Crazy Feasts

Ph.D.

1. HOW CAN A FEAST BE CRAZY?

Feasts

In every mess have folly,

And the feeders

Digest with it a custom,

I should blush

To see you so attired.

William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

Many feasts have been called unusual, but few are acknowledged as truly crazy. So how is it that banqueting – dining to celebrate conviviality with family, friends and peers – can ever be considered crazy? Rest easy, since that question is at least partly answered in the following scenarios and tales of feasting follies. Some even smack of dark intrigue!

Since feasts typically celebrate important personal, family or group occasions that are secular or religious in nature, hosts strive to make them pleasing and memorable. Especially memorable? Aye, there’s the rub! While sharing food brings people together during holidays or rites of passage like birth, marriage, confirmation, initiation ceremonies or death memorials, it can also drive them apart. Although everyone agrees that commensality was biologically important to human evolution and the roots of social life, dining together can become dramatized as a love feast or battlefield. While relatively few hosts deliberately stage a crazy feast, except during reversal rituals like Halloween or Mardi Gras, craziness can and does happen for reasons beyond control. Is there a spy in the kitchen? Did Uncle Roscoe finally snap and come dancing downstairs without shorts? If so, quick – find Aunt Celeste in the kitchen before it’s too late!

The success of any feast depends on several interrelated factors: the nature of the occasion; the dishes served; the decorative settings; the entertainment; the dining environment; and, of course, the ages, sex and social statuses of the hosts and guests. And then there’s the amount of money or resources hosts are willing to invest in the celebration, and whether it is a religious banquet or feast with potentially dangerous liaisons.

Normal feasts are remembered because of one or all of these elements, but sometimes a feast sticks in the craw of social memories as extremely crazy. This can happen because of its timing, general presentation, or even an odd menu. And believe me, there have been feasts by Popes and Wise Guys I would never mention until after they are publicized in another Godfather exposé.

Learning about crazy feasts can be amusing, informative, and even stimulate a desire to stage one (or more) for your own reasons and guests. And I do mean stage one, since crazy feasts are as dramatic as the grandest opera, and we know those plots turn on craziness. If learning about crazy feasts stimulates readers with a penchant for drama into hosting their own crazy feasts, so be it! Some helpful (or crazy) suggestions, recipes, and caveats are included in this textbook-for-intentional-social-folly.

How can we define feasts in general? What do they include? Will we know one when we see or eat during one? While some actual food-related occasions may seem crazy to cultural strangers – like downhill cheese rolling races in England, or Italian street fests with hordes of semi-nude people pelting each other with overripe tomatoes – at least we understand that food is being honored in a backhanded way. But our interests here will be focused on more edible non-movable (or only slightly movable) feasting: as when the food moves mostly from plate to mouth while the eater stays put.

So what is a feast? To titillate the literati among readers, a dictionary-type definition can be hazarded for starters. For example, one could say: a feast is a dramatic culinary-centered social occasion which fulfills the hosts’ explicit and implicit goals through a ritualized dramatic commensal celebration. After checking dictionaries and crafting this formal definition for the pedantic among us, we can move on to more congenial approaches. Give me a break! I’m a Cultural Anthropologist much given to classifications and definitions only some of which resemble reality.

We tend to think of feasts as huge affairs, but not all feasts involve a cast of hundreds gorging on fifty-plus courses. Any feast, even a crazy one, can be a small, even intimate meal with few courses; however, most dinners of this genre reek of an erotic aura and intent. And craziness happens during them too. Consider the intimate feast a man hosts to make his marriage proposal, but before he can stutter the question, his intended swallows the engagement ring cleverly hidden in the chocolate mousse. I believe a movie once hinged on this contretemps. Anyway, the fact that many religious rites, paintings, novels, plays, movies and operas create or depict plots that center on feasts suggests they are important value-laden situations. A certain amount of acting-out is embedded in the staging of banquets or feasts. Dramatic tension rises as increasingly complex dishes are presented for audience-guest appreciation, until even the hosts become nervy or intoxicated.

