“Know and understand; it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a man, but that which comes out. . . .”
(Book of Matthew, 15:10)
BLASPHEMY MENU
APÉRITIF
Brandy “Masai” Alexander
Fresh cow blood mixed with ice, milk, and brandy.
FIRST COURSE
Fritatta with Marrano Sausage
With Lenten eggs and kosher pork sausage.
SECOND COURSE
Iguana Carpaccio
Hibiscus-fed iguana served with a Catholic sauce.
MAIN
Adafina with Matzoh Balls
A heretic stew of meats and chickpeas.
DESSERT
Biscuit de Jesus
Unleavened wafers with naturally sweet manna jam.
The Sacred Act of Eating
If you deconstruct most religious ceremonies, you wind up with a man dressed suspiciously like a chef serving some kind of snack. Eating is imbued with religious meaning, and some anthropologists believe the rituals and symbols of organized religion grew directly from dining etiquette. Most religions forbid a vast array of dishes as a way to both give their followers a coherent identity and discourage them from mingling with disbelievers who might plant the seed for blasphemous thinking. The Old Testament devotes most of the Book of Leviticus to listing blasphemous dishes; one rule, prohibiting the mixing of meat with milk, was considered so important that it was apparently among the original Ten Commandments. Christianity, however, is largely free of these taboos, an apparent attempt by Christ and his followers to depart from the mainstream of religious tradition (or maybe they figured it would just make conversion easier). Which isn’t to say they weren’t fussy eaters—devout Christians routinely swallowed five times when they drank, once each for the five wounds of Christ, and every morsel was sliced into four parts, three for the Holy Trinity and one for Mary. During the 1600s, the Spanish Inquisition even had “food police” roaming the streets, sniffing for heretic cooking. But Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Judaism still retain their forbidden foods and the echoes of these beliefs have led to some of the more bizarre chapters in how we worship our Head Chef.
The Jewish Pig
Once upon a time, Jesus bumped into a rabbi sitting by the side of the road. The rabbi had just been arguing with his friends about the rumors that this guy Christ was the Messiah. So he decided to test His powers. “If you are truly the Messiah,” the skeptical rabbi said to Jesus, “then you can surely see what lies beneath this barrel next to me.” The rabbi believed some pigs were napping there. Unbeknownst to him, however, the pigs had been replaced by his own son. When Jesus told him that his son was sleeping under the barrel, the rabbi sneered—some Messiah! Christ tried to convince the rabbi of the truth, but the rabbi would not listen. So Christ simply turned the child into a pig and walked away. It’s a relatively benign fable told by early European Christians to explain the Jewish aversion to pork as a fear Jews have of eating their own children. But the tale grew over the centuries into a series of beliefs that implied that Jews were actually a subhuman race that had sprung from swine. Christian Poles believed that Jewish women had horizontal vaginas, like sows, and that they carried their babies for only six months. Butchers renamed the most succulent part of the pig (a single vertebrae near the base of the spine) the Jewess, or Damsel in the Swine, and some parts of Germany created a “cloven foot” tax exclusively for Jewish visitors. Other cantons required them to swear to tell the truth in court while standing on the flayed skin of a sow, i.e., to literally swear “on their mother’s body.” If found guilty, Jews were hung upside down, as opposed to by the neck, in a parody of the way one slaughters and bleeds a hog. In a bizarre reversal, some pigs received court trials as humans: the famous French hog of Falaise was tried for murder while wearing a jacket, breeches, and gloves. When found guilty of murdering a child—an accusation frequently leveled at Jews—the animal was hung while wearing a human mask.
Then a curious figure called der Judensau (the Jewish pig) began to appear among the gargoyles guarding the churches of Central Europe. It showed Jewish people sucking on the teats of a pig and gave the Church’s official seal of approval to the Jews-as-pigs myth. Peasants spread rumors that circumcision, then only performed by Jews, was actually a castration like the one performed on male pigs to help keep their flesh edible. The pig castrators of the French Pyrenees adopted a uniform parodying that worn by the Hebrew mohel, who performs the act of circumcision, including the mohel’s trademark red silk belt. Cutting off part of the ear was a traditional way of marking a pig whose flesh was inedible. So officials began mutilating “inferior humans,” like Jews, in the same way, and the phrase “here’s your father’s ear” eventually became a popular anti-Semite jeer. The upside to this insanity was that it allowed the Romans to forgo the ritual murder that had kicked off their Easter rites. The tradition had been to put an elderly Jewish man into a barrel lined with spikes and roll him down the side of Mount Testaccio, according to Claudine Fabre-Vassas’s mesmerizing La Bête singulière (“The Singular Beast”). By 1312 Jews and swine were considered so interchangeable that a pair of pigs were substituted for the gentleman, albeit only after being dressed in fine silk suits and driven in an elegant carriage to the mountaintop. Rome’s Jewish community, of course, was forced to pay for the carriage.
The development of printing turned the Judensau into “a forceful image which kept imprinting itself on the mind, conditioning, indeed stereotyping, an attitude toward Jews,” according to Isaiah Shachar’s study of the subject, and soon graced the covers of popular travel guides. The printed version, however, had been “improved” by the addition of an elderly rabbi who was pictured eating excrement jetting out of the pig’s rear. The father of Germany’s Protestant revolution, Martin Luther, expounded upon this hateful bit of pornography in 1543. “The Rabbi,” he wrote, “bows and stares with great attentiveness [into the pig’s rectum] and into the Talmud [Judaic holy book] as if he wanted to read something intricate and extraordinary . . . and the letters that fall from this [they] gobble down.” Luther’s “analysis” was embellished over the next few centuries. One bestseller explained that in the past “pious Jews did not approve of the sow for eating [but] today the Jews ignore this and make her their mistress.” Another used the Judensau image as proof that “the sow is the brother to the Jews.” The concept was such a hit in Germany that Christian house painters hid the image on the walls of their Jewish customers by covering it with a layer of watery plaster that would eventually peel away and “miraculously” reveal the “true nature of Judaism.”
