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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 a great banquet served from a golden cloth spread over the floor. On it were placed several kinds of exotic breads, after which huge gold basins of pilau were carried in, one by one, along with glasses of pomegranate juice. Four huge pilau platters were filled with poultry, and four more, each holding a whole lamb weighing eighty pounds. Hosts needed strong servants for those feasts. I wonder which part the French ambassador hated more: eating on the floor, or all that pilau and no wine.

Later British kings were also noted for gustatory excesses. George IV, for example, was so grossly fat that his non-corseted belly drooped to his knees. Yet, in January of 1817, he ordered the famous French chef Carême to create a great banquet for visiting Grand Duke Nicolas of Russia. Carême complied, and served some one-hundred and twenty-seven dishes plus delicacies. These were followed by a four foot high marzipan Turkish mosque. One wonders who hoisted George and his belly to his feet afterwards.

Some historical banquets planned to cement political and/or paramilitary power resulted in murder or social bedlam. And it must be mentioned that sometimes Christian humility was ‘celebrated’ through feasts with hundreds of dishes and casts of hundreds to serve fewer than a hundred. Meanwhile, hundreds more starved in the streets. Among others who could be mentioned, Pope Boniface VIII (1294-1303) insisted on solid gold spoons and table decorations, and wore only silk clothes and fine robes to dine. He also kept a swarm of cooks, breadmakers, cellarmen and spice experts to assure fine dining, although reportedly in constant fear of being poisoned.

Or consider Clement VI (1342-1352), who sponsored menus rich with pies, soups and cheeses. His coronation was celebrated with over thirty courses consisting of 50,000 meat and poultry pies followed by rich honeyed deserts (Rinaldo & Vicini, 113-118). And there were others! One wonders if they were seeking divine sanction through narcissism or visionary hubris.

Successful feasts, crazy or not, typically need other defining elements in addition to food. We know that aesthetic sensibilities are stimulated by such things as fanciful table settings, food-as-sculpture, stunning entertainments, or unusually well-clad or under-clad guests, fully set tables that rise from the floor below, or even trick ceilings that open to dispense clouds of rose petals. And what about the medieval tradition of four-and-twenty-blackbirds literally ‘baked’ in a huge pie until freed to fly during dessert? Now there are modern semi-nude female ‘birds’ that emerge from fake cakes served during male rite-of-passage celebrations. Or female birthday luncheons with fake for-hire male cops who brazen their way in, strip and flip their truncheons on command. Yes, sensibilities are variously stimulated, and satisfactions are variously gained.

Many crazy feasts were prolonged or lasted several days. For these, several menus were needed, along with music, dance, magicians and dramatic interludes. Prolonged feasts also sponsored ‘time out’ breaks so diners could rest, recover, frolic, and allow food and drink to settle in. A change of pace, scene or even of dining rooms, as wealthy Romans practiced, eased the mind and stomach if hours of feasting remained. In his Decameron (1351), Giovanni Boccaccio described feasts that lasted several days and included interludes with recondite niches for naps, dallying or intercourse between courses. It is probable that Boccaccio also drew the illustrations that decorated his Decameron’s earliest original publication. (Readers can consult Decameron texts on Project Gutenberg.)

In point of fact, most guests enjoy a feast, crazy or not, if it offers good food and the comfort of dining with like-minded friends. These factors shape the basic components of successful banqueting any time. The explosive humanist creativity of renaissance Italy generated many exuberant and pleasurable feasts. Peers liked to banquet together, and special clubs dedicated to serving feasts with imaginative food or arresting visual presentations sprang up in most major Italian cities. They were typically sponsored by co-worker Guilds that dominated the crafts. Painting was considered a craft learned through guild membership, and some of their feasts were definitely pleasantly crazy.

For example, the Campagnia del Paiolo (Cauldron Club), to which the famous painter Andrea del Sarto belonged, vied with similar Guilds to prepare the most interesting and amusing feasts. For one banquet, del Sarto constructed a temple with sausage columns and a Parmesan courtyard that housed a songbook made of lasagna, its pages inscribed in peppercorn notes, resting on a lectern of sliced veal (cf. Willan, 37ff.). What, no woven spaghetti tapestries? Food as ephemeral artwork was central to such events, some of which were so interesting they became written history.