Feasts often become occasions for important plot actions to occur in life, as well as in art. We don’t need to read Jane Austen to prove this, although she dramatized the awful symmetry of ruined lives that can result from a faux pas or improper class-defined interaction during banquets and balls. And scores of British mysteries turn on plots featuring country weekend dinners during or after which one or more guests are murdered, even before the inevitable fox hunt!

And what about that celebrated Last Supper, after which the disciple-guests quarreled about who said what during their Spartan meal until they exploded into different ontologies and sects? Indeed, some hangers-on still seek Jesus’ humble goblet as a sacred totem, although He would probably think that fetish foolishness. The menu for that banquet was more than lean, but the plot ended in a sacrificial death that challenged disciple-guests to create the greatest of all Mysteries: endless ritualized agapé love feasts. Then, since theologians can never leave well enough alone, they changed the meal-cum-ritual-Mass to include the transmogrification of bread and wine into God-as-Host Himself! That crazy magic was aimed to stimulate thought and fright, as well it might!

You might eschew these comments as merely cheeky, but it is notable that The Last Supper is a scene often painted by artists to deepen believers’ bonds of faith. The craziness happened after that ritual feast, when friendly believers split into separate sects. But for now, let us dodge the wanderlust of theology, and simply note that even well intentioned serious feasts can serve craziness instead of dessert.

To be honest, history suggests that most hosts sponsor feasts to enhance their own status, and/or to bind their guests into tighter economic, religious or social relationships. In other words, traditional feasts often performed the same basic function as contemporary ‘let’s-have-lunch’ business occasions do today. To gain such ego-serving ends, justifiable or not, huge expenditures and much labor are often dispensed to sponsor aggrandizing feasts. Ever been to a museum or political fund-raiser? Most charge hundreds of dollars for tasteless chicken entrées, mediocre wine, and being forced to listen to one or another party line for dessert. No good crazy feast goes unpunished.

In view of their rather obvious goals, one must admit that the great feasts of history were seldom simple affairs. Indeed, hosts often sponsored feasts with calculated byzantine goals only known to themselves and perhaps a trusted Chef. But if hosts of any era want a banquet to be impressive, it follows that the menu, the visual presentation of dishes, the environmental ambiance, and the entertainments must be orchestrated to instill the desired memories for guests to rave about. All the senses should be exercised and well sated. That summary helps explain why royal or noble patrons often ordered their famous indentured artists to create elaborate environments with visual and mechanical aids to amaze guests. Imagine asking Leonardo da Vinci to play his handmade lute and sing ex tempore after dinner; or demanding that Michelangelo create a snow sculpture as an after-dinner dessert, during a rare Florentine snowfall! But these requests actually happened!

And there were festal occasions - like the marriage feast of Henry II of France to Catherine de Medici (1549) - that featured an actual bull fight and siege against a fake castle built for the occasion. Even the Pope bristled at that feast, since it was held during Lent. In earlier days, wealthy Agostino Chigo had a mechanical device built that sent his guests’ dining utensils (often silver or gold) flying into the Tiber River where they were hopefully caught in nets by servants! Entertainments can definitely help make a feast crazy.

But again, not one of these motivations or presentations necessarily makes a feast crazy. Craziness can happen because of bad planning, or also because of the feckless play of sheer accidents. The innocent transformation of a normal into a crazy feast can result in humorous satire, or a tragic perversion of the host’s original intentions. While this isn’t a plan to make thinking about feasts into projective tests, you might play around with that idea for your own crazy feast. I can see it now: huge inkblots pinned to walls, or oddly shaped plates with wandering designs of darkly tinted mashed potatoes….