The Jewish dietary taboo against consuming blood underwent a similar metamorphosis and anti-Semites claimed that Jews were actually obsessed with blood because they used it in their religious ceremonies. The best blood was said to come from Christian children, a belief that became so deep-rooted that it was still causing riots among Polish Americans in the 1920s. This cocktail of bigotry, fear, and ignorance was unfortunately amplified by some Jewish dietary laws that limited communication between the two groups; followers were banned from eating nonkosher foods, or anything touched by a nonbeliever. Sharing wine between the religions was also taboo in some sects, as was eating together. “The Christians interpreted these ancient laws—formulated long before Christianity—as meaning that to a Jew everything Christian was unclean” wrote historian Will Durant, and retaliated by banning “Jews and harlots” from touching food in the market. Kosher meat could only be displayed in stalls selling diseased flesh.
These inversions of Hebraic food taboos would be laughable were their ramifications not so ghastly. “If it was impossible for men in the age of Enlightenment and later to conceive of Jews as their fellow humans it was not just because of religious differences,” wrote Shachar. “It seems clear that the Judensau— honoring the Jew more or sometimes less humorously with porcine ancestry—had been contributing to a transfer of the Jews to a totally different, non-human category . . . or as the German would put it, unsereiner.” It was the unsereiner concept that Nazi scientists modernized so effectively with the use of scientific jargon. “Non Nordic man,” wrote the authors of the Nazi textbook New Fundamental Problems of Racial Research, “occupies an intermediate zone between Nordic man and the animal kingdom,” and is worthy of extermination. Interviews with Germans involved in Nazi massacres indicate that many felt no revulsion at the murders themselves but only at the accompanying mess, which they compared to working in a butcher shop.
Human beings magically transformed into animals are the stuff of fairy tales. But racist propaganda is just that, bedtime stories told to frightened adults, and Hitler was merely a master storyteller who brought the medieval fable of the “Jewish pig” to life. First he used the quasi-science of eugenics to reclassify the Jews as a subhuman species. He then forced Christian women accused of fornicating with Jews to wear signs identifying them as sows. Then he moved the Jewish people into sty-like ghettoes and built a netherworld of slaughterhouses where millions of these “animals” were butchered. In the end, however, it was not the Jews that Hitler’s fantasy transformed into animals, but his German followers. In the famous study of Nazi atrocities Violence Without Moral Restraint, Herbert Kelman points out that when people dehumanize their victims in order to rationalize violence, it is the aggressors who become “increasingly dehumanized . . . until they lose the capacity to act as moral beings.” The Führer must have forgotten that fairy tales tend to have moral endings.
Dinner with the Spanish Inquisition
“The said Beatriz cooked and had cooked adafina and Jewish cuisine with meat, onions, chickpeas, spices all crushed. . . .” This excerpt from the trial of a housewife named Beatriz Lopez is a good indication of just how perilous a dinner party could be in sixteenth-century Spain. Catholic priests roamed the streets of Madrid sniffing for Jewish cookery; friends invited for dinner might be informers and show up with pork sausage to see if you would resist adding it to the stew you were cooking. To serve a Jewish dish, or even to use certain ingredients (like oil), was considered proof of heresy and invariably led to being burned at the stake. The Spanish Inquisition even published a kind of cookbook so Christian neighbors or servants could recognize suspicious cooking techniques. The Jews the Catholics were seeking—called Marranos (pork) because they’d feigned conversion to Christianity by publicly eating bacon—countered by developing fake food like their chorizo di Marrano, a sausage that omitted pork and substituted red-colored spices for blood. If an officer of the Spanish Inquisition dropped by a Marrano’s house, the inhabitant would pop one of these babies into a bun and have lunch to confuse the officer. People, both Catholic and Jewish, took to hanging hams outside their front door to ward off suspicion.
In a study of women accused of heresy by the Inquisition, scholar Renee Levine determined that almost all of their “crimes” consisted of cooking forbidden dishes and that they took the risk because, with all Jewish institutions destroyed, these household practices were the sole “remaining device for transmitting knowledge” of Jewish culture. The dish most often mentioned in the Inquisition’s transcripts was a delicious stew of meat, chickpeas, and cabbage called adafina. It was a particularly incriminating meal because adafina was designed to cook overnight so as to avoid doing any work on the Sabbath in accordance with Jewish law. The fact that matzoh balls were one of the main ingredients couldn’t have helped matters.
The following recipe for cocido madrileño comes from Juan Carlos Rodriguez, the chef and owner of a New York restaurant, 1492 Food, which specializes in modern versions of heretic Spanish cuisine (1492 was the year Jews and Muslims were expelled from Spain). Ironically, the Jewish adafina (of Moroccan background) became cocido, the national dish of Spain. Both are traditionally served in three courses, first the broth with the relleno meatballs or matzoh balls, then the vegetables, then the meat. The trial of Ms. Lopez seemed to hinge on this fact, as the prosecutor noted in his charges by writing, “after long cooking, the broth was extracted and the meat awaited . . . and thus she ate it with great devotion that [she] had for the laws of Moses.” Beatriz Lopez was burned alive before the Spanish elite in the mid-1500s. A choir sang hymns to drown out her screams.