Similar feasts were sponsored by a rival gourmand Guild, the Campagnia della Cazzuola, (Casserole Club). One time, dressed as construction workers, guild members sponsored a feast for which they built edifices of bread-bricks and sweetmeat-stones cemented together with pasta. Both creative feasts resemble early ‘performance art’ events which sidestep sheer taste appeal to become interesting aesthetically. So food presentation can – as often happened in history – become an occasion for ephemeral art.

Many equally absurd banquet excesses characterized later Restoration and nineteenth century Regency feasts among the wealthy or royals of Great Britain. Their feasts typically offered multi-page menus (still heavy on meat dishes), elaborate decorations and baroque costumes that were pure hyperbole. Their lust to wax opulent was often acted out through food-related rituals. And dare I mention that well-documented upper class British penchant for genuine food-fights? The ‘lower-classes’ were not so foolish as to throw food at each other; they simply ate it. Or should I say ‘et it’?

And we must not forget Lord Bridgewater, the famous British writer and expatriate. He lived mostly in Paris and managed to astonish even the French by giving lavish dinner parties for his many dogs. A self-styled animal lover, he dressed his doggie-guests in the latest of fashions, right down to miniature shoes. However, this self-described animal lover never balked at shooting captive game when residing at his English estate. Lucullus reincarnated? He reminds one of Oscar Wilde’s defining quip about fox hunting: the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.

Our more modern society has made conscious efforts (consistent with economic trends) not to have so many serve so few. Then as now, however, feasts requiring opulence and servile attendants can only be considered successful if the participants believe that God and power politics are on the same side. I won’t go there, but shall settle for bits of culinary history.

During the early years of the twentieth century, the United States of America – the new social braggart on the world-block – was guilty of sponsoring many deliberately crazy feasts. After all, there were those newly-minted robber barons, some of whom delighted in acting imperial. One example suffices. In 1903, a wealthy horse-loving host sponsored a feast for thirty members of the New York Equestrian Club. That much seems normal. The crazy part was that the guests dined on horseback, although each horse had to be hauled by freight elevators to a fourth floor of the Fifth Avenue restaurant. Waiters costumed as grooms served each course on trays firmly fastened to the pommels and flanks of each horse. Champagne was served in ice buckets suspended from saddlebags, and suckled through long nipple-tipped tubes. The surrounding environment was remade to feature murals of outdoor scenes, while real birds flitted and perched in genuine bushes under a fake harvest moon and twinkling stars. The horses dined on oats while the guests chewed their way through many courses washed down with gallons of champagne. It was a crazy soup-to-nuts, fruits, cheese and coffee feast (Fletcher, op. cit., 227-8).

Accounts of several crazy surrealist feasts (mostly in France) by such famous wealthy curiosities as Harry and Caresse Crosby were common gossip (see Carolin Young’s Apples of Gold in Settings of Silver, 273-295, passim). They entertained in various states of dress. For one example, while the host was painted ochre, wearing a necklace of dead pigeons and carrying a sack of live snakes, the hostess wore a blue wig, was bare-breasted and encircled her torso with a paper dragon. Guests were assured a rollicking time and much champagne.

Vienna – a city renowned for its unique blend of outré fantasy and bad politics – sponsored many crazy feasts, especially during Carnivals. For example, in January of 1913, when economic downturns were critical, Vienna’s bank employees held a Bankruptcy Ball (irony in action) for which ladies arrived costumed as balance sheets with voluptuous debits and garnished décolletage. Meanwhile, thin men were deposits, and fat men were labeled as withdrawals. The guests ended up in Debtors’ Prison (a restaurant) where they feasted on placemat doilies made of useless mortgage or stock certificates placed around centerpieces made of bunched eviction notices topped with whipped cream. Champagne was ‘purchased’ with I.O.U. chits, and a riotous if jejune time was enjoyed by all (Morton, 1-2).

Politics, religion, personal vengeance, vanity, the urge to proselytize, art movements, attempted seductions, or even simple affection have all generated notable feasts which remain in cultural inventories for ages beyond their actual occurrences. Some were documented in diaries or satirical broadsheets – merely awaiting potential rehashes by Hollywood. Before financial ruin at the end of the roaring twenties, super-wealthy Americans were famous (or infamous) for hosting wild dinner parties that served Continental dishes and strong spirits dispensed with open hands. They typically ended when zany over-spirited friends ‘got out of hand’. Oh, those frontier Americans, so feral, whether in New York or Paris!

Friends and I once created a mildly crazy costume feast entitled The Marco Polo-Match, staged as a challenge for diners to ‘match’ funds for a local museum. We covered a long table with an outsized map of Marco Polo’s journey starred in select locations. The buffet dinner featured a menu of typical dishes from the starred ‘caravanserai’ stops. Our exotic menu included dishes from China through Central Asia and on to Mediterranean Italy. Music was played from different geographical areas and guests wandered around or danced in various colorful costumes and styles. Entertainments ranged from ‘Mongolian’ shufflers to a rented ‘Moroccan’ belly dancer. Guests reported having a memorable time and ‘matched’ the funding goal. This was an easy buffet feast, since many dishes were prepared ahead, but a coherent menu was crazy-making. Music was of no help, since it roamed from clashing Chinese gongs and Indian ragas to dashes of grand opera. And entertainment (except for the guests themselves) proved difficult. The primary craziness of that feast lay in its gypsy menu and subsequent gastric clashes. The night was crowned, however, by the late surprise visit of Ravi Shankar! He played his sitar from our balcony overlooking the Pacific, and his generous musical gift made funding flourish.

Some ritualized feasts were and are orchestrated to satirize or deliberately reverse social or religious norms and customs. For example, during European medieval Feasts of Fools, masters served their servants who called them ‘mere donkeys’ and freely reviled them. There were also ‘Bean Fests,’ when employers annually hosted and paid for huge banquets for their employees whom they also slavishly served (see a famous ‘Bean Feast’ painting by Jacob Jordaen, 1640, online).

Another reversal example is a famous Jamaica Bay feast of 1890, when ‘conservative Republicans’ (is there another kind?) flew the Jolly Roger for Thanksgiving, and forced defeated candidates to serve election winners (Reported in a New York Times). Or what about Hasidic Jews who hold occasional Trink Siyde (drinking banquets), during which the men (no women, of course) reverse their normal fastidious habits, become drunk and grossly satirize the leaders and customs of the goys among whom they reside. Then too, Hallowe’en feasts have become noted for excesses and relaxed norms in food or ghostly follies, since this one-time children’s holiday has become an adult reversal festival. What goes around comes around as the saying goes, and occasional dramatic catharsis helps relieve social tensions.

And there are also cases when cross-cultural dining jokes prevail to create craziness. One example occurred during an early banquet by British ex-patriots working for the East Indian Trading Company in what became Hong Kong. The guests for these banquets were English visitors hosted by Chinese owners of vast estates. Experienced Brits enjoyed most Chinese dishes, but newcomers to Hong Kong were suspicious of alien ‘exotic’ dishes. One experienced British wit teased a worried newcomer guest by reciting a poem about Chinese food. The last verse about a Chinese entrée ended thus:

Still cautious grown, but to be sure,

His brain he set to rack,

At length he turned to a (Chinese) behind,

And pointing, cried, “Quack, quack?”

The Chinese gravely shook his head,

And firmly said, “Bow wow.” (from Project Gutenberg, Fan Kwae ebook, 42-43)

In spite of occasional lapses into craziness, eating together is still important. Commensality, the sharing of hunted or gathered food within families, clans or tribes, was embedded in human evolution during the millions of years with selective vetting of genomic factors that support human survival. Commensality became brain-linked to empathy and self-rewarding emotions until food sharing was embedded in humanity. In one sense, we were hardwired for it, and dining together still affirms intentional sociability. Some theorists even cite the early cooking of food as not only critical to human digestion, but as having shaped the hominid cranium, as well as enhanced the predisposition for food sharing.

Reversing normal eating-together patterns occurs typically when society wishes to call attention to or deny social norms for reasons like: punishment for anti-social acts (solitary confinement); to enforce military disciplines; to enhance solitary meditation (Carthusian or Trappist monks and hermits); or to celebrate feasts that reverse social class propriety.

Since dining together presumes a measure of social trust and class-specific amiability, British mystery writers have used the country weekend dinner party as the signature occasion for murder(s). A dash of poison or stab in the back, the lights go out, the butler drops a tray and voila! Cherchez la femme, the footman, or the gouty Lord upstairs in his pink tutu.