Feasts resemble the drama of theater in many ways. They have a cast of characters that performs in a staged setting, as well as a beginning, middle and end defined typically as courses. Some feasts offer background music, toasts or speeches, and as many roles or guests needed to enact the host’s plot. Feasts involve ‘costumed’ characters and actions staged by the host who directs his caste of diners in their dual roles as players and audience. Feasts resemble theater-in-the-round. They involve directors (hosts), producers (cooks), plots (menus and courses), staged settings (dining rooms), costumes (party gear), dialogues (glorified gossip), and sometimes turn on denouements with erotic by-play (won’t go there).

Culinary history is rich with descriptions of grandiose banquets sponsored by royals or infamous popes. Some even feature dark plots, poison-laden dishes, and deadly thrusts to gain coveted power. Indeed, the lust for canonization flavored many lubricious sauces served with dubious entrées during Renaissance cavorting. Erotica were normally saved for other festal occasions, but not always.

Gaining power through feasting is well-known to include enough sensory gratification to flavor future memories. Finally, like the classic definition of literary plots that end with denouements, placated guests become both critics and memory-banks. After studying many historical banquet menus, one wonders why more guests didn’t become ill from over-indulgence. At least one can better understand why gout figured so prominently in classic Victorian plots.

A peek into the connivances of pre-feast hosts and guests is a peek into their hearts and minds if not their souls. Cookbooks, caterers or chefs are consulted to set menus. Guest lists are studied with finicky care and social acumen. Closets or favorite shops are ransacked for the latest fashions and gossip about other potential guests. Turning over the responsibilities and drudgery of hosting to caterers or chefs can be desirable, and was often done during servant-laden times. Only rich oddballs like Talleyrand, the famous French foodie statesman, employed many cooks, but still hung around his kitchen so much his staff became almost suicidal.

Famous European Chefs were honored and took their work seriously. They were paid well, especially if they agreed to cross the Channel from France or Italy to England. In fact, during those days of highly changeable politics, the illustrious career of the greatest royal Chef, François Vatel, ended in a culinary-caused suicide. Vatel’s suicide allegedly occurred because of a tardy fresh seafood delivery for a Chantilly Palace feast with King Louis XIV as the star guest. Crazy chefs too? Vatel’s glorious fame and suicidal plight are dramatized in the colorful film Vatel (2000).

But again, not one of the above-mentioned factors necessarily makes a feast crazy. Why, then, would anyone want to learn about or emulate crazy feasts? One short answer to that question is simply ‘for the fun of it.’ We enjoy learning about dramatic human follies, especially if we did not create or experience them ourselves. And when the stakes are not too high, a bit of feast-satire is not only tolerable, it is satisfyingly humorous.

After these meandering alternatives then, let’s be serious: what can make a feast crazy? Sometimes craziness happens because of: over-the-hill or zany guests; poor entertainments; crummy environments; or tasteless and badly served cuisine. Sometimes craziness results from the cultural inappropriateness of the menu, or the crashing boredom of the guests. And sometimes craziness results from excessive formality or crude informality with its usual rude interactions. And lastly, craziness can also happen when plans go awry for uncontrollable chance reasons; or when clashes result from misreading social cues and make behaviors offensive. Who has not read about State Dinners during which ‘unnamed diplomats with negligent cooks’ served ham to Muslim guests and beef Wellington to Hindus?

Even excellent cooks and hosts cannot control the world that impacts them, so feasts become crazy when unanticipated or accidental events occur. When the outlandish or inevitable happens, the original purpose of a feast may become its least memorable aspect. Instead, guests will recall the bizarre happenings that made the feast crazy, because memory is as notoriously selective as a high class hooker. And last but not least, a crazy feast always makes good gossip.

History offers a rich harvest of notable bizarre feasts, and even contemporary banqueting is not exempt from this category. Remember when the dogs ate your marinating steaks, and you had to serve pizza for the Country-Club Fundraising dinner? Or when the woodwind trio you contracted on-line for your daughter’s wedding reception turned out to be a Punk Rock band you clicked on by mistake? Or when you arranged a surprise birthday banquet for The Boss, and the guests arrived to learn he’d run off with his secretary that afternoon? Or when schedules went awry and workers ripped up your dining room carpeting while you were at the market buying ingredients for that special lovefest dinner?