Make the Relleno first.
10 ounces (300 grams) chickpeas
1 pound (1⁄2 kilogram) veal shank
4 marrow bones (about 1⁄2 inch thick)
1 bone from a serrano ham
1⁄2 morcilla de arroz (blood sausage)
2 pounds (1 kilogram) cabbage in quarters or large chunks
1 pound ( 1⁄2 kilogram) carrots, thickly chopped
1⁄4 Cornish game hen per person, cut into quarters
6 smallish potatoes, peeled
1⁄2 Spanish chorizo sausage
5 ounces (150 grams) tocino (whole bacon)
6 ounces (180 grams) fideo pasta
Salt
Freshly ground pepper
Soak chickpeas overnight, rinse, and pick over. Wrap in a cheesecloth bag and set aside.
Put the veal, marrow bones, ham bone, blood sausage, cabbage, and carrots into about three quarts (three liters) fresh, cold water. Bring to a boil and skim fat. Adjust heat to low and cook uncovered for approximately two and a half hours. Add chickpeas with hen or chicken (chickpeas should be on top), and cook another hour on low. Add peeled whole potatoes, chorizo sausage, and tocino. Simmer another thirty minutes or until potatoes are tender. Remove all ingredients and put the broth back on low heat and skim again. Season with salt and pepper to taste. You should have approximately two quarts (2 liters) of broth. Serve broth with relleno and noodles first. Then serve chickpeas and vegetables as a second course. Finish with the meats (some like to pile vegetables and chickpeas in the center of plate and surround with meat). Dampen with broth. Serves 6.
Relleno
1⁄4 pound lean ground pork, lamb, or veal
1 egg, beaten
1⁄2 teaspoon thyme
1⁄2 teaspoon oregano
Salt
Fresh black pepper
1 cup bread crumbs or matzoh
Olive oil (for browning)
Combine all ingredients in a bowl and form into about 12 meatballs. Brown in hot olive oil, and set aside, then boil briefly with the fideo noodles for the soup course.
If you wish to make this dish kosher, simply replace all pork products with approximately two pounds of boneless lean lamb, cubed. Replace bacon and sausage with one veal foot or four lamb’s feet. Add approximately a half dozen cloves of minced garlic and six raw eggs in the shell and approximately a tablespoon of ground cumin, and cook as before. The eggs are cooked like hardboiled eggs in the broth with the other ingredients, but served peeled and cut in half. If you wish, you can cook this for eighteen hours on very, very low heat (use a heat diffuser) or in an oven at 170°F. You should check from time to time to make sure that the liquid covers all ingredients.
The Kosher Question
There is so little agreement on the meaning of Jewish dietary laws that a New York court recently declared it unconstitutional for the government to certify a business as kosher. The rules, they said, were so incomprehensible it would force government employees to interpret religious doctrine thus violating the separation between church and state. In fact, the only thing that seems relatively clear is that the regime known as kosher, or kashruth , and its Islamic brother halal, both derive loosely from the biblical Book of Leviticus, which details the “beasts which ye shall eat among all the beasts that are on the earth.” It lists about one hundred animals from rabbits to salamanders, but the underlying premise is relatively simple. God created the world in three sections, earth, water, and sky. The religious chefs of the day interpreted this to mean that an animal that lived within one of those realms was the Lord YHWH’s pet and suitable for dinner. Beasts that straddled the line, however, came from the Devil’s menagerie. So, mammals that are cloven-footed and chew the cud are kosher, but the pig, which has a cloven foot but apparently doesn’t chew his food properly, is so blasphemous that some Jewish texts refer to it as “that which should not be named.” Likewise, a fish with scales and fins belongs to the sea element and is kosher, whereas an amphibious salamander is not.
At any rate, that’s the interpretation of some cultural theorists. Scientists persist in speculating that the antiporcine clause relates to pork’s tendency to harbor trichinosis. Never mind that this disease is not necessarily fatal, or that cows and lambs were responsible for the much deadlier anthrax plagues. Historians fancy the notion that Jewish pig phobia stems from their stint as slaves in Egypt during the time when the cult of the god Seth held pigs to be exalted beasts. This may also explain the curious reports that certain Jewish cults used to have secret pork feasts once a year. According to scholar Frederick Simoons, when Seth was overthrown, his beloved spareribs became taboo for Egyptians, save for a yearly feast held at the full moon, a habit some Jews might have picked up. Why the full moon? Because the original sacred animal was not the pig, but the similar-looking hippo, which lives on the Moon. Hippos live on the Moon? Well, yes; the idea is that while some Pharaoh was meditating on the full moon reflected in the Nile, a hippo emerged from the reflection. . . .
For obvious reasons, most rabbis have given up on finding a coherent explanation. Even the great twelfth-century rabbinical scholar Maimonides, in his appropriately titled book Guide for the Perplexed, suggested that devout Jews should follow the food taboos but view them as an object of meditation and “whatever is possible for him to do in order to find a reason for [following] it, he should.” The result of this advice is the delightfully Jewish chaos noted by the New York Supreme Court: some sects ban certain types of fat or particular veins or tomatoes. Some even express reservations about women suffering a yeast infection over the holiday because it goes against the Passover ban on fermented substances. Only two questions, however, need concern the civilized creature. Why is kosher wine so damn awful (it’s sometimes boiled); and, if Muslims and Jews are the only people whose laws make them (almost) each other’s ideal dinner guests, why can’t they get along?
