a ‘Big Man’. Anyway, potlatches were honored ritual feasts until invading foreigners, who didn’t relish blubber or wasteful generosity, made them illegal through alien colonial rules and Statutes.
Wealthy imperial Romans were renowned for excessive feasts. Tacitus and Dio Cassius describe one of Nero’s crazy feasts held on a huge pleasure barge decorated in ivory with gold fittings. Loaded with drunken guests, it was slowly towed across Agrippa’s Pond by smaller vessels. The youthful crew, rouged and garbed in gilded loincloths, dropped guests off at shore locations where they could indulge in bacchantic sex with their choice of partners – male, female, undetermined, prostitutes, virgins, or even children. All this while dining on wine, braised flamingo tongues, puréed brain of pheasant, sautéed sows’ udders and other rich tidbits. Yum, yum! Nero’s celebrations were often staged as eighteen-course orgiastic feasts, and he was not alone in this custom.
Historians also mention the allegedly fantastic feasts sponsored by Cleopatra and Marc Antony during their periodic dangerous liaisons. Antony’s penchant for dressing and acting like the god Bacchus amid Alexandrian wealth was matched by Cleopatra’s ritual role-play as the goddess Isis. The chronicler Athenaeus (see Book IV) describes Cleopatra’s feasts for Antony as served on golden plates inlaid with gems, and staged in huge twelve-couch rooms whose walls were hung with gold-worked tapestries. She often gifted Antony with whatever knickknacks he saw and liked. These and periodic barge feasts on the Nile became perfect paradigms for crazy feasting. Why crazy? Because, instead of enhancing Anthony’s political image and power, these ‘Oriental’ banquets were reported to the Roman Senate (gossip traveled then too) and used as one justification for mobilizing Octavian into war against him. In effect, they were cited as ‘proofs’ that Marc Antony was no longer truly Roman, but merely a Hellenized ploy of Cleopatra and her decadent eastern ways.
Moreover, crazy feasting continued through long medieval and later periods, during which profligate banquets flourished. Consider the feast marking George Neville’s elevation to Archbishop of York in 1464. He hosted a banquet serving: 300 loaves of bread, 300 tuns of ale, 100 tuns of wine (that’s 25 thousand gallons), 105 oxen, 6 feral bulls, 1,000 sheep, 304 pigs, 304 calves and 400 swans. What about the partridges in the pear tree? And reportedly, there were overall 14,833 meat and poultry dishes that required sixty-two cooks and five hundred and fifteen scullions too serve the food (Fletcher, 21). Christian poverty and its celebrated piety?
Obviously history offers a wealth of exemplary crazy feasts, whether large or small. As another example, consider a small private feast for four knights sponsored by an Archbishop of England, on February 9, 1568. Their sixteenth century menu for five (including the host) included: bread, wine and oranges; two roasted hens; six roasted partridges; half a kid in crust; roast boars; ram meatballs with egg yolks; stewed rams; turnips in bacon; stewed pork; large apples; two cardoons (thistle-like plants related to artichokes), olives, cheese and nuts. One wonders about the cholesterol levels of men who routinely ate such meals, or did jousting normalize that knightly plague? Never mind, since we already know they didn’t live long in those days.
And a first prize might be awarded to one of history’s great feast-givers, sixteenth century Catherine de Médici. That famous Italian Queen Consort of Henry II of France made herculean efforts to ‘enlighten’ her benighted French subjects about food, its preparation and artful service. She was renowned for sponsoring feasts to enhance political unity and to ‘get her own way’. Her famous ‘progress feasting’ travels lasted more than two years and sponsored many wraparound entertainments and rich menus. These occurred while she roamed around France to introduce her teenage son (Charles IX) to the populace in order to imprint them with her exotic Italian presence and culinary finesse. She failed to understand that these banquets often had the opposite effect: they made her seem more foreign and less French. And Catherine did not travel alone. She was accompanied by several thousand court members, their servants, untold trunks of festive clothing, tutors, priests, five doctors, five kitchen officers, five sommeliers, cooks, porters, grooms, beaters for hunts, and nine dwarfs in miniature coaches, to say nothing of the gold plate, silk sheets and cookery pots. The length of her caravan was as staggering as were its costs (Visser, 28). The famous can often make themselves infamous, n’est pas?
