Since commensality has atavistic roots grounded in hunting, gathering and sharing adaptations, eating together has been often transformed into a symbolic sacrament, a metaphor for religious rituals of sharing or thanksgiving. Important High Holiday meals often feature vocalized sacred liturgy while serving dishes or ingredients with symbolic meaning. Most religious holiday feasts include symbolic dishes such as bitter herbs, turkeys, figgy puddings, special ornamental breads, certain drinks from ancestral recipes and so on.
From the outré dishes and wild extravagances already noted, you might already have gained a better understanding of other factors that can render feasts crazy. Normal feasts are meant to send positive and unambiguous social signals to guests; however, if these signals are poorly conceived, misunderstood or abrogated, crazy feasts result. Thus, in spite of good intentions, some of the exemplary feasts presented in this book surpass cultural norms in scope, purpose or unanticipated results. In short, they became crazy in one or another way through behaviors such as bad taste, cross-cultural contempt, or simply through profound ignorance, or a soupçon of chance.
Enough history! We more or less defined ‘feast’ before, and now should summarily define what is meant by the word crazy in Crazy Feasts. Crazy here does not refer to its primary meaning of insane or mentally unsound, but rather to its secondary and more informal meanings as impractical, over-enthusiastic or over-excited. This informal popular sense of crazy (commemorated in jazz slang as ‘like crazy, man’) designates that which departs greatly from normal proportion or moderation. Behaviors that depart from cultural norms typically suggest intentional satire, being immoderate, or purposefully abrogating societal rules.
The feasts described in Crazy Feasts are exemplary of different historical periods and types of craziness. In each case, a brief historical description introduces the cultural context of the feast, and recipes from the era are appended for consideration. Some feasts were genuinely historical, but presented with perhaps a dash of interpretation. Others were selected from literature, and some are only imagined, but based on enough actual history to smack of veracity. In each scenario, the level of historicity or fiction is stated. Should you, dear readers, decide to host a crazy feast, the included recipes can be used, or others can be chosen from cookbooks and the internet. I once found an obscure eleventh century Arabic recipe I needed for a novel through Google, and was introduced to an entire cadre of food history buffs who translate obscure historical recipes from dead or semi-dead languages. They gladdened my heart, mind, and several subsequent menus.
By the by, if you use fresh citrus fruits, now is a good time to start saving and drying their peelings. You will see how many recipes, especially from past centuries, use citrus flavors in their dishes. Regularly dried citrus peel kept in closed containers adds flavor to everything from rice to meat and fish. It can be used to enhance teas, olives and pickles. Less known ingredients are noted and appropriate substitutions are suggested in recipes when necessary.
If you plan a crazy feast, emphasize craziness in clever ways which don’t require a huge outlay of resources – unless you’re a rock star or CEO. Use your own imagination to satirize or celebrate your life and time. The essential rule is: do not be timid. Remember, you have a unique opportunity for experimentation and every excuse in the world to embrace the unusual. Fashion be damned, and opt for exuberant fun! This does not mean that good taste is irrelevant, but rather that its boundaries can be explored, stretched or satirized.
For now, bon appétit, and laissez les bons temps rouler! But also remember Dorothy Parker’s wry reminder from her The Flaw in Paganism:
Drink and dance and laugh and lie,
Love the reeling midnight through,
For tomorrow we shall die!
But alas, we never do.
(online Dorothy Parker Citation)
2. ANOTHER ROMAN HOLIDAY: TRIMALCHIO’S FEAST
In spite of humble origins, Roman cuisine became enormously elaborate through time. A history of trade and conquests stimulated the use of increasingly varied ingredients, and wealthy hosts became increasingly addicted to sponsoring sumptuous feasts with unusual entertainments. These feasts, quite naturally, were prepared and served by small armies of servants and slaves. By the imperial Roman period, competition among feast-givers was the rule not the exception, and political and military careers were known to hang in the balance between banqueting successes and failures. Much depended upon a host’s ability to please, impress and satisfy guests.
Through time and conquests, far-flung colonies offered a staggering range of foods as tribute or trade, and sybaritic decadence became stylishly rampant among the wealthy. By then, wealthy Romans’ villas often offered multiple dining rooms, each elaborately decorated with murals, and Roman chefs had developed complex dishes from unusual and costly ingredients.
Although conservative Roman senators argued loudly against the ruinous waste of hedonistic feasting, it continued unabated. Sumptuary laws defining the acceptable limits for entertaining were passed by the Senate and typically ignored. While many banquets were given to gain economic or political prestige, others were staged as extravagant excuses for sheer debauchery. Elaborate menus and prolonged feasting were interlarded with loud or sometimes crass entertainments and occasional trips to baths or vomitaria to regurgitate, to relax or to recover stamina for more feasting - all ingenious if unappetizing alternatives to feeling as stuffed as many of the dishes served.
Luxurious Roman dining rooms were typically light, airy, attractively furnished and decorated with colorful murals celebrating food or food-related activities. Some murals were definitely erotic, as the ruined villas of Pompeii and Herculaneum illustrate. Wealthy Romans dined reclining on couches while being served by servants or slaves. A triclinium, the dining room, takes its name from the arrangement of three couches (triclinia) placed on three sides of each dining table. Thus, dining room sizes were referred to as two, three or more sets of triclinia arrangements.
During long feasts, guests were sometimes invited to bath and/or change their garments between courses, and special resting-rooms were provided for sloppy or careless diners to don extra togas brought with them. In this sense, dining chambers functioned much like stage settings with dressing rooms nearby. Having slaves and dressers makes a huge difference!
Roman men typically banqueted together, although women could also be present depending upon several factors and the nature of the feast. Sometimes women were present as entertainers, and/or were present and introduced as ‘trophy’ wives or mistresses before the serious drinking of unwatered wine began. Trimalchio’s feast includes just such an interlude staged by the host’s wife. In her case, she brought a couple of fellow-diners with her and provided a few literal high kicks and jokes for dramatic relief.
Roman literature reports that fortunes were spent on feasting by the imperial likes of Lucullus, Heliogabalus, Claudius and Caligula – names to reckon with. Gluttony and hyper-developed tastes for the bizarre were expressed by serving dishes like flamingo or nightingales’ tongues, camels’ heels, and ostriches stuffed with sows’ udders. Emperor Lucullus even excavated a canal from the ocean to one of his estates in order to have abundant fresh seafood literally swimming into his kitchen. He also constructed an immense aviary to dine luxuriously on birds while observing others flying about in ‘their prison’. This reminds the author of something Samuel Butler noted in his Notebooks: Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.
We know a good deal about Roman culinary history through the writings of historians, social critics, dramatists and poets. We also have an extant Roman cookbook containing considerable information regarding classical period dishes. This cookbook, one of the first in Western history, entitled De re coquinaria (Of Culinary Matters),