The Decadent Cookbook (26 page)

Ere sin could blight or sorrow fade,

Death came with timely care.

His memory is odoriferous; no clown curseth, while his stomach half rejecteth, the rank bacon; no coalheaver bolteth him in reeking sausages; he hath a fair sepulchre in the grateful stomach of the judicious epicure - and for such a tomb might be content to die.

“Unlike to mankind’s mixed characters - a bundle of virtues and vices, inexplicably intertwisted, and not to be unravelled without hazard - he is good throughout. No part of him is better or worse than another. He helpeth, as far as his little means extend, all around. He is the least envious of banquets; he is all neighbours’ fare.

“I am one of those who freely and ungrudgingly impart a share of the good things of this life which fall to their lot (few as mine are in this kind) to a friend… . But a stop must be put somewhere. One would not, like Lear, ‘give everything.’ I make my stand upon pig. Methinks it is an ingratitude to the Giver of all good flavours to extra-domiciliate, or send out of the house slightingly (under pretext of friendship, or I know not what), a blessing so particularly adapted - predestined, I may say, to my individual palate. It argues an insensibility.

“Our ancestors were nice in their method of sacrificing these tender victims. We read of pigs whipt to death with something of a shock, as we hear of any other obsolete custom. The age of discipline is gone by, or it would be curious to inquire (in a philosophical light merely) what effect this process might have towards intenerating and dulcifying a substance naturally so mild and dulcet as the flesh of young pigs. It looks like refining a violet. Yet we should be cautious, while we condemn the inhumanity, how we censure the wisdom of the practice. It might impart a gusto.

“I remember an hypothesis, argued upon by the young students, when I was at St. Omer’s, and maintained with much learning and pleasantry on both sides, ‘Whether, supposing that the flavour of a pig who obtained his death by whipping (
per flagellationem extremam
) superadded a pleasure upon the palate of a man more intense than any possible suffering we can conceive in the animal, is man justified in using that method of putting the animal to death?’ I forget the decision.

“His sauce should be considered. Decidedly, a few breadcrumbs, done up with his liver and brains, and a dash of mild sage. But banish, dear Mrs. Cook, I beseech you, the whole onion tribe. Barbecue your whole hogs to your palate, steep them in shallots, stuff them out with plantations of the rank and guilty garlic - you cannot poison them, or make them stronger than they are: but consider, he is a weakling - a flower.”

On Sucking Pig,
Charles Lamb.

It is impossible to talk about Decadence and food without touching on the greatest Decadent of them all - Donatien-Alphonse-François de Sade. Eating was a matter of great importance to the Divine Marquis. His correspondence with his wife is crammed full of requests for food, which is hardly surprising when you consider that he spent most of his adult life - 27 out of his 64 years - behind bars. A letter written from his cell at Vincennes in July 1783 asks Mme de Sade for
“… four dozen meringues; two dozen sponge cakes (large); four dozen chocolate pastille candies - with vanilla - and not that infamous rubbish you sent me in the way of sweets last time.”
The odd delicacy was all he had to look forward to much of the time.

Food played a central role in his fiction too.
Les 120 Journées de Sodome
was described by de Sade as
‘l’histoire d’un magnifique repas’.
And the feast laid on by the Comte de Gernande in
La Nouvelle Justine
was typical. It consisted of eighty nine dishes.

‘They were served two soups: one Italian pasta with saffron, the other a
bisque au coulis de jambon,
and between them a sirloin of beef à l’anglaise. There were twelve hors d’oeuvres, six cooked and six raw. Then twelve entrées - four of meat, four of game and four of pâtisseries. A boar’s head was served in the middle of twelve dishes of roast meat, which were accompanied by two courses of side dishes, twelve of vegetables, six of different creams, and six of patisseries. There followed twenty fruit dishes or compotes, an assortment of six ice creams, eight different wines, six liqueurs, rum, punch, cinnamon liqueur, chocolate and coffee. Gernande got stuck into all of them. Some of them he polished off on his own. He drank twelve bottles of wine, starting with four Volneys, before moving on to four Ais with the roast meat. He downed a Tokay, a Paphos, a Madeira and a Falernian with the fruit and finished off with two bottles of liqueurs des îles, a pint of rum, two bowls of punch and ten cups of coffee.’

The libertine uses these banquets to stoke up the furnaces of his lust. His ability to eat huge meals is a sign of his sexual prowess. One appetite is connected to the other - and the pleasures of satisfying them are closely allied: ‘
Après les plaisirs de la luxure,’
says Gernande,
‘il n’en est pas de plus divins que ceux de la table
.’ (After the pleasures of lust … there is none more divine than those of the table.)

But there’s also a link between food and cruelty. Gernande again:

J’ai désiré souvent, je l’avoue, d’imiter les débauches d’Apicius, ce gourmand si célèbre de Rome, qui faisait jeter des esclaves vivants dans ses viviers pour rendre la chair de ses poissons plus délicate: cruel dans mes luxures, je le serais tout de même dans ces débauches-là, et je sacrifierais mille individus, si cela était nécessaire, pour manger un plat plus appetisant ou plus recherché.