This type of conspicuous consumption parallels feasts with built-in interludes of purposeful destruction: like burning or destroying elaborate ritual offerings, sponsoring huge fireworks displays, the staging of costly mock battles, or the creation of ephemeral artworks to be destroyed after one display. City-states on the wane, like sixteenth century Venice, tried to impress visiting French King Henry III (1574) to a degree that nearly impoverished its treasury. The Venetians created an overabundance of triumphal arches, grand ephemeral gardens with sculptures, and hosted a series of extravagantly lavish banquets to impress their royal visitor. As an example, one feast for three thousand guests centered on a gargantuan menu of foods, some presented on fabulous place settings made entirely of spun sugar! And sugar was a very costly commodity, even for trading cities.
Other crazy historical feasts also focused on fantastic uses and displays of sugar. Sugar was so costly that its reckless consumption was a sure mark of great wealth. For example, Mary, Regent of the Netherlands, tried to influence Philip II of Spain by presenting a gastronomic orgy (1549) featuring a ‘sugar collation’ as the menu. During this fantastic drama-fest, tables laden with hundreds of sweets were embellished by sculptures of spun sugar, including large sugar animals lowered from the ceiling. These displays were also surrounded by pretend thunder and lightning, as well as by a ‘rain and hail storm’ of tiny glittering falling sugar candies. Sugar was still ruinously costly even for rich royals, as they were to discover all too soon.
Or consider the occasion when Maria de Aviz married Alessandro Farnese, the Duke of Parma, in 1566. Their nuptial feast featured sugar platters holding hundreds of sugary desserts to be eaten with sugar-sculpted knives and forks. That meal climaxed when the guests devoured their plates and goblets, also sculpted from sugar. Wedding gifts featured giant sculptural scenes of sugar figures (Abbot, 43-44).
By the end of the sixteenth century, sugar use had trickled down to the middle class, and culinary history was peppered with new sugary desserts and recipes. England became and remained more or less addicted to puddings.
We can note yet one more costly Médici-related feast. For example, to celebrate the marriage of Maria de’ Médici to Henry IV of France on October 5, 1600, the Tuscan countryside was sacked for ingredients, servants, entertainers, artists, artisans, and costumers to create the spectacle of the age. The royal hosts demonstrated power and wealth through a feast that lasted for days, although the marriage ceremony was enacted by a stand-in, since the King was absent for military reasons! A wedding without the groom, which culminated in a dramatic crescendo when Maria’s entire table (in a simulated garden) revolved to demonstrate the passage from her previous status to that of Queen of France. But a bit of irony hangs thereon. When Maria finally reached Paris, after having been crowned Queen in a self-initiated ceremony in Saint-Denis, no grand honeymoon followed, because Henry IV was assassinated the next day. It was probably just as well, since Henry was much given to mistresses and their bastard offspring. It seems that French kings and royal Médici consorts had problems in spite of prestige and wealth (Young, 66-85).
During another ‘valiant’ attempt to ensure better relations between England and France, Henry VIII and François I held a three-week carnival of feasts near Calais, which became known as the ‘Field of Cloth of Gold’. For this celebration, Henry built a 12,000 square feet temporary palace and served enormous amounts of food daily. Feasting was interspersed with jousts, wrestling matches and other endless entertainments – all with poor and few positive results. After all, there was that religious problem and Henry’s penchant for changing wives….
Even traveling diplomats were royally feasted in foreign capitals. In 1672, the French Ambassador visited Persia, where he was given a great banquet served from a golden cloth spread over the floor. On it were placed several kinds of exotic breads, after which huge gold basins of pilau were carried