The possibilities are endless and their results magnificently serendipitous. Usually Asians don’t serve Westerners snakes or still-living entrées that thrash about on their platters, but it can and does happen. After all, living or rare ingredients are costly fare to serve honored guests in parts of Asia. And annual hospitalizations still occur among Japanese gourmands who ate costly fugu (poisonous pufferfish) prepared by maladroit chefs who failed to excise the deadly parts. These few examples suggest that we are moving closer to understanding how and why some feasts are or become crazy.

Most adult taste preferences result from cultural food patterns shaped during childhood, and only curiosity, willingness, or genuine hunger drive most adults to taste unusual dishes or ingredients. So remember, it is easy to transgress when setting menus, because not everyone is a food adventurer. And then there are those food taboos and endless allergies to consider. Sometimes I think printed invitations with ‘please check the following forbidden foods, or note them on the blank line’ should be tendered. That could save lives, facilitate planning and relieve the worries of allergy prone guests.

Culinary patterns and food taboos – often grounded in outdated or unsafe historical practices – become ritualized into religious rules of acceptance or rejection, like all that business about pork and other carnivores. Indeed, ancient myths and beliefs can endow food ingredients with positive values or profound taboos, especially if they include purity versus pollution ideas. People in western industrialized countries tend to dislike the idea of eating insects; however, in the Moroccan desert I’ve seen the happy harvesting and quick-fry meals of scooped-up locust infestations, even without honey. When locusts darkened the sky in whirling humming clouds and settled in heaps to crunch their way through brush, they were gleefully gathered, prepared (wings off), salted and quick-fried by Berbers. For days the welcome harvest was carried in burnoose hoods as a welcome protein snack, the edible analogue of potato chips. Desert dwellers know better than to waste good protein. Important components of the Prehispanic Mexican indigenous diet included dogs, insects, worms, grubs and their eggs. And not to be outdone by the Native Americans, I know a pizzeria in Malibu, California, which occasionally serves rattlesnake pizza to culinary dilettantes or showbiz customers with ‘foreign’ guests to titillate. I’ve even heard their retorts of that old adage: ‘Why, it tastes just like chicken!’

On a psychosocial level, motivations for sponsoring feasts range from alleged piety to tooth-and-nail biological imperatives to gain personal power and wealth. Please note that power and wealth are typically allied, and often rise or fall together. Other motivations for hosting feasts include: the need to express unified personal ties and family status; the need to display religious dedication through ritual celebrations; the need to consolidate memberships within peer associations; the need to express gratitude; and/or the need to gratify such murky goals as erotic lust, revenge or thinly veiled satire. Then too, there is the simple and more compelling need to have a good time with chosen friends.

In sum, feasts or dining-together-celebrations are meant to satisfy and embellish an actual or desired social consensus of needs and emotions through the sharing of food with intentional sociability. That’s it in a nutshell.

Eating is basically a mundane daily activity that is necessary for life. In many belief systems, even gods, goddesses and spirits need to eat, and priests are assigned to feed, dress, and care for their needs. Even the earliest monotheisms without a depicted god were known to offer such clever contrivances as burnt offerings to be savored by the One but apparently still hungry Great Being.

Lust-for-power-and-influence feasts typically emphasize the conspicuous consumption of huge amounts of food, over-the-hill entertainment, or even the purposeful ritual destruction of valued goods. Typical examples of the latter were the potlaches given by northwest Native American Haida and others to celebrate rites of passage. During these feasts, participants not only consumed yards of oily blubber, the host often gave away or destroyed much of his wealth. Some Anthropologists cleverly suggested that staged potlatches are not actually crazy feasts, but function as economic levelers, through a kind of covert Socialism, against economic inequality in areas with few natural resources. Perhaps that was their subconscious function, but I doubt asking the Haida would net that verbal democratic justification. I think any host would have admitted that the feast simply made him a ‘Big Man’. Anyway, potlatches were honored ritual feasts until invading foreigners, who didn’t relish blubber or wasteful generosity, made them illegal through alien colonial rules and Statutes.