The Lawyer in Us
“One must be careful not to be taken in by appearances, even at Lent feasts held by great ecclesiastics, where scandal should have been easily avoided,” wrote an Italian courtier in the eighteenth century. “I remember one where they appeared to be serving white soups, red mullet, sole and trout.” This note referred to a series of blasphemous feasts held by Roman priests who’d disguised dishes to accord with Catholic Lenten laws restricting diners to fish and vegetables. The cream soups the letter described turned out to be made of finely minced capon. That luscious trout on the table, head still on, was actually pheasant covered in “scales” made of almonds.
This is a rather artistic example of what people will do to circumvent dietary taboos. There are plenty of simpler examples. The clergy’s classifying of newborn rabbits as “fish” suitable for eating during Lent created such a demand that it led to the modern method of rabbit domestication in pens because they had to be killed as soon as they’d popped out of mama to qualify for the exemption.
Missionaries in South America displayed similar creativity by classifying iguanas as fish because the reptile’s propensity for sunning itself in riverside trees revealed its “true nature.” The iguana’s refined diet of hibiscus flowers made it a welcome addition to fasting clerics, according to one happy abbot, who compared the flavor of saddle of iguana to sweet rabbit, “ugly but very tasty when you get over your disgust.” Modern-day Japanese prove themselves no slackers at parsing a rule when they claim their slaughter of whales to provide whale bacon occurs in the course of legitimate scientific research. Hypocritical gibberish, of course, but no more so than that of Americans who bemoan the damage done to the environment by this whale slaughter, and then serenely allow the massive deforestation of Brazilian forests in order to ensure their supply of cheap hamburger meat.
The various vegetarian cults, however, are the most egregious hairsplitters. The Buddha himself put a “don’t ask/don’t tell” clause in his ban on meat, essentially stating that believers may enjoy osso bucco every day of the week if they had no direct and immediate knowledge—preferably typed and notarized— that the meat dish was prepared specifically for them. It’s a loophole thousands of hungry Buddhists have driven through. The Tibetans used it to create a caste of Untouchable Muslim butchers, apparently reasoning that a Buddhist is simply incapable of truly understanding what goes on in the mind of a nonbeliever. Others used the precedent to semisanctify top sirloin, arguing that since a chicken and a cow have equal souls, it is better to slaughter a cow, and feed forty, than to slaughter a chicken and feed, at best, four. Pound per soul, the reasoning goes, it’s a karmic bargain. The real legal eagles are the Buddhist monks of Thailand, some of whom have decided they can eat fish because they do not kill the creature so much as “remove it from the water.”
Perhaps the earliest example of this comes to us in a bit of dialogue from Greece around 500 B.C.
FIRST MAN The Pythagoreans eat no living thing.
SECOND MAN But Epicharides the Pythagorean eats dog.
FIRST MAN Only after he’s killed it.
Lent Egg
Lent is the only notable Christian dietary law, a forty-day regime leading up to Easter, during which one is supposed to forgo strong food like meat and eggs and even milk. Pretty mild stuff, despite which the counterfeiting of food for Lent became a minor art form in the Middle Ages. There was fake bacon in which salmon was made into a kind of pâté laced with pureed pike fish and almond milk to replicate the pork fat. The following curiosity comes from A Noble Boke of Cookry: For a Prynch [Prince] Houssolde or Another Estately Houssolde, a fifteenth-century cookbook largely devoted to this counterfeit cuisine. The translation, done by a Mrs. Alexander Napier in 1882, leaves much of the original medieval spelling intact, as have I (with some clarifications).
To roft egs in Lent take and blowe out the mete [meat, i.e., yolk and white] at the end of the egg and washe the shelles with warme water. Then take thick milk of almond and set it to the fyere till it be at the boiling. Then put it in a canvas and let the water run out and keep all that hangeth in the clothe and gadur it to gedure [gather it together] in a dyshe. Then put it to white sugar and colour one half with saffron and [add to flavor] poudered ginger and cinnamon. Then put some of the white [unflavored] in the eggshell and in the middle put in of the yellow to be the yolk and fill it up with white. Then sit it in the fire to roast. To fifteen eggs take a pound of almond milk and a quarter of ginger and cinnamon.
A Well-Risen Messiah
Jewish cooks weren’t the only ones persecuted for heretic cooking. Christian Europe actually tore itself in two because of a squabble over a cookie recipe. A wafer, actually—or would that be biscuit?—the one representing Jesus and served at the High Mass. The Orthodox wing of the church, which dominates Eastern Europe, Russia, and Greece, had always served a well-risen, chewy Son of God at their Mass. The Romans preferred a flat, crackerlike treat. In A.D. 1054 two leaders finally got together to create a unified recipe. There was plenty of room for compromise, but judging from the two men’s preconfab correspondence, the impending disaster was probably unavoidable.
“Unleavened bread is dead and lifeless,” went one letter from the Orthodox side, represented by Michael Cerularius, “because it lacks leaven, which is the soul, and salt, which is the mind of the Messiah.” Nonsense, had been the reply from the Catholics’ Cardinal Humbert. “If you do not with stubborn mind stand in opposition to the plain truth,” he wrote to Cerularius, “you will have to think as we do and confess that during the meal (the Last Supper) it was unleavened bread Jesus Christ distributed.”
