
From The New Inquiry, Christine Baumgarthuber:
That the rich ate in grand style and quantities comes as no surprise.
History tells of Roman emperors who gorged from midday to midnight on
the tongues of song birds and the bladders of fish and the soft, pink
teats of heifers. Later kings and queens proved as voracious as their
imperial forebears, as did prosperous merchants, burghers and other
commoners. Anyone who had money made a show of it at table. A wealthy
late 14th-century Englishman’s ordinary meal consisted of three courses,
the first featuring seven dishes, the second five and the third six. On
festive occasions the number of dishes increased to nine, eleven and
twelve, making for some thirty to forty plates of food in all. And this
for a man of middling fortune!
“If
the dinner is defective the misfortune is irreparable; when the
long-expected dinner-hour arrives, one eats but does not dine; the
dinner-hour passes, and the diner is sad, for, as the philosopher has
said, a man can dine only once a day.” — Theodore Child, Delicate Feasting (1890)Those
with deeper pockets wedded spectacle to surfeit. One winter’s night in
1476 the fabulously wealthy Florentine Benedetto Salutati hosted a
banquet. He spared no expense. A first course of petite pine-nut cakes,
gilded and doused in milk and served in small majolica bowls greeted
guests. Eight silver platters of gelatin of capon’s breast followed.
Next came twelve courses of various meats representing the bounty of
barnyard and forest: great haunches of venison and ham, a bevy of
roasted pheasants, partridges, capons and chickens, all accompanied by
thick slabs of blancmange. Fearing that his guests might weary of this
parade of animal flesh, Salutati ushered in two live peacocks, their
breasts pinned with silk ribbons and their feet affixed to silver
platters. From their beaks curled tendrils of incense. Then came the piéce de resistance: a large covered platter, also of silver. When Salutati’s attendants lifted its lid, out flew a flock of birds.
For all their inventive excess, the regal feasts of prosperous
commoners could not match those of true royalty. England’s Henry VIII,
for example, boasted an appetite as invariable as it was insatiable. His
favorite dishes he ordered to be brought to him, even when he journeyed
abroad. Before visiting France in 1534, he dispatched a communiqué
across the Channel. “It is the king’s special commandment,” it read,
that all of the artichokes “be kept for him.”
Joseph Stalin, it was reported, would become “very cantankerous” if served a substandard banana.Other
monarchs had their gustatory quirks. Soup France’s Louis XIV slurped to
the point of chronic diarrhea, and gluttony overtook him at his wedding
feast to such a degree that he ate himself impotent (much to his
bride’s chagrin no doubt). Even the Revolution did little to discomfit
the royal belly. So ravenous was the restored king Louis XVIII that
attendants had to supply him with pork cutlets between meals.
The distaff side matched their male counterparts bite for bite.
Catherine de Medicis, the Italian-born wife of France’s King Henry II,
regularly sickened herself on roast chicken and heaps of cibrèo,
a thick Florentine ragout of rooster gizzard, liver, testicles and comb
mixed with beans and egg yolks and served on toast. Britain’s Queen
Victoria too suffered unremitting peckishness. When Lord Melbourne, one
of her ministers, advised her to eat only when she was hungry, she
replied, “I am always hungry.”
“The farmer is not a man: he is the plow of the one who eats the bread.” — Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion (1973)Subjects
expected their sovereigns to be hungry. Power rested on conspicuous
excess. Abstemiousness occasioned distrust. In 888, Guido, Duke of
Spoleto, a contender for the throne of the Frankish kingdom, found his
bid derailed by his small appetite. Quipped the archbishop of Metz, one
of Guido’s critics: “No one who is content with a modest meal can reign
over us.”
“I
went into the workhouse on Sunday last (April 30) after church…. I
asked them [the inmates] how they lived, whether they had sufficient
[food] … they said, that if they could be allowed four ounces more bread
three times a week, which was the day in which they had their pea-soup,
they should have all they could wish for.” —
The Parish and the Union; Or, The Poor and the Poor Laws Under the Old System and the New (1837)
Keen to emulate their antecedents, new money ate as voraciously as
old. This was no more true than in nineteenth-century United States,
where it seemed anyone who struck gold spent it on lavish refection. The
American self-made millionaire, James Buchanan Brady, better known as
“Diamond Jim,” exemplified Gilded Age excess, breakfasting daily on
beefsteak, chops, eggs, pancakes, fried potatoes, hominy, cornbread,
muffins and a beaker of milk. Mid-mornings he snacked on oysters and
clams. For lunch came more shellfish accompanied by two or three deviled
crabs, a pair of broiled lobsters, a joint of beef, a salad and several
fruit pies. To round out the meal and to make, in his words, “the food
set better,” he would polish off a box of chocolates.
When meals didn’t “set better,” they set decidedly worse. About the
time that Diamond Jim was inhaling crustaceans by the dozen, a certain
Mr. Rogerson (nationality and profession unknown) reportedly gorged
himself to such a miserable extent that at meal’s end he committed
suicide.
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