Humans seem cursed (or blessed) with the hubris of overreaching themselves to know the unknowable, to perform beyond given needs and exceed taboos, or simply to shock and épater le bourgoisie. Thus, the human penchant for innovation can transform food and feasts – which typically enact shared sustenance – into planned or unplanned bedlam. Some feasts come disguised like Trojan horses bearing dishes that signify conquest, like the last meal of choice afforded a criminal about to be assassinated as punishment. An odd and curious twist of values at best: the solitary chosen meal served to a ‘guest’ who will never digest it, since he/she will be legally murdered by the hosts in front of an audience. An entire scenario of ultimate ostracism and indeed a crazy feast.

In spite of their typical positive emotional aura, feasts have been sometimes judged as negative or at best anti-military:

Some men are born to feast, and not to fight;

Whose sluggish minds, e’en in fair honor’s field,

Still on their dinner turn -

Let such pot-boiling varlets stay at home,

And wield a flesh-hook rather than a sword.

(Joanna Baillie from the drama Basil)

Ouch! Isn’t being dubbed ‘pot-boiling varlets’ a bit rough on gourmands and innocent foodies? Fortunately, the more typical view about feasts was proposed by Robert Burton (1577-1640) in his Anatomy of Melancholy:

As much Valor is to be found in feasting as in fighting, and some of our city captains and knights will make this good, and prove it.

We incline to the latter view, even if meals can become as crazy as two-edged swords. Food can be an aphrodisiac, a bribe, a medicine, or weapon for murder. Head-to-head talks over meals can become body-to-body sighs after dessert, or end in phone calls to divorce attorneys. Each society has its own ideas about aphrodisiacs and symbolic meanings about the social rules for food preparation and serving (see Ravicz, 2000, passim).

Some foods are thought to pollute, while others are reputed to invigorate and heal. Most humans seem perverse or simply hungry enough to consume almost any organism for food. In fact, some human omnivores create grand feasts while chiding the same practice in others. Northern Chinese satirize southern Chinese in sayings like: ‘They eat anything with legs but tables, and everything that flies, with or without wings.’ Pots calling kettles whatever?

Ben Johnson (1573-1637) satirized human omnivores in his Volpone:

The head of parrots, tongues of nightingales,

The brains of peacocks, and of ostriches,

Shall be our food; and could we get the phoenix,

Though nature lost her kind, she were our dish.

It’s true that we humans are masterful omnivores. That status calls to mind an historical menu that gives substance to Johnson’s poetry, although it satirized a period of actual starvation and necessity, rather than mere human perversity. It exemplifies a genuine albeit sad historical crazy feast.

During persistent French battle sieges in the winter of 1870, starving Parisians first slaughtered their horses for food; next sold and butchered their zoo animals (there was nothing to feed them anyway); and then moved on to devour the fish in the ornamental pools of the Tuileries. Finally, only bizarre comestibles were left to assuage their hunger. Being French, a few citizens celebrated that terrible situation with – you guessed it – a perversely crazy feast. On December 4, the journal Les Nouvelles announced the following menu for a ‘grand feast’ to be attended by the mayor and select Parisian notables:

Horsemeat consommé with millet

Brochettes of dog livers à la maître d’Hotel

Minced cat meat with mayonnaise

Shoulder roast of dog in tomato sauce

Cat stew with mushrooms

Dog cutlets with peas

Rat salamis à la Robert

Roast Leg of dog flanked by rat

Wild escarole salad

Sautéed begonias

Plum pudding with horse marrow sauce

Desserts and wine.

Generated by genuine hunger, this ‘crazy’ menu satirized the traditional French preoccupation with food. No recommendation for emulation is suggested (see Colin Clair, 166-7, menu translation by the author).

Lest we think such crazy feast menus occurred only historically or in foreign societies, think again. The New York Entomological Society celebrated its 100^th Anniversary in 1992, at the Explorers Club in New York. The menu was as exotic as some of the guests. Club members were served starters featuring crickets and larvae to stimulate the appetite. They moved on to feast on mealy worm ghanouj, waxworm fritters in plum sauce, cricket and vegetable tempura, roasted Australian grubs with roast beef, and chocolate cricket torte as dessert. And they weren’t even starving! One wonders what bestial venom they chose to drink. At least their menu was cosmopolitan.

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)