Wealthy imperial Romans were renowned for excessive feasts. Tacitus and Dio Cassius describe one of Nero’s crazy feasts held on a huge pleasure barge decorated in ivory with gold fittings. Loaded with drunken guests, it was slowly towed across Agrippa’s Pond by smaller vessels. The youthful crew, rouged and garbed in gilded loincloths, dropped guests off at shore locations where they could indulge in bacchantic sex with their choice of partners – male, female, undetermined, prostitutes, virgins, or even children. All this while dining on wine, braised flamingo tongues, puréed brain of pheasant, sautéed sows’ udders and other rich tidbits. Yum, yum! Nero’s celebrations were often staged as eighteen-course orgiastic feasts, and he was not alone in this custom.

Historians also mention the allegedly fantastic feasts sponsored by Cleopatra and Marc Antony during their periodic dangerous liaisons. Antony’s penchant for dressing and acting like the god Bacchus amid Alexandrian wealth was matched by Cleopatra’s ritual role-play as the goddess Isis. The chronicler Athenaeus (see Book IV) describes Cleopatra’s feasts for Antony as served on golden plates inlaid with gems, and staged in huge twelve-couch rooms whose walls were hung with gold-worked tapestries. She often gifted Antony with whatever knickknacks he saw and liked. These and periodic barge feasts on the Nile became perfect paradigms for crazy feasting. Why crazy? Because, instead of enhancing Anthony’s political image and power, these ‘Oriental’ banquets were reported to the Roman Senate (gossip traveled then too) and used as one justification for mobilizing Octavian into war against him. In effect, they were cited as ‘proofs’ that Marc Antony was no longer truly Roman, but merely a Hellenized ploy of Cleopatra and her decadent eastern ways.

Moreover, crazy feasting continued through long medieval and later periods, during which profligate banquets flourished. Consider the feast marking George Neville’s elevation to Archbishop of York in 1464. He hosted a banquet serving: 300 loaves of bread, 300 tuns of ale, 100 tuns of wine (that’s 25 thousand gallons), 105 oxen, 6 feral bulls, 1,000 sheep, 304 pigs, 304 calves and 400 swans. What about the partridges in the pear tree? And reportedly, there were overall 14,833 meat and poultry dishes that required sixty-two cooks and five hundred and fifteen scullions too serve the food (Fletcher, 21). Christian poverty and its celebrated piety?

Obviously history offers a wealth of exemplary crazy feasts, whether large or small. As another example, consider a small private feast for four knights sponsored by an Archbishop of England, on February 9, 1568. Their sixteenth century menu for five (including the host) included: bread, wine and oranges; two roasted hens; six roasted partridges; half a kid in crust; roast boars; ram meatballs with egg yolks; stewed rams; turnips in bacon; stewed pork; large apples; two cardoons (thistle-like plants related to artichokes), olives, cheese and nuts. One wonders about the cholesterol levels of men who routinely ate such meals, or did jousting normalize that knightly plague? Never mind, since we already know they didn’t live long in those days.

And a first prize might be awarded to one of history’s great feast-givers, sixteenth century Catherine de Médici. That famous Italian Queen Consort of Henry II of France made herculean efforts to ‘enlighten’ her benighted French subjects about food, its preparation and artful service. She was renowned for sponsoring feasts to enhance political unity and to ‘get her own way’. Her famous ‘progress feasting’ travels lasted more than two years and sponsored many wraparound entertainments and rich menus. These occurred while she roamed around France to introduce her teenage son (Charles IX) to the populace in order to imprint them with her exotic Italian presence and culinary finesse. She failed to understand that these banquets often had the opposite effect: they made her seem more foreign and less French. And Catherine did not travel alone. She was accompanied by several thousand court members, their servants, untold trunks of festive clothing, tutors, priests, five doctors, five kitchen officers, five sommeliers, cooks, porters, grooms, beaters for hunts, and nine dwarfs in miniature coaches, to say nothing of the gold plate, silk sheets and cookery pots. The length of her caravan was as staggering as were its costs (Visser, 28). The famous can often make themselves infamous, n’est pas?