The exact reasons for these different recipes are rather complex. The Orthodox Church believes that the leavening that makes bread rise represents the life force of Christ. Greek housewives still claim their breads rise by the will of Christ, in recollection of his ascension from the dead, and they lace special loaves with dried flowers from the altar. The Roman Catholic recipe comes from the matzoh bread Hebrews serve at Passover, a flat, crackerish fellow that was left unleavened because the Jews were in such a rush to get out of Egypt that there was no time to let the bread rise. Not that the Vatican was going to cop to “Jewish tendencies”—one of Humbert’s main kvetches was that Orthodox leaders were “persecuting [Catholics] by calling them Matzists” because they used matzoh bread at Mass.
The two sides could easily have split the difference and opted for pita: delicious, easily stuffed, and only partially risen. But the negotiations didn’t really get off on the right foot. In fact, it’s not clear they ever got off at all. The Catholic Humbert, renowned for his unpleasant disposition, arrived in Istanbul after a long journey and was already furious over a letter he thought Cerularius had written condemning the Catholic wafer. Cerularius, however, had never even seen the letter, much less penned it—a Bulgarian archbishop was the author—and when some foreigner showed up at his house unannounced, shrieking about crackers and a mysterious letter, Cerularius failed to extend his fullest hospitality. It seems the Catholic Humbert had forgotten to write he was dropping by to discuss some theological disputes, and Cerularius came to the conclusion that Humbert was a spy posing as a papal ambassador. After a few days of cooling his heels in the Patriarch’s reception room, Humbert packed his bags and headed back to Rome. On his way out he declared Cerularius, who was the head of the Orthodox Church, a blasphemer and emphasized his displeasure by nailing the order of excommunication to the Orthodox Church’s holiest spot, the altar of St. Sophia in Istanbul. “Mad Michael [Cerularius], inappropriately named Patriarch,” began the letter, and that was the nicest part. Cerularius returned the favor by declaring the Romans heretics for their matzist tendencies. He also banned shared meals between Orthodox and Catholic clergy.
This dispute split the world’s most powerful organization in half and set in motion events that would divide Europe for centuries. It was this dispute that the Crusaders cited when they defiled the Orthodox Church by setting a prostitute on Cerularius’s throne in 1204. The division between the two churches also sufficiently weakened the Christian empire to allow the Ottoman Turks to conquer Eastern Europe. This, in turn, laid the groundwork for Russian domination of Eastern Europe and set the boundaries of the Soviet Union’s Iron Curtain. Even the recent Serbian conflict was affected—the Russians were reluctant to bomb Serbia because they both belonged to the Orthodox Church and shared a long history of being dressed down by self-righteous hypocrites from the West. The two churches finally made up nine-hundred-plus years later in 1965.
For What We Are About to Receive
We all know the routine of thanking Him before we break bread. “Oh, Lord, on this day/We Thank Ye for our daily bread. . . .” It’s only good manners: God created the world that we feed upon and so as good guests we have to thank him. But not everyone views the situation that way. The Sherpa people of Nepal consider the gods as the guests, and moreover ones who had better behave Themselves. “They make the explicit analogy between the offering ritual and social hospitality,” writes anthropologist Sherry Ortner. “The people are hosts, the gods their guests . . . who they make happy so they will want to help humanity.” These Sherpa ceremonies start off a bit like a frat party. Incense is burned, loud music is played, and beer is poured out the window so “the guys” (normally local entities) will know there’s a happening. When the supernatural guests arrive, they are invited to seat themselves in bread-and-butter sculptures that are up to seven feet high called tormas. To make sure there’re no gate-crashers, similar bread-and-butter sculptures, gyeks, are baked for the demons and then tossed out the temple door as far as they can be thrown. Then an appetizer, usually seared fat from a goat’s heart, is served to the guests, followed by a smorgasbord of tso (cooked) dishes. This party, however, is not about buttering up the deities and earning goodwill. The Sherpas are putting their guests under an obligation. “I am offering you the things which you eat,” their prayer goes, “now You must do whatever I demand.” Lest the gods think this thinly veiled coercion presumptuous, the Sherpas remind them it is the sacred duty of all guests not to offend their hosts, saying “that is not my order, but you have promised to work for me in the beginning of time. . . .”
O, Dog
“No one’s eating dogs anymore,” said Don Climent, head of San Francisco’s International Rescue Committee. “My Laotian clients just needed information on what’s acceptable to Americans in relationship to dogs. Besides, I think they were more interested in the squirrels.”
Climent was explaining to me how it was that a group of dog lovers from Laos caused a national panic in the early 1980s. It started one day in August when some cops found five headless dogs lying in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. As the officers stood puzzling over the situation (now if I were a dog, where would I hide my head?), they noticed a number of Asians armed with bows and arrows wandering about. The dogs, it seemed, belonged to the Laotians in the gustatory sense. The incident appeared in the papers, and overnight Californians realized that a tribe of quasi-cannibals had invaded their state. Filipino sailors were accused of sneaking into suburbs for nocturnal dog hunts. A lady in Sacramento discovered her children’s favorite pooch hanging by its tail at a neighborhood barbecue, skinned, flayed, and waiting for the kiss of the smoking grill. A San Francisco man found his spaniel in a Chinese neighbor’s garage under suspicious circumstances. A law protecting pets was immediately proposed. Politicians fumed, immigrant groups rationalized, and a brown-and-white springer spaniel named Ringo appeared before the California Assembly wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with “I’m for Loving NOT for EATING!” It all went to prove that there are two distinct species of dog in the world. There’s the Western dog, hair flying in the wind as he rushes to the rescue, a pampered, petted deity Europeans revered so much they used dog blood in early transfusions. The other kind of dog is also loved, preferably roasted, sometimes sautéed. The Chinese call them “hornless goats” or “fragrant meat,” and in some restaurants you can pick out which puppy you want cooked for dinner. Connoisseurs recommend red-haired mutts with sprightly ears and black tongues for their veal-like flesh. Dog is an honorary dish, and the Vietnamese say, “It’s going ill for the dogs,” if a legal dispute is dragging on, because it was the custom to serve roast pup at all negotiations.
