Читать книгу Spice: The History of a Temptation - Jack Turner - Страница 17

If Atticus feasts in style, be is considered very grand. Juvenal, Satires (AD 100–127)

One course of a Roman meal would lay us very low, probably, and strip our palates for many days of even the crudest perceptions of flavour.

M.F.K Fisher, Serve it Forth, 1937

Familiar is not, however, how most modern readers have seen Apicius. In the last few centuries his book has provoked more bafflement than admiration, particularly in the matter of spice. ‘Perhaps the craving for excessive flavouring is an olfactory delirium, a pathological case, as yet unfathomed like the excessive craving for liquor, and, being a problem for the medical fraternity, it is only of secondary importance to gastronomy’ – such was the verdict of one of his nineteenth-century editors. And this opinion is fairly representative of the received wisdom on Roman food. Until very recently, the ancient Roman meal was generally considered on a par with other notoriously lurid displays served up for public consumption, along the lines of gladiatorial bloodbaths and public crucifixions: harsh and brutal, more a subject for revulsion than emulation or serious study. Apicius’ cookbook in particular is regularly cited as proof of rampant excess in the kitchen, nowhere more than in the taste for overpowering, palate-stripping seasonings.

Well, maybe. But it is a confident judge who reaches a verdict on the cuisine of an entire civilisation on the basis of one cookbook, and in fact there are good reasons for reading Apicius with due caution. The physiology of the human palate has not evolved appreciably in the last two millennia, and it is no more likely that the Romans regularly seared their mouths with spices than we do. Nowhere does Apicius give quantities for his recipes: all we know is that the end result was spicy, but we don’t know how spicy. Doubtless if a recipe for an Indian curry were transcribed in the same manner it would provoke similar confusion among those for whom Indian food is as alien as Roman food is to us.

In any case it is more than a little naïve to read the text simply as a practical cookbook, since its nominal author was himself a figure of some notoriety. According to a version of events circulating in the first century AD, Apicius supposedly ate his way through a vast fortune before finding himself down to his last ten million sesterces: still a healthy bank balance, but not enough for this gourmand, who took poison rather than live on a limited budget. To the satirist Juvenal (c.AD 55–c. 127) his name was mud. Christians were still more prejudiced: to the Church father Tertullian (c.AD 155–C.220) Apicius’ greed was legendary, contributing an adjective of his own for his trademark seasonings; to Sidonius (c.430–c.490), ‘Apician’ was another word for ‘glutton’. The notoriously debauched and luxurious Emperor Elagabalus (ruled AD 218–222) is recorded as having had a high regard for his works, a detail the author of the Augustan History slipped in as mutually revealing, and damning. There was in short nothing neutral about Apicius; his name carried none of the comforting, homely associations of an Elizabeth David or a Delia Smith. In any case, the contents of the cookbook that bears his name were of practical interest only to a relatively narrow segment of Roman society. Most of the population of the empire lived at or not far above the level of subsistence, and on the grounds of cost alone Apicius’ more celebrated recipes—boiled, spiced flamingo, for instance – were out of their reach.

Which was, in all likelihood, precisely the point. For like the flamingo, spices were an expensive taste. Only pepper was reasonably available to a sizeable part of the population, and even pepper, as we have seen, carried an air of exclusivity. In his Natural History Pliny gives a list of spice prices that were probably fixed by the state. Black pepper was the cheapest at four denarii the pound, white pepper nearly double that at seven. A pound of ginger cost six denarii, the same quantity of cassia anything from five to fifty. By far the most expensive were various grades of cinnamon oil, in mixed form ranging from thirty-five to three hundred denarii the pound, in its pure form a whopping 1,000 to 1,500. At this time a citizen soldier earned a wage of 225 denarii per annum, and a little later a free day-labourer could earn about two denarii per diem. In the days of the early empire a pound of black pepper, the cheapest and most available spice, would buy forty pounds of wheat, representing in the order of a few days’ wages for a member of the ‘working class’. A pound of the finest cinnamon oil would cost a centurion up to six years’ work.

