Crazy Feasts

Marilyn Ekdahl Ravicz

Description

CRAZY FEASTS is a culinary history cookbook that includes descriptions of ten banquets that were quite crazy or bizarre in several senses. Each feast is preceded by a short description of the location and historical setting in order to give a background for the dishes served, as well as for the particular kind of craziness involved.

The feasts vary in historical depth from the Roman Empire period to the first decades of the twenty-first century. The locations include cities from Rome to other European capitals, as well as Mexico City, when it was called Tenochtitlan as the Spanish conquistadores entered it in the early sixteenth century. Each feast described was either an actual historical incident, or is an imagined banquet that could well have occurred given the culture and habits of the time.

Each feast described is followed by recipes garnered from that culture and historical period. CRAZY FEASTS is a salute to human folly and the happy circumstances of glorious banquets meant to stimulate your sense of fun and folly should you decide to create a crazy feast of your own.

Sujets

• Cuisine
• La cuisine et son histoire
• History
• Cooking

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 20 décembre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781456627874
• Langue: English

Extrait

CRAZY FEASTS
 
 
MARILYN EKDAHL RAVICZ
 
 
The cover is a painting by Jan Mandijn entitled “Burlesque Feast”, c. 1550. Its use has been authorized under the Creative Commons licensure afforded by Wikipedia for works of art, along with given rights for acknowledged publication.

Copyright 2016 Marilyn Ekdahl Ravicz,
All rights reserved.
 
 
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
http://www.eBookIt.com
 
 
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-2787-4
 
 
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

 
 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
 
FICTION
Requiem for Córdoba
Alexandre and Simone: the Two Musketeers
Blood, Soil and Art
Love Song for Dancing Strings
Murder as a Second Language
Alexandria: Cloud-Cuckoo-Town
Crossing to Samarkand
 
NON FICTION
Early Colonial Religious Drama in Mexico: From Tzompantli to Golgotha
Ken Friedman: the World that Is, the World That Is to Be
Erotic Cuisine: A Natural History of Aphrodisiac Cookery
Ergonomics for Home-based Workers: Use your Brain to Save your Body

 
 
 
TO BOB, TO LIFE, AND TO OUR MANY CRAZY FEASTS
OF HEART AND MIND

 
 
 
And let us honor the joyous hours of crazy mental feasts that Monty Python’s Flying Circus gave to us. Here’s to their
Theme: A lways Look on the Bright Side of Life:
 
So remember when you’re feeling small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray there’s intelligent life out there in space
‘Cause there’s bugger all down here on Earth.
 
 
‘With good friends….And good food on the board, and good wine in the pitcher, we may well ask: When shall we live if not now?”
 
M.F.K. Fisher, The Art of Living.

 
 
Author’s note
The idea for Crazy Feasts , which is a blend of history, fiction and cookbook, tweaked my interest while researching materials for a previous work: Erotic Cuisine:A Natural History of Aphrodisiac Cookery . The tweaking persisted until I succumbed and wrote this culinary history cookbook as personal catharsis.
The histories of religion, anthropology, literature, drama, art and music are littered with descriptions of and references to food, banquets and ritual feasting. Some of the feasts described appear so crazy – by reason of content or context – that they begged for attention, or at least a hearty laugh. The laugh didn’t last long enough, so this book inevitably happened. As a Cultural Anthropologist, part of my beat is learning about social patterns that appear cross-culturally with regularity and, not surprisingly, the universal urge to hold celebratory feasts fits one example nicely.
My thanks to the many friends who shared in our many straight or crazy banquets, and to the memories of those who helped prepare some of the recipes I’ll offer you. We survived co-chef kitchen warfare to remain best friends. You know who you are or were in case you have now celebrated reincarnation.
The books and articles from which I quote material are cited in the text and bibliography. For those presses which did not respond to my requests for citation permissions (I’ve waited more than three years), I hereby thank you in absentia, and have properly noted the cited sources in the text and bibliography.
The bibliography at the end lists the most relevant publications reviewed and referenced for this book, much of which was simply learned through many years of fieldwork data (I’m a Cultural Anthropologist), notes, directed research, cooking with friends and from gossip during our own occasional crazy feasts. I also wish to thank Project Gutenberg for the privilege of using their resources in those chapters where they are noted. This wonderful service is mentioned at the end of the bibliography. Garnering information and materials this way still seems like the best kind of sheer magic to me.
In short, friends and I have held some crazy feasts of our own; however, those tales will be told some dark and stormy night around a campfire, while tempting wary spirits with gourmet toasted marshmallows rolled in crushed almonds. And, dear readers, I acknowledge you in advance and wish you well if, having read this culinary history and its recipes, you decide to host some crazy feasts of your own.
Marilyn Ekdahl Ravicz, 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