The Asian cultures are the only modern dog eaters, but the most developed canine cuisine belongs to the people of the Pacific Isles and the New World. The Aztecs had huge puppy farms in which they bred a stocky chocolate-brown pooch related to the hairless Chihuahua. “There were four hundred large and small dogs tied up in crates, some already sold, some still for sale,” wrote Spanish missionary Fray Diego Duran in the early 1500s. “And there were such piles of ordure that I was overwhelmed! When a Spaniard who was totally familiar with that region saw my amazement he asked ‘But why are you astonished, my friend? I have never seen such a meager supply of dogs as today!’ There was a tremendous shortage of them!” The Polynesians and Hawaiians had similar ranches where they raised poi dogs so toothsome that they were largely reserved for the king. The now-extinct poi was a curious creature: bug-eyed and unnaturally plump, it was a strict vegetarian that lived on nothing but sweet potatoes and soup. European visitors described them as semi-amphibious and so lacking in energy they eschewed barking in favor of listless little yelps. They were not, however, mere livestock. Dogs were often spiritually tied to a specific child, like a pet, and were breast-fed with the child at the mother’s breast (a courtesy still offered to young piglets in some areas). If a child died, his or her puppy was killed and buried alongside to guard the infant during its journey in the afterlife. If it was the dog that passed away first, its teeth became a necklace the child wore to ward off sorcery. Dinner, however, was the more common fate. The puppy was usually suffocated by blocking its mouth and nostrils for fifteen minutes. Its delicious blood was made into a pudding by adding hot stones to the liquid, but the body was roasted luau-style in a pit covered with banana leaves and earth. “Few there were of the nicest of us,” wrote Sir Joseph Banks of his time with Captain Cook’s eighteenth-century expedition “but allowed a South Sea dog was next to an English lamb.”
The when, where, how, and why of this split in humanity’s feelings for the species is still hotly debated. Dogs are thought to have initially accepted humans as near-equals about 12,000 years ago, although some put the date as early as 125,000 years ago. The first alliance was over hunting, with humans relying on the wild dogs’ keen sense of smell, while the dogs benefited from our weapons and flexible fingers. Canine historian Mary Thurston reports that as late as 1870 Native American hunters were followed by wolves for weeks, “at a distance of half a mile or so and at night, when he [the Indian] lies down to sleep, they will also crouch at a respectful distance.” This business relationship turned personal when people adopted pups left orphaned by the packs that had begun to hang about the human tribes, a phenomenon which still occurs between Australia’s Aborigines and the wild dingo dogs that loiter near their settlements.
The first dog worshipers were the followers of the Egyptian god Anubis who, 3,500 years ago, preached that their dog-headed deity walked humans to the afterlife. At one point they had a religious city populated by canine “priests” that humans petted to improve their karma, and archaeologists have found thousands of mummified puppies that were used in much the same way as Christians use crosses. The Romans later morphed this idea into “dog hospitals,” where the ailing were given a healing lick. The thirteenth-century Italian St. Roch became famous for a “miracle dog” that kept him alive by feeding him with stolen bread. It is still the custom during the saint’s mid-August festival to let all the village dogs into the church, where they are fed pastries.
The stronghold of the don’t-eat-the-damn-dog contingent seems to have been in Europe, perhaps because the colder climate killed off many edible plants and made hunting essential. My personal belief is that in this era humans and dogs actually ate and slept as equals, rubbing shoulders around the campfire, just as we do now. This hunting bond was so intense that until a few hundred years ago, European hunters still ritually gave their dogs the “soul” of any stag they’d hunted together by soaking bread in the prey’s blood (thought to contain its soul), and then rewrapping it in the stag’s skin. The dogs would then again tear the animal apart and devour its “soul” while the humans held the stag’s head over the feasting pack. For some reason this relationship faded as humans headed east from Europe and into the Americas, at least as indicated by the practices of people from Asia to Mexico. But who really knows why such radically different attitudes developed? Islamic disgust for the canine species apparently formed when they conquered the Persian Zoroastrians around the eighth century. The Persians, it seems, had worshiped dogs and considered killing or eating them a crime, and as part of their cultural subjugation of the area, the Muslims took the opposite stance. The Californians, however, chose neither to demonize nor deify. Torn between the desire to be two kinds of politically correct—culturally sensitive and kind to animals—the politicians simply returned the legislation outlawing dog meat to committee for further consideration. That was in 1982. It has yet to reemerge.