They at least would not have been pouring on the spice with a heavy hand. And even for those with the money, there is plenty of evidence that Romans knew when their food was over-spiced. The irony of the now traditional images of Roman food as an exercise in baroque excess is that they were in large part the product not of Rome’s enthusiasm for bingeing but its reticence, the credit for which is due to Christian polemicists, who were virtually obliged to portray Rome as a vast, gluttonous sink – culinary history, like any other form of history, is written by the winners. But in fact a great deal of Roman writing on food is couched in the sort of language we might associate more with Zen minimalism than with a Lucullan banquet. In his eleventh Satire Juvenal lays out the criteria of the morally blameless meal: modest, rustic and home-grown, it will not break the bank. The service is simple and unaffected, without any indecent floorshows. A bracing reading of epic poetry is entertainment enough. One of the letters of Pliny the Younger reproaches his friend Septicius Clarus, who repeatedly scorned invitations to simple meals of lettuce, snails and wheatcakes chez Pliny for the flashy delights of oysters, sows’ innards, sea-urchins and Spanish dancing girls (can we blame him?). In Pliny’s opinion the ideal meal should be ‘as elegant as it is frugal’.

In this respect Pliny was far from alone – particularly, it would seem, on the subject of seasonings and spices. The comedies of Plautus (c.254–184 BC) and Terence (c.105–c.159 BC) are sprinkled with references to seasonings (condimenta), one of their stock characters the boastful cook who can reel off all the exotic flavours at his disposal: Cilician saffron, Egyptian coriander, Ethiopian cumin and, most tempting of all, silphium of Cyrene. This North African aromatic, ultimately harvested to extinction, turned Roman gourmets weak at the knees.^* There was even a musical comedy on the topic. And when the seasonings were overdone the Romans were capable of expressing themselves with a forcefulness that makes even the most hostile restaurant review seem a model of restraint. In Plautus’ Pseudolus, first produced in 191 BC, a pimp by the name of Ballio goes to hire a cook from the ‘Cooks’ Forum’ (or ‘crooks’ forum’, as the tight-fisted Ballio calls it). Through his preening chef, Plautus has fun at the expense of all the trendy cooks who employ all the latest spices and ‘celestial seasonings’, the names of which are pure fantasy: cepolendrum, maccidem, secaptidem, cicamalindrum, hapalocopide, cataractria. The names of some of these mock Greco-Latin pastiches are vaguely menacing: secaptidem, for instance, sounds like something that cuts or slashes through you (from secare, to cut or sever), and the unappetising cataractria evokes a waterfall, a portcullis, a sluice, or a type of seabird. For such mockery of novelty for novelty’s sake to get a laugh the culinary scene must have been reasonably diverse and sophisticated. (The inflated language of Plautus’ cook often comes to mind when I’m looking over the menu of a fashionable new restaurant.) Trying to justify his high fee, the cook declares of his rivals that ‘They don’t season with condiments, but with screech-owls, that devour the guests’ innards alive.’

Which is not the sort of language one would expect of a culture accustomed to drowning out its flavours with overpowering, palate-stripping seasonings. And in fact there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for Rome’s apparent addiction to spices, one that has more to do with the social than the strictly practical purpose of cookery. In Rome no more than in any other developed culture can one explain habits of cooking merely in terms of function, any more than other fashions such as dress or language can be accounted for in such narrowly utilitarian terms. Historically, people have eaten spices not simply because they taste good, but also, and sometimes more importantly, because they look good. ‘Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are,’ wrote Brillat-Savarin. For most of their history spices spoke unequivocally of taste, distinction and wealth.

For a wealthy Roman the dinner table (technically, the couch, the dining table being a medieval innovation) was one of the most effective stages on which he could display his sophistication and generosity. Public or semi-public events such as the banquet offered the perfect opportunity for flaunting them, where the cost and flamboyance of a dish were a proclamation of opulence and liberality. At his banquets the emperor Elagabalus mixed together jewels, apples and flowers, tossing as much food out of the window as was served to his guests. He ‘loved to hear the prices of the food served at his table exaggerated, claiming it was an appetiser for the banquet’. He fed foie gras to his dogs, served truffles in place of pepper, ground pearls on the fish and dished up gold-encrusted peas.

