner chez Mom, but right now her kitchen looks like a construction site. A tower of dishes teeters in the sink; various appliances drone in unison. Unfazed, Mom cuts scraps of dough into leaf shapes. The dough will decorate a kulebyaka, the magnificent Slavic fish pie that will crown her extravagant, 19th-century-style Russian banquet tonight.
“Why, why, why, didn’t you let me serve game?” she says. I point out, for the umpteenth time, that grouse is hard to come by in Jackson Heights, Queens, where Mom has lived for more than two decades in a small one-bedroom apartment.
Angry sighing. “But they—they!—always followed the meat course with a game roast!”
“They” happen to be a noble 19th-century St. Petersburg family whose feasts Mom has been obsessively replicating for quite some time now. Her inspiration comes from a single source: a 1996 book called High Society Dinners. Cowritten by Mom’s favorite Russian cultural historian, Yuri Lotman, this handsome volume chronicles a year at the table in the house of a powerful statesman named Pavel Durnovo. The menus, culled from Durnovo family archives, are interspersed with family letters and diaries, shopping lists and guest lists, snippets from the period’s press, plus plenty of scholarly commentary. The result is a fascinating panorama of aristocratic domesticity in bygone St. Petersburg. Some people cook Julia cover to cover. Mom’s grand ambition has been to whisk and sauté her way through an entire year of Russian society gatherings circa 1858. Tonight she’ll be showing off the elaborate fruits of her labor to a clutch of Russian émigré intellectuals and artistes, all co-conspirators who share her passion for our home country’s food mores.
When my mother, Larisa Frumkin, was growing up in the Soviet Union in the 1940s, the reality of a 19th-century aristocratic banquet was as unattainable as cheese from the moon. Her own favorite childhood treat was sosiski, or frankfurters, and I was hooked on them, too—though Mother claims that the sosiski of my 1970s Brezhnev-era childhood were nothing compared with the true, Stalinist article. Why do those proletarian franks remain the madeleine of every Homo sovieticus? Because besides sosiski with canned peas, kotlety (Russian hamburgers), borscht, and a few other simplicities, there was precious little to eat back in the USSR.
Our isolation from the rest of the world during Iron Curtain times—not to mention the sheer imagination required to elevate family meals out of their grinding drabness—go a long way toward explaining why my mother, a retired teacher now in her 70s, became an epicurean archivist-adventuress of the highest order. Dreaming, in and out of the kitchen, has always been Mom’s style. Other Muscovite moms served up pirog (savory pie) plain; mine stuffed hers with cheese and tomato paste and insisted on calling it pizza. In her hands, the watery cabbage soup known as shchi was “pot au feu.” Back in those days, we hadn’t a clue as to what real pizza or pot au feu tasted like, but the words filled us with romantic longing. Mom was a gastronomic Don Quixote.
Eventually, the straitjacket of Soviet life could no longer contain her, and in 1974 we emigrated to America, leaving my father behind. With access to cookbooks and the cornucopia at New York City’s food stores, she wasted no time turning her former reveries into tasty reality. Once, on returning from a trip to the Great Pyramids, she served an ancient Egyptian banquet replete with barley bread and a mess of strange greens. Another time, inspired by an exhibition of northern Italian art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she now works as a volunteer lecturer and tour guide, she astounded the show’s curator by inviting her to a home-cooked period dinner featuring uncannily perfect edible replicas of 16th-century Lombardian still lifes. But while Mom can swing ancient Egypt and Renaissance Italy with equal panache, her most spirited efforts have been devoted to the Durnovo feasts.
Tonight Mom and I reminisce while decorating the table. Arranging red roses on a cream-colored, antique-looking tablecloth, she recalls the chipped, mismatched dinnerware of her childhood. A momentous household event was the arrival, in the late 1950s, of a real serviz (dinner service), a gift from a high-ranking general to my granddad, who was Stalin’s chief of naval intelligence for the Baltic region. To Mom, the serviz suggested possibilities for entertaining beyond sosiski. She discovered such forbidden literature as a pre-revolutionary edition of Elena Molokhovets’s A Gift to Young Housewives, a 19th-century kitchen bible in which many of the recipes begin with “Send your maid to the cellar.” She salivated over descriptions of live-poached sturgeons and rosy hams in Tolstoy and Chekhov. As the years of corruption, enforced collectivization, and state-induced famine following the 1917 Revolution had wiped out such comestibles, this was the Soviet idea of food porn.