Holy Cow
The weekly market in the coastal village of Anjuna, India, can be quite the scene. Rajasthani women peddle ten-pound silver bracelets; Nepalese merchants offer carved human skulls; English junkies pawn their tennis shoes; neo-Eastern-synthotechno -house-acid-rave-hip-hop-didgeridoo sound tracks fill the air. And there are celebrities everywhere—Julia Cow, Harrison Cow and, yes, even Keanu Reeves Cow—wandering about and mooing at anyone who fails to show respect. My beloved Nina J. and I had our own booth in Anjuna once upon a time. She peddled a soothing balm made of sandalwood. I sold delicious little gâteaus of honey and coconut. Business was rather slow until one day a cowlebrity swooped down on our humble little stall, and in one long, lascivious lick, inhaled every cake I possessed. It also blessed Nina’s perfumes with a liberal douse of spittle. Nina and I were ecstatic, and, just to be sure everyone remembered our celebrity clientele, we built a papier-mâché cow’s head, complete with a pair of glorious golden horns. The cakes looked splendid on its foot-long hot pink cardboard tongue the next market day. But not for long: our two-legged customers were soon lapping them up as quickly (if with less drool) as our Bollywood friend had the week before.
Indian cows live in a realm above and beyond the ordinary travails of mere mortals. Each and every one of them is said to house 330 million deities: Shiva has the nose and his sons the nostrils, while the tail belongs to Sri Hanar, the goddess of cleanliness. This extreme overcrowding means cows drip sanctity. All their products are sacred. Food cooked in butter is called pacca, and it’s karmically delicious as a result of its submersion in a cow product. Lesser foods are called kacca. Some Hindus refuse to eat cauliflower because the Hindi word for it, gobi, is heretically close to that of cow, gopa. High-born Hindus returning from life abroad are often obliged to eat a pellet made of butter, yogurt, and urine, all bound up nicely with a bit of dung, to repurify themselves after life among the heathens.
Needless to say, no dutiful Hindu would think of eating the beast. It’s a food taboo that has been widely criticized in the West; how can a country where millions of people die every year from malnutrition, wails the Texas Cattle Rearing Association, afford “cow retirement” homes so a useless animal can end its days in peace? What’s so special about a goddamn cow? The religious response is simple enough. In Hindu theosophy, it takes eighty-six reincarnations for a soul to climb up from a devil to a cow, but only one to leap the gap separating cattle from humankind. Hence, that steak on your dinner plate might have contained the soul of your newborn child. Historians prefer the idea that Hindu religious leaders became cow lovers two thousand years ago to prove that they were more compassionate than those upstart Buddhists. The ecological defense is that the cow’s enormously complicated digestive system, comprising four stomachs, can turn the most wretched of weeds into milk, people food that is both delicious and nutritious. Its dung, dried and molded into patties, provides crucial fuel in the deforested continent. Its piss, chilled, has the same tart flavors associated with Chablis. To wantonly murder such a resource would be ludicrous. Rather, it is the West’s steak fetish that is illogical, because the twenty-two pounds of grain needed to produce one pound of beef diverts human food resources to feed livestock.
Not that anyone is seriously suggesting that the Hindu fetish derives from a deeply logical impulse. Their passion runs too hot for that. When Indian Muslims want to start a ruckus, they need merely to drive a herd of implied ground round past a Hindu shrine. The Hindus elicit equally enthusiastic responses when they “accidentally” lead flocks of pigs to the nearest mosque. There are riots, murders, then everybody goes home with the glow of sanctity staining their cheeks.
It’s the English, however, who proved themselves the masters of boor-dom by offending both Muslims and Hindus in one fell stroke. When the East India Company, then in control of India, armed their native troops with the Enfield rifle in the mid-1800s, the weapon was cutting-edge stuff: three times more accurate and ten times as fast on the reload. The secret was the grease that encased every Enfield bullet. Unfortunately, this supergrease was made from pig and cow fat, the two animals sacred or taboo to every native on the subcontinent. The fact that the soldiers had to bite off the bullet’s tip to load the rifle was pure bad luck. The Indian officers explained their dilemma to the British. If we touch this bullet—much less put it in our mouths!—we will become Untouchables. How will we find wives? Our own mothers will disown us! The English officers wrote to London and urged that the bullets be coated in mutton fat. London bureaucrats told them not to be silly. Indian soldiers started to mutiny. Unrest spread throughout the region.
Then out of the jungle trotted a sadhu with four pieces of chapati bread stuck in his turban. To this day the Indians claim to be clueless as to the meaning of the Chapati Movement of 1857, but it appears to have been a culinary chain letter. The first sadhu gave his four chapati breads to a village elder with the message to share them with everyone in the village and then bake four more, which in turn were to be delivered to the next village with the same message, etc., etc. Historian Christopher Hibbert speculates that the chapati movement referred to rumors that the British were adding ground cow bones to local flour so as to destroy India’s religious structure and facilitate converting the continent to Christianity. At the time, however, no one knew what it might mean, and everybody was on edge. The breaking point came when an Untouchable asked an Indian soldier for a drink from his canteen. When the soldier politely cited his caste as grounds for refusal, the Untouchable said, “What does it matter? Soon you will be without any caste just like me. You chew the taboo bullets. Cow killer! Pig lover! You are all just Untouchables!”
The Hindu soldiers went wild and started massacring not just the English officials, but women and children. The British responded with a lamentable lack of restraint. They killed innocent children and shot rebelling soldiers out of cannons. Taking up the culinary motif, they sewed some Hindu soldiers into cow carcasses and left them to suffocate. Their behavior was so louche that the British government decided to take India away from the East India Company and make it a member of the British Empire. In fact, this early revolution probably failed only because the Indian soldiers, who outnumbered the English twenty-five to one, refused to use the hated Enfield rifles during the fight.
