The Essential Feast
© 2004 Nichola Fletcher. Published December 2004 Wine Ireland. Dublin
What satisfying news. The latest research from archaeologists now suggests that the origins of agriculture lie not in stemming hunger but to satisfy the desire for feasting. Apparently the earliest plants chosen for domestication were not the most efficient ones to fill hungry Stone Age bellies (some, such as gourds, had no nutritional value but would have made attractive vessels). Instead, they were luxury plants intended for feasts and probably to empower the élite. Although we may nowadays regard lentils, rice and wheat as staple foods, they were at that time high-status treats (they still are, in some places). Wheat was essential for its role in producing alcohol whilst as late as the Iron Age, lentils - one of the first crops grown in the Near East - still appeared as one of the chosen ingredients for King Midas's funeral feast.
So it appears that feasting was of fundamental importance to the original followers of the Paleo diet; the activity appears to be part of man's very nature and we ignore this at our peril. Aristotle and Rabelais - both physicians - recognised our innate urge for enjoyment. 'Man is a laughing animal' wrote Aristotle, and Rabelais: 'Better to write about laughter than tears, for laughter is the essence of mankind.' He also proclaimed that 'drinking is the distinguishing characteristic of man, by wine we become divine.' And his writing repeats ordinary people's yearning for gargantuan quantities of food; the Vision of MacConglinne, no less.
Mentioning the word 'feast' elicits a gallimaufry of reactions, as I found when researching Charlemagne's Tablecloth. Most commonly the word evoked images of sumptuous extravagance: glittering gold dishes, sparkling glassware, colourful costumes blazing with jewels, and such exquisite food as can scarcely be imagined, served up to the accompaniment of music and entertainers. Equally popular is the rumbustious bacchanalian vision with scantily clad wenches serving up so much food and such heroic amounts of drink that even robust bellies creaked with the abundance. In contrast, some people thought of endearingly modest family affairs. But nobody answered with indifference; the subject always aroused comment.
Sometimes adverse. 'But feasts,' sighed some people, frowning and pursing their lips in disapproval, 'are surely an outmoded concept; how could anyone justify the profligate extravagance they displayed in the past, for they depended on power, on self-aggrandisement, on a level of social division and exploitation that we don't tolerate nowadays.' A fair point, one might say, but such events should be viewed in the context of their time and place and consideration given to their raison d'etre, for in many cases the élite were expected to dazzle their guests; it could spell disaster if they didn't.
In any case, feasts are not always intended as displays of power and wealth; there are many other motives. Hospitality and charity – more acceptable reasons, perhaps - were, and are, taken seriously in many cultures. The renowned Hospices de Beaune auctions that indicate price trends in the Burgundy market, are of course followed by a grand candlelit dinner for the Chevaliers du Tastevin and their guests in the medieval surroundings of the Hotel-Dieu; all the proceeds of this go to fund the charitable works of the Hospices. For hospitality, think of the Arab notion wherein a guest is a gift from God and no matter how humble or alien he may be, should be generously entertained with no expectation of reward. There is a story of Hatim al-Ta'i, a pre-Islamic Beduin poet who as a young man is said to have killed his father's whole herd of several hundred of camels for a party of strangers. The father was actually pretty disgruntled but his son pointed out, rightly, that he had given his father a place in history by this act; though as well as displaying hospitality he had also gained prestige.
But what makes a feast different from a good dinner? A feast must contain elements that lift the occasion above that of a meal, good or otherwise, because a rich man's ordinary meal could be a feast to someone who was starving, and indeed the contrast between fasting and feasting, or equally the notion of real hunger, is disappearing rapidly from our snack-ridden lives. Nevertheless, there are many examples of people who have found themselves in challenging circumstances ranging from the sudden recovery of appetite after serious illness to simple rare treats amongst prisoners of war, or the journals of hungry explorers who dreamed up fantasy feasts as a way of enduring their ordeal. Under such conditions the food these people had took on a heightened importance. Clearly, for them, enough was indeed as good as a feast.
Sometimes the special element is fear and superstition: funeral feasts, for example, or feasts connected with crop growing or harvesting, and of course our great Christmas and New Year midwinter feasts. Or it could be anger and threat (the feasts of the Kwakiutl consisted of the competitive eating of seal blubber and berries soaked in fish oil with the possibility of being set alight afterwards), or perhaps simply the wish to share an enthusiasm - all these have spawned feasts. It would appear, too, that the concept attracts the eccentric and the flamboyant.
An 1854 engraving illustrates The Acclimatisation Society of Great Britain: a group of enthusiasts seated inside a huge model of an iguanodon at the Crystal Palace in London. These gentlemen chewed their way through a selection of peculiar and gelatinous (and sometimes almost inedible) dishes made from bizarre creatures and vegetables garnered from all over the world - all examples of what they hoped would usefully add to the prosperity of their nation once the creatures had been acclimatised. Their counterparts in Paris were less fortunate - the inmates of the Jardins Zoologique were almost entirely eaten during the siege of Paris in 1870. The beastly feast cooked up for Christmas at Restaurant Voisin featured such titbits as haunch of wolf, stuffed donkey head, civet of kangaroo, roast camel and cat flanked with rats, amongst other things. Only the big cats and the monkeys (and the hippopotamus which was too big) escaped being dispatched to the all-powerful butchers for their wealthier customers. They managed to come up with some Mouton-Rothschild 1846, Romanée-Conti 1858, Chateau Palmer 1864 and some 1827 port to go with it, so it can't have been too bad.
Another eccentric feast was given at the beginning of the twentieth century by one Cornelius Billings (affectionately known The American Horse King) to celebrate the opening of his new racing stables. It took place on the top floor of Sherry's restaurant in New York where the two dozen or so guests were mounted on horseback forming a large circle in which afterwards a vaudeville show entertained them. The horses had been transported in the elevator. To lubricate their many-coursed meal, Billings' guests sucked champagne through rubber tubes from bottles (two each) kept cold in saddle bags stuffed with ice, suspended from the horses' necks.
Jump forward a century to find an uplifting example of a communal feast staged earlier this year in Australia. The Spanish food artist Alicia Rios was asked to create an event for Melbourne's centenary celebrations. 'Melbournephagy' or 'Eating the City' consisted of Rios dividing the city into its ethnic districts and, using her infectious charm and enthusiasm for the concept, persuaded each community to build its own district using its own style and its own indigenous food as building blocks. When all the districts had been cooked, rolled, stacked, fried, steamed, pressed and assembled into edible architecture, the great variety of cuisines and design somehow magically harmonised into a vast cohesive work of art. Edible art. And whilst anyone who felt like doing so danced and sang and made music, all the ethnic groups mingled, and together they set to work to eat their city: Polynesians leant beside Chinese to reach a piece of road bypass with some library on the side, Arabs stretched next to Europeans to reach a skyscraper and a spoonful of park. How enticing the boulevard looked, how luscious the multi-storey car park! Yet Melbournephagy was nothing to do with self-aggrandisement and everything to do with racial integration and harmony.
These curiosities aside, for the most part, feasts conform to the conventions of their time and the interest lies not just in marvelling at dazzling spectacles of the past (though this is certainly fun) but in examining the minutiae - of ritual and historical continuity, of culture and symbolism - that made them operate on so many levels. And a look behind the scenes, especially to where things did not quite go according to plan, reveals people with all-too familiar human failings. Those jewel-like inhabitants of fifteenth century Burgundian miniatures turn into real people who become grumpy when the heat and overcrowding at a feast is overwhelming, who are disgusted by foreign food when on crusades. Centuries later, a seventeenth century chef is beside himself with fury at his stingy employer who refused to heighten the doorways into the dining room to accommodate his spectacularly elaborate pyramid of banqueting sweetmeats that would have surely guaranteed his pre-eminence. Reality checks often confound celebrity chefs.
A common element running through the ages is the desire to use ideas and devices from the past in one's feast. It was particularly prevalent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and it inspired me to emulate, to the best of my abilities, some of these spectacles. I used the occasion of the millennium to prepare a surprise feast for my friends. There were, of course, delicious dishes but in between, strange things happened: dozens of small fishes were strewn onto the floor, a pie concealed a jack-in-the-box, a fully reconstructed swan appeared followed by a monstrous swan pie, and finally there was a white stag made of pastry filled with red wine and with a sword sticking out of his chest, so that when it was withdrawn the wine pulsed out like blood from a wound. On the face of it this all sounds rather bizarre and indeed an initial account that I wrote for some colleagues elicited one or two of those pursed lips and comments of 'unsavoury, grotesque' (the others thought it was terrific). But when it was appreciated that the fish stunt was a re-enactment of one described in Alexandre Dumas' Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine that described an event at an eighteenth century dinner (which in turn echoed Athenaeus' Dinner of the Sophists); that the joke pie with its message copied medieval entertainments, as did the swan; and that the white hart not only followed instructions from a seventeenth century cookery book but was also redolent of the imagery of the white hart that represents regeneration, the passion of Christ, immortality and renewal (all appropriate for celebrating a new millennium), then my flamboyant gestures fell into their place in history.
O, don't let the pursed-lipped ones win - these things are too important to lose.