This type of conspicuous consumption parallels feasts with built-in interludes of purposeful destruction: like burning or destroying elaborate ritual offerings, sponsoring huge fireworks displays, the staging of costly mock battles, or the creation of ephemeral artworks to be destroyed after one display. City-states on the wane, like sixteenth century Venice, tried to impress visiting French King Henry III (1574) to a degree that nearly impoverished its treasury. The Venetians created an overabundance of triumphal arches, grand ephemeral gardens with sculptures, and hosted a series of extravagantly lavish banquets to impress their royal visitor. As an example, one feast for three thousand guests centered on a gargantuan menu of foods, some presented on fabulous place settings made entirely of spun sugar! And sugar was a very costly commodity, even for trading cities.

Other crazy historical feasts also focused on fantastic uses and displays of sugar. Sugar was so costly that its reckless consumption was a sure mark of great wealth. For example, Mary, Regent of the Netherlands, tried to influence Philip II of Spain by presenting a gastronomic orgy (1549) featuring a ‘sugar collation’ as the menu. During this fantastic drama-fest, tables laden with hundreds of sweets were embellished by sculptures of spun sugar, including large sugar animals lowered from the ceiling. These displays were also surrounded by pretend thunder and lightning, as well as by a ‘rain and hail storm’ of tiny glittering falling sugar candies. Sugar was still ruinously costly even for rich royals, as they were to discover all too soon.

Or consider the occasion when Maria de Aviz married Alessandro Farnese, the Duke of Parma, in 1566. Their nuptial feast featured sugar platters holding hundreds of sugary desserts to be eaten with sugar-sculpted knives and forks. That meal climaxed when the guests devoured their plates and goblets, also sculpted from sugar. Wedding gifts featured giant sculptural scenes of sugar figures (Abbot, 43-44).

By the end of the sixteenth century, sugar use had trickled down to the middle class, and culinary history was peppered with new sugary desserts and recipes. England became and remained more or less addicted to puddings.

We can note yet one more costly Médici-related feast. For example, to celebrate the marriage of Maria de’ Médici to Henry IV of France on October 5, 1600, the Tuscan countryside was sacked for ingredients, servants, entertainers, artists, artisans, and costumers to create the spectacle of the age. The royal hosts demonstrated power and wealth through a feast that lasted for days, although the marriage ceremony was enacted by a stand-in, since the King was absent for military reasons! A wedding without the groom, which culminated in a dramatic crescendo when Maria’s entire table (in a simulated garden) revolved to demonstrate the passage from her previous status to that of Queen of France. But a bit of irony hangs thereon. When Maria finally reached Paris, after having been crowned Queen in a self-initiated ceremony in Saint-Denis, no grand honeymoon followed, because Henry IV was assassinated the next day. It was probably just as well, since Henry was much given to mistresses and their bastard offspring. It seems that French kings and royal Médici consorts had problems in spite of prestige and wealth (Young, 66-85).

During another ‘valiant’ attempt to ensure better relations between England and France, Henry VIII and François I held a three-week carnival of feasts near Calais, which became known as the ‘Field of Cloth of Gold’. For this celebration, Henry built a 12,000 square feet temporary palace and served enormous amounts of food daily. Feasting was interspersed with jousts, wrestling matches and other endless entertainments – all with poor and few positive results. After all, there was that religious problem and Henry’s penchant for changing wives….

Even traveling diplomats were royally feasted in foreign capitals. In 1672, the French Ambassador visited Persia, where he was given