(I admit that I have often wanted to imitate the debauchery of Apicius, that most famous of Roman gourmets. He had slaves thrown live into his fish ponds so that the flesh of his fish would achieve a greater delicacy. I am cruel in my lusts and would be even more so when it came to such acts of debauchery. I would sacrifice a thousand if necessary, just to eat a dish which was more tempting or recherché.)

The Count’s banquet is a prelude to numerous acts of depravity and cruelty, which end with another meal. This is described as
“le plus magnifique souper”
the centre-piece of the table being the body of Gernande’s wife, the Comtesse, whom he has bled to death. This doesn’t seem to worry his guests unduly, or spoil their appetite.

Although he doesn’t actually eat his wife - the Count is more of a vampire than a cannibal - there are, as you might expect, several cannibalistic episodes in the writings of De Sade.

In
Aline et Valcour,
Sainville, in search of his beloved Léonore, arrives in the kingdom of Butua, ruled over by Ben Mâacoro. In this society, captive Jaga tribesmen are eaten piecemeal, sometimes cooked, sometimes raw. When Sainville expresses his moral outrage, Sarmiento, the prime minister, is surprised.
‘L’anthropophagie n’est certainement pas un crime,’
he says and justifies the practice in various ways. To begin with, in Butua, young men are simply more tasty than tough old monkey meat. Then, whether a man is buried in the bowels of the earth or the bowels of another man makes no difference. But also, as man forms part of
‘le système de la nature’
there is no reason not to eat him just like any other animal. (This brings to mind the story of the Rev. Thomas Baker who took part in an expedition into the interior of Fiji in 1867. He was proudly showing his comb to a local chief, who thought it was a gift and stuck it in his hair as an ornament. Baker brusquely took it back, not realizing that touching a Fijian leader’s head was a mortal insult. The chief demanded vengeance. He sent a messenger ahead of Baker on his travels, announcing that a whale’s tooth would be the reward for whoever killed him. The mountain tribe at Navatusila took up the offer, killed the Reverend, and cooked him. (Unfortunately the recipe is lost). Most of the tribe enjoyed eating their exotic meal, but those who had been given a leg found that even after lengthy cooking it remained extremely tough. It took some of the more sophisticated islanders to point out that the Wellington boot it wore was not part of the European’s skin.)

The argument about the ‘naturalness’ of cannibalism occurs again in the
Histoire de Juliette
when Juliette and her companions are waylaid by the Russian ogre, Minski. He lives in fabulous wealth in a castle hidden away among the Apennines, not far from the volcanic region of Pietra-Mala. Juliette and the others are invited to dine with him in a room where the tables and chairs are formed by
de groupes de filles artistiquement arrangés.
Seated at this strange furniture the guests are served
plus de vingts entrées ou plats de rôti.
Minski then informs his guests that all the dishes served are human flesh. They overcome any repugnance with phrases like
‘il n’est pas plus extraordinaire de manger un homme qu’un poulet’
and tuck in. In true Sadean form, Minski not only eats vast quantities but drinks copiously too; thirty bottles of Burgundy, Champagne with the entremets, Aleatico and Falernian with the dessert. By the end of the meal, more than sixty bottles of wine
étaient entrées dans les entrailles de notre anthropophage.
Again the meal acts as an overture to the most grotesque scenes as the protagonists hurl themselves into the abyss of depravity.

The other cannibal in the
Histoire de Juliette
is Pope Pius VI. Having performed a black mass - itself a form of meal - on the steps of the altar in St Peter’s, the Pope ‘drunk with lust’ tortures and kills an adolescent boy, before tearing out his heart and eating it.

But to return to the man himself, behind bars at Charenton. Or more precisely, to his wife. Given that she needed to cater for the Marquis’ sweet tooth, and wary of providing any more ‘infamous rubbish in the way of sweets’ Mme de Sade could do no better than turn for help to the sisters of the Santa Trinità del Cancelliere in Sicily. The aristocratic nuns of this Cistercian convent were famous for their
fedde
(sweet cakes, literally ‘slices’). These were made in oval-shaped moulds hinged rather like a mussel shell. They were lined with marzipan (
pasta reale
) and filled with apricot jam and egg custard. When one half of the mould was folded over on the other, the filling oozed out and the result looked amazingly like female pudenda.

Another form of
fedde
produced by the nuns were called
Fedde del Cancelliere.
The Chancellor referred to was the 12th century founder of the convent and here
fedde
can mean not only ‘slices’ but also ‘buttocks’.

Ingredients for Blancmange filling:

4
CUPS
MILK

½
CUP
CORNSTARCH

1 ¼
CUPS
SUGAR

¼
VANILLA
POD