Revolutions over cow fat, riots over roast beef—it strikes Westerners as preposterous until you realize that we, too, have massacred and tortured thousands over the exact same issue. The first known portrait of God is a horned figure dancing on the walls of a Paleolithic cave in France. Horns, it seems, have always been a sign of supersexual or supernatural power. The ancient Babylonians used them like military stripes and gave their more powerful spirits an impossible number, like the seven-horned lamb in the Bible’s Book of Revelation. At some point this horn fetish became focused on cattle. From the Greeks’ bull-headed Minotaur to the mysterious horn temples of ancient Ur to the modern bullfights of Spain, the entire cradle of Western civilization was once a den of cattle worship. The most eccentric was the early Egyptian cult of Apis, in which a cow or bull was selected based on certain markings and worshiped as a god. The animal was particularly revered by baby-seeking ladies who flashed their genitals at the bemused beast to ensure conception. A pagan horned deity surrounded by naked women indulging in obscene rituals—any medieval Christian would have recognized HIM in a second. Witches kissing the Horned One’s ass were little more than overwrought cow lovers. The Judeo-Christian Church had simply demonized earlier religions and turned the horned deity into Uncle Nick, first in the Golden Calf so disliked by Moses, and then in the horned Lucifer. People who persisted in this original faith were tortured, tenderized, and roasted at the stake. When Linda Blair was possessed by the Devil in Hollywood’s The Exorcist, she shouldn’t have spewed vomit and obscenities. She should have mooed.
You and Your Beautiful Hide
He was the most elongated man I’d ever met, seven feet tall, with ears that hung down to his shoulders. Would have made a terrier pup jealous. The Masai of northern Kenya are famous for elongating their earlobes to enhance their natural good looks, and his must have made him look pretty sweet. His outfit, however, left a little to be desired. He’d given up those traditional bloodred Masai robes and spears for a grimy guard’s uniform and a shotgun, which he pointed at everyone who dared to enter the courtyard of our little hotel in the town of Isiolo. But he was definitely a Masai and loved nothing better than to talk about his family’s cattle.
“We only have a few,” he told me sadly while we shared a cigarette. “Ah, but they are just so beautiful. If you saw them . . .”
Everybody loves a good steak, but the beefy passions of the Masai people of northeast Africa are so intense, so soul-consuming, that anthropologists have suggested they suffer from a collective neurosis called “the cattle complex.” They pray to the beasts. They polish their horns. They drink their blood. They even name their children after cows. And every night, dressed in traditional crimson robes, spears in hand, the giant warrior-herders sing their beloved moo-moos to sleep.
God gave you to us long ago
You are in our hearts
Your smell is sweet to us.
But is this true love? Anthropologists Keith Hart and Louise Sperling found crucial differences between the Masai and Hindu cattle fetishes. For one thing, the Masai eat their loved ones. Reluctantly, true, and they get the animals drunk before their throats are slit, but eat them they do, and apparently with gusto. The wills of high-ranking tribesman usually contain instructions on which members of his herd should be eaten at his wake and which skins he wishes to be buried in. In fact, it’s actually a point of pride to live upon nothing but cow products, mainly milk and blood mixed together, or a kind of cheese made by curdling milk with cow urine. The only combination not allowed is milk and meat together, and the Masai will always take a special herb to make them vomit out any milk they have drunk before they eat beef. To eat anything “not cow,” or even mix vegetables with cow products, is allowed, but it’s terribly déclassé. The ultimate disgrace is to be banned to one of the tribes that actually grow and eat vegetables.
Equally odd is that although the Masai language has more than ten adjectives exclusively devoted to describing a cow’s charms, they appear to be indifferent to the quality of any given animal. It’s only the size of a man’s herd that matters, and the chief’s advisers are chosen not based on blood relation or geography, as is typical, but by the number of animals they own. I should say the number of animals they stole ; the Masai are notorious cattle raiders (they don’t view it as theft), and at one point owned 1 million head among forty thousand people. The anthropologists’ conclusion was that a cow is no more sacred to the Masai than a lucrative NASDAQ share is to a Wall Street stockbroker. “Pastoral nomads (like the Masai) are some of the thickest-skinned capitalists on earth,” they wrote in their paper Cattle as Capital, “and view the cattle as self-reproducing commodities . . . representing future consumption.” Their reluctance to sell or eat their animals is simply the capitalist’s eternal hope for higher returns on the morrow.
The security guard I met that night would probably not have agreed. It was just one of those chance encounters that happens when one travels about mindlessly for months at a time. I was trying to meet a friend up toward the Ethiopian border and had gotten stuck in Isiolo because bandits had made trucks shy about heading north. I certainly had no interest in cows. But it’s hard to avoid the topic when talking to Masai. My friend that starry desert night told me how the god Engapi used to send all the world’s cattle to the Masai on a string between Heaven and Earth. When the Masai carelessly allowed the string to break, Engapi sentenced them to a life of “gathering” up all the cattle that were (of course) rightfully theirs. He told me that in his father’s day his tribe had owned hundreds of cattle. He even reminisced about the great cattle wars when the men would form raiding bands with names like “Red Bull,” because naming the group after a bull made them more attractive to the cattle. One of their favorite tricks was to shoot arrows up in the air; when the dirt-loving farmers covered their heads with their shields, he said, they were shot in the stomach. Ha! Ha! Ha! He laughed, throwing his shotgun over his shoulder. Such foolish people!
Written by Stewart Lee Allen in "In The Devil's Garden - A Sinful History of Forbidden Food", Ballantine Books, New York, 2007, excerpts part 6. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa