In the Devil's Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food (18 page)

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. . . .”