STANDING in her Queens kitchen, brushing the kulebyaka with egg glaze, Mom expounds on the Durnovo lifestyle. Meals at the family’s home were relatively restrained, she explains, because excess went out of style after the Napoleonic War of 1812 had ravaged the country. What’s more, under the rule of the reformist tsar Alexander II, the mood in the city’s aristocratic salons was increasingly nationalistic. Since the 18th century, the Russian aristocracy had spoken and dined French, but by the 1850s, in a reflection of the new Slavophile spirit, à la russe specialties had started appearing on aristocratic menus alongside the usual soupe printanière and poulard à l’estragon.
When Mom embarked on the Durnovo project, she reckoned that the period feasts would be quite doable in New York, given a bit of recipe research and ingredient sleuthing. Then again, there were obstacles. The Durnovos occupied a vast neoclassical mansion on the granite-paved English Embankment, then the poshest address in St. Petersburg. Mom entertains in a cramped apartment whose kitchen is smaller than the Durnovo’s cupboard. They had serfs setting their tables with heavy silver, fine china, and enough monogrammed linen to blanket Siberia. But Mom wasn’t going to be outdone. Repeated raids on the 99-cents store on nearby Roosevelt Avenue have yielded two dinner sets—one silvery, one white and burgundy—bearing convincingly neoclassical patterns. From other Queens tchotchke shops Mom has hauled home such indispensable dinner paraphernalia as soup tureens, crystal goblets, and a fine assortment of candelabra.
Mom’s high-society meals always follow the same strict, six-course progression observed in the Durnovo household. Soup gives way to fish—either something au gratin or a Slavic-style fish pie—and then a meat course. Next comes roasted game, followed by a vegetable course and, finally, dessert. Though Mom’s menu was to be no exception, its exact composition had the two of us quarreling in the days leading up to tonight’s meal.
We were in agreement on only two dishes, both of them 19th-century classics that were popular at the Durnovo table: kulebyaka, that glorious oblong pastry filled with layers of fish, wild mushrooms, and rice (and a subject of delirious odes by Chekhov and Gogol), and also pozharsky cutlets, which were immortalized in the writing of Alexander Pushkin, Russia’s national poet. Mom’s version of the dish contains freshly ground chicken breast instead of the usual veal. I watch her shape the meat into plump, oval patties, into which she tucks a pat of butter, “for extra succulence.” Just before dinner, she’ll coat them in fine homemade bread crumbs and sauté them.
Beyond these two dishes, our disagreements over the evening’s menu roughly mirrored 19th-century Russian debates between Westernizers (Mom) and Slavophiles (me):
Mom: “I will try potage à la tortue.”
Me: “Turtle soup? Eeks. What’s wrong with borscht?”
Mom: “Nyet. Don’t be silly; the Durnovos didn’t eat borscht.”
Me: “Yeah, and what’s this on page 303?”
In the end Mom conceded. She even liked my idea of serving beef boiled in borscht stock as a separate course. “Catherine the Great, after all, adored boiled beef,” she said. But the beef constituted a seventh dish, forcing us to eliminate the crucial game course. She grumbled, I hectored, until, finally, the menu took shape: borscht accompanied by teeny pirozhki (pastries) with egg-and-scallion filling; the kulebyaka; the pozharsky cutlets and boiled beef; a vegetable course of turnips braised in málaga wine; and, for dessert, a macédoine en gelée—berries in a quivering black currant-gelatin mold. A lavish zakuski (hors d’oeuvres) spread would precede dinner, and both the meal and its prologue would be washed down with plenty of flavored vodkas, champagne, and French wines.
After the game-or-meat conundrum, determining the human ingredients for the party was a no-brainer. Ira and Sasha Genis had to attend. Sasha, whose Radio Liberty cultural broadcasts are listened to by millions in Russia, is a food scholar himself, a man whose dinners tend to revolve around mushrooms gathered by moonlight in the Siberian woods and rare Latvian lamprey eels. Also among the invitees: the artist Vitaly Komar, renowned for his mock-Stalinist paintings, as well as the documentary-film maker Andrei Zagdansky and his vivacious wife, Toma. A last-minute request by my boyfriend, Barry Yourgrau, a writer, to invite Junzo Sawa, his Tokyo-based literary agent who was in town, left Mom scratching her head. “But the Russo-Japanese relationship was strained in the mid-1800s!” she protested. Then: “Okay, he can play an envoy from a Central Asian colony. An emir or maybe a khan. Here, here, give him this Kirghiz hat.”
The true reason, I think, why Mom so relishes her costume dramas is this: as a young girl she earned praise for her roles in student plays and dreams of becoming an actress. Never mind that the Dumovo dinners were catered by professional staff and a cadre of serfs; Mom thrives on being a one-woman show. Shopping, cooking, serving, popping out of the kitchen to perform “high society” hostess duties—to her it’s all one big play.