Elagabalus was an extreme and indeed a pathological case, yet his appetites exemplified an ingrained tendency of Roman society. Romans of a certain class generally took an uncomplicated attitude to the relationship between wealth and happiness, an ethos well summarised by Apuleius: ‘Truly blessed – doubly blessed! – are those that trample gems and jewellery underfoot.’ A single adjective, beatus, sufficed for both wealth and happiness. To those inclined to agree, display at the table was nothing less than a social imperative. Only the poor or miserly patron stinted in his hospitality, at the expense of influence and regard, whether in his own eyes or the client’s. Juvenal’s fifth satire is addressed to the contemptible client who accepts second-rate hospitality and a miserly meal of fish bloated on Tiber sewage, ‘like some public buffoon’. Even the host’s satirically sentient lobster disdains such ignoble guests.

For those keen to avoid such a fate, whether a host out to impress or a client on the receiving end, spices were a godsend. They were expensive and exotic, not far behind the gems Elagabalus tossed from his window. Elagabalus himself perfumed his swimming pool with spices. They were the ideal accoutrements of the flashy gourmands who, in Juvenal’s words,

scour air, sea and land for tasty morsels,

and cost is never an object; pry more closely, and you find

the more they spend, the greater their pleasure.

It was doubly impressive that spices were, in nutritional terms, superfluous: prime examples of what Lucan (AD 39–65) saw as ‘what luxury, frenzied by an inane love of display has sought out throughout the entire globe, unbidden by hunger’. The Romans certainly did not invent gastronomic snobbery, but they raised it to a high art. Athenaeus (c.AD 200–?) dedicated a book to the subject, The Deipnosophists or Banquet of the Learned, a fifteen-volume marathon of recherché commentary on matters gastronomic through the course of a night-long banquet.

In social terms, then, the cost of spices was less a liability than an asset. They were moreover ideally suited for the equally ancient inclination to pretentiousness. One of the Satires of Horace (65–8 BC) mocks an absurdly affected banquet hosted by a certain Nasidienus Rufus, who waxes lyrical over the dinner he serves. For the appetiser there is wild boar ‘captured while a gentle south wind was blowing’. Pepper – the white variety is de rigueur – features in one of the main courses, a dish of lamprey served in a sauce of live shrimp, described by the host in language worthy of a modern gourmet magazine. His lamprey,

he said, was caught while still pregnant; had it been taken later, the flesh would have been inferior. These are the ingredients of the sauce: extra-virgin olive oil from Venafrum; fish sauce from Spain; a five-year-old wine, but Italian-grown, and added during the cooking – if you add it after the cooking a Chian vintage suits best – white pepper, not without a little vinegar, made from fermented wines from Lesbos. I who was the one who first pointed out that you should boil arugula and bitter elecampane^* in the sauce; whereas Curtillus prefers sea-urchins, unwashed …

For Nasidienus it was apparently the sheer difficulty of obtaining ingredients that counted. Elagabalus refused to eat fish while at the coast, yet demanded it when he found himself far inland. The emperor’s insistence on novelty could take a sadistic turn:

By way of entertainment he used to propose to his guests that they should invent new sauces for seasoning the food, and he would offer a great prize to he whose sauce he liked, even giving him a silk robe which was at that time regarded as a rarity and an honour. If however he disliked the sauce, he would order that its creator would have to keep eating it until he came up with a better one.

But it is a character from fiction who is most closely identified with the Roman penchant for culinary exuberance. The Cena Trimalchionis, or Trimalchio’s banquet, is a mid-first-century work by Petronius (?–c.AD 66), bon vivant, courtier and style-consultant to the emperor Nero – a position that presumably left him well-informed on the subject of lavish dinners. The action of the Cena revolves around a dinner laid on by Trimalchio, a fabulously wealthy parvenu who has made a pile from speculative voyages – exactly, as it happens, the milieu of the India trader. (Similarly engorged characters reappear many centuries later, in the time of the Dutch and English East India companies.) Trimalchio’s guests are treated, if this is the mot juste, to a banquet of toe-curling vulgarity. The meal is part theatrical stunt show, part gastronomic marathon. There is a daunting variety of courses, the only common element a stress on the exotic, the unexpected and the bizarre. One guest tries the bear meat and ‘practically spews her guts out’. Another, impressed, whispers to his neighbour that everything – even the pepper! – is home-grown (without a greenhouse, a botanical impossibility). If you want hen’s milk, Trimalchio can get it. He orders mushroom spawn from India and serves boar stuffed with live birds that fly out when the beast is cut open. There are dormice seasoned with honey and smoking sausages resting on a silver grill above ‘coals’ of plums and pomegranates. A slave brings in a basket containing a wooden hen atop a pile of eggs, at which point Trimalchio wonders out loud if the eggs are half-cooked. The narrator tries to crack one and finds it made of pastry. He is about to toss it aside, thinking there is nothing worthwhile inside, when he fishes about within and pulls out a figpecker swimming in peppered egg yolk.

The spice, evidently, was in keeping with the flashy and expensive display. Another dish, borne in by four slaves, consists of heaped plump fowls topped with sows’ bellies. Perched at the apex is a hare to which wings are attached in imitation of Pegasus, the winged steed of myth – the effect not unlike a broiler hen trussed up as Superman. Live fishes flop about this pile of flesh in a slew of peppered wine sauce. The spicy sauce is little better than the bear meat, but then a display of taste was never the host’s intention.

Thanks in no small measure to the brilliance of Petronius’ creation, the lurid hues of Trimalchio’s debauch continue to shape modern images of the Roman meal. But as Trimalchio’s unfortunate guest is at pains to point out, to many Romans this was all a bit much. A powerful purist aesthetic ran through Roman culture, indeed was basic to a cherished if increasingly tarnished self-image until the final days of the empire. Viewed in this light not merely spices but for that matter all seasonings were superfluous, luxurious and even harmful fripperies. The correct purpose of food was nutrition; all else was vanity. Cicero (106–43 BC) was of the opinion that the best spice for his dinner was – or should be – hunger. He even claimed that he preferred the smell of earth to that of saffron. In his Tusculan Disputations he relates the salutary tale of the visit to Sparta of Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse, a town famous in antiquity for the quality and sophistication of its cooks. Spartan food was equally stereotypical, but to the other extreme. This was, in short, an encounter made to order for edification: the archetypal rich sybarite meets the dour ascetics, famed for their renunciation of all pleasure. On being served a stodgy black broth Dionysius complains that the meal is not to his taste, whereupon the Spartan cook puts the visitor in his place: ‘Small wonder,’ he replies, ‘for the condimenta are lacking.’ ‘And what condimenta are they?’ asks the visitor, obligingly walking into the trap. ‘Honest toil in hunting, sweat, a run to the Eurotas [the local stream], hunger and thirst,’ is the tart response, ‘for with these things the Spartans season their feasts.’

Self-evidently, the message of such exemplary incidents ran deeper than a straightforward declaration of personal preferences. To Romans such as Cicero, how and what you ate was an issue of the utmost ethical importance. Diet was a yardstick of, and in some sense shaped, moral worth. It was Trimalchio’s point inverted: you were what you ate. And what a shocking contrast present indulgence formed to the rugged heroes of the past! Historians and satirists never tired of comparing contemporary debauch with ancient virtue. Manius Curius Dentatus, conqueror of Pyrrhus, is reported to have cooked his own vegetables. The emperor Augustus, according to Suetonius, liked his dinner plain and unaffected; the Stoic Cato declared that he only ate meat so as to be strong enough to fight for the state. The past was tough, frugal and pristine; the present, luxurious and bloated.