STILL, as dinnertime looms, Mom looks exhausted. Ordering her to rest, Barry and I set up the zakuski buffet in the antechamber—er, Mom’s tiny foyer. Out come little plates of smoked herring, caviar, and cheeses. Here are Mom’s famous pickles, in which canned Chinese straw mushrooms are married with supermarket Italian dressing, to a surprisingly 19th-century-Russian effect.
“Kvas, don’t forget the pitcher of kvas!” Mom yells from the couch. But of course! This fermented peasant drink based on rye bread was much in vogue among St. Petersburg aristocracy 150 years ago.
At long last, and with shocking suddenness, all the guests arrive. Clustered in the foyer, they laugh, kiss, and take snapshots of one another’s costumes. Zakuski swiftly devoured, everyone attacks dinner. The guests are floored by the deep flavor of Mom’s ruby red borscht. They gasp when she slices open the kulebyaka, filling the room with mushroom-scented steam. Ira and Sasha swear that not even Pushkin tasted pozharsky cutlets this juicy, and Vitaly likens the whole affair to performance art. As for Junzo, his love for Mom’s horseradish vodka—“just like wasabi!”—is visibly profound. Tonight’s show is a smash hit.
Later, after everyone has finally departed, leaving truckloads of dirty dishes behind, it dawns on me: what will Mom do when she’s finally finished with every menu in High Society Dinners? Apparently she’s already thought of that inevitability. “How about a series of retro-kitsch meals, very Soviet, very Socialist Realist?” she murmurs, nostalgically smacking her lips. I guess that means a lot of sosiski. I wish Mom luck keeping the hordes of hungry Russians away.
A WIDELY PUBLISHED journalist, Fagone has written for Slate, Wired, GQ, The Atlantic, and other venues. His first book, Horsemen of the Esophagus, from which our selection is drawn, is a study of the curious American sport of competitive eating, which involves the ingestion of huge numbers of hot dogs, grilled cheese sandwiches, oysters, and other foods by what can only be called gastronomic athletes. The eating contest, he says, is both “an American horror show and an American success story.”
from Horsemen of the Esophagus:
The Passion of the Toast
SHE HAS PICKED a fine day to grace Southern California with Her presence. The sun is shining, the sky is blue. Gulls loop above the Venice Beach boardwalk in jazzy little arcs. The February air is warm, but not warm enough to melt the grilled cheese sandwich through which She has chosen to broadcast her message of peace. Anyway, She’s packed inside a plastic box, surrounded by cotton balls, and encased in a frame for protection. Ten years ago the image of the Virgin Mary appeared on a grilled cheese sandwich in the frying pan of Diana Duyser, a Florida jewelry designer. Now, She is here.
The Blessed Virgin, in recent years, has been appearing less and less in crop formations and curvy building glass. She seems to prefer, as holy vehicles, specific kinds of food. She has not seared Herself onto a piece of ahi sushi, or a crepe suzette. She has not arranged Her visage in mosaic form using the grains of a delicate risotto. Instead, She has chosen as vehicles to become flesh a popcorn kernel, a Funyun, and a Rold Gold Honey Mustard pretzel twist—and, here, now, a grilled cheese sandwich. Even deities change with the times. In 2005, Our Lady seems to be a voracious snacker. The Virgin’s palate is no longer demure. She’s hungry.
This afternoon, when it comes to appetite, the old girl is flat outclassed. In fifteen minutes, here at Venice Beach, the World Grilled Cheese Eating Championship will be decided. It’s an eating contest. Whoever eats the most grilled cheese sandwiches in ten minutes wins $3,500. The prize pot has attracted some of the hungriest people in the world—people who eat under the banner of the International Federation of Competitive Eating, also known as the IFOCE or the Federation. They consider themselves professionals, and athletes. Guys like Eric “Badlands” Booker, a 420-pound subway conductor, rapper, and world champion in the donut, corned beef hash, and cheesecake disciplines. “Hungry” Charles Hardy, who just half an hour ago tattooed the initials “IFOCE” onto his right bicep. Ed “Cookie” Jarvis, a Long Island realtor who embroiders his numerous eating titles onto a gargantuan flowing robe with his portrait airbrushed on the front, flanked by a lightning bolt. Rich and Carlene LeFevre, the First Couple of competitive eating—a pair of sweetly manic retirees from the outskirts of Las Vegas. Carlene is a consistent top-five finisher, and Rich, nicknamed “The Locust,” holds records in Spam (6 pounds in 12 minutes), chili (one and a half gallons in 10 minutes), and corny dogs (18½ in 10 minutes).
Even the Locust’s accomplishments pale in comparison to America’s greatest eater, now sitting in the concrete bleachers, beaming, her ponytail held in place by two star-shaped barrettes. Sonya Thomas. Five feet five, 103 pounds. She calls herself “The Black Widow” because she gleefully devours the males; she may or may not be playing on an Asian stereotype. Her eating titles are so numerous that promoters list them alphabetically: asparagus, baked beans, chicken nuggets, chicken wings, eggs, fruitcake, giant burger, hamburger, jambalaya, Maine lobster, meatballs, oysters, pulled pork, quesadilla, sweet potato casserole, tacos, toasted ravioli, Turducken . . .
“BROTHERS AND SISTERS!”
It’s starting. The voice is miked up. It booms from the concrete expanse near the stretch of boardwalk called Muscle Beach, named after an outdoor gym where exhibitionists yank dumbbells. Beyond the gym, toward the beach, is a concrete amphitheater, with bleachers that face the stage and a stage that faces the Pacific. The stage sits directly underneath a giant concrete barbell, looming like a relic of some extinct bodybuilding race. The stage’s speakers broadcast the voice, which is saying:
“There are moments in our days when we are suddenly LOST.”
Conversations stop. One hundred and fifty curious heads swivel toward the man onstage in the dark blazer and the straw boater hat. This is the contest emcee: George Shea, chairman of the IFOCE, which bills itself as “the governing body of all stomach-centric sport.” His hands, clasped together over his crotch, hold a microphone. He looks down and widens his stance dramatically as the opening lament of Moby’s “Natural Blues” emerges from the PA system.
“We hum along doing the million things that Americans do, and then suddenly we are STRUCK—”
A woman, excited, screams.
“—and we wonder why. There is no trigger. There is no reason. And yet there it is. Sadness. Isolation. Loss. Why?”
Shea pauses, then answers his question:
“Because the PURSUITS of our lives have OBSCURED our lives, ladies and gentlemen. It is not only the hustle and bustle, the cars, and the kids, the debts and the acquisitions—it is something more.”
Often, Shea refers to competitive eating as the country’s “fastest-growing sport,” and he likes to say, tongue two-thirds in cheek, that eating is now number five in America’s heart after baseball, basketball, football, and golf, having surpassed hockey and badminton. Today’s contest is just one of a hundred scheduled for 2005, up from about seventy in 2004. Prize pots surge, TV deals dangle . . .
“We cannot SEE!” Shea is saying. “We cannot HEAR! We cannot THINK! And that is why . . . she has come! Amid no fanfare whatsoever!
“A woman!” says Shea. “Grilling a cheese sandwich!”
The music shifts to a gentle adult contemporary track. George Shea bleeds all aggression from his voice.
“Ladies and gentlemen. It is said that pearls are the precipitate of sunlight, slowed and bent by the ocean until it forms a nugget of beauty inside the lowly mollusk. And likewise, this grilled cheese sandwich is the precipitate of the divine spirit”—and here the music shifts again, to a dark minor-key vamp, and Shea’s voice skews evil—“captured here on Earth in the most unlikely of places, delivered to us in the image of the Virgin Mary!”
Shea has sensitive features, an aristocratic nose, and neat black hair. Goodlooking, compact. Perfect posture. His voice is melodious but powerful—precise, all syllables enunciated, with the pitch control of a cabaret singer and the gestural excess of a dinner-theater Hamlet.
“It is the bane of our species,” he says, “that we are warped most when we know it the least, ladies and gentlemen. It is time to put aside the pursuits that push us through our day, because this change is here today as an athletic and religious experience. TODAY WE HOLD THE GOLDENPALACE.COM WORLD GRILLED CHEESE EATING CHAMPIONSHIP! An all-you-can-eat contest that will stand as an homage, as a recognition, a dramatic illustration of the message delivered [to] us by the Virgin Mary Grilled Cheese Sandwich!”
The music softens. Shea ushers onstage a representative of GoldenPalace.com, Steve Baker. Last November, GoldenPalace.com bought the sandwich for $28,000 on eBay, hoping to use it for promotional stunts like this one. Wearing a grubby sweatshirt, jeans, and two-day stubble, Baker raises the Virgin Mary Grilled Cheese above his head and proclaims:
“The Passion of the Toast lives.”
Baker steps down into the crowd, now a sea of limbs holding digicams and angling for a keepsake shot. He parades the sandwich, which Shea calls “the culinary version of the Shroud of Turin,” into the digicam throng, and then the sandwich is placed onto an easel, at the side of the stage, to make way for the gurgitators.