Four huge pilau platters were filled with poultry, and four more, each holding a whole lamb weighing eighty pounds. Hosts needed strong servants for those feasts. I wonder which part the French ambassador hated more: eating on the floor, or all that pilau and no wine.
Later British kings were also noted for gustatory excesses. George IV, for example, was so grossly fat that his non-corseted belly drooped to his knees. Yet, in January of 1817, he ordered the famous French chef Carême to create a great banquet for visiting Grand Duke Nicolas of Russia. Carême complied, and served some one-hundred and twenty-seven dishes plus delicacies. These were followed by a four foot high marzipan Turkish mosque. One wonders who hoisted George and his belly to his feet afterwards.
Some historical banquets planned to cement political and/or paramilitary power resulted in murder or social bedlam. And it must be mentioned that sometimes Christian humility was ‘celebrated’ through feasts with hundreds of dishes and casts of hundreds to serve fewer than a hundred. Meanwhile, hundreds more starved in the streets. Among others who could be mentioned, Pope Boniface VIII (1294-1303) insisted on solid gold spoons and table decorations, and wore only silk clothes and fine robes to dine. He also kept a swarm of cooks, breadmakers, cellarmen and spice experts to assure fine dining, although reportedly in constant fear of being poisoned.
Or consider Clement VI (1342-1352), who sponsored menus rich with pies, soups and cheeses. His coronation was celebrated with over thirty courses consisting of 50,000 meat and poultry pies followed by rich honeyed deserts (Rinaldo & Vicini, 113-118). And there were others! One wonders if they were seeking divine sanction through narcissism or visionary hubris.
Successful feasts, crazy or not, typically need other defining elements in addition to food. We know that aesthetic sensibilities are stimulated by such things as fanciful table settings, food-as-sculpture, stunning entertainments, or unusually well-clad or under-clad guests, fully set tables that rise from the floor below, or even trick ceilings that open to dispense clouds of rose petals. And what about the medieval tradition of four-and-twenty-blackbirds literally ‘baked’ in a huge pie until freed to fly during dessert? Now there are modern semi-nude female ‘birds’ that emerge from fake cakes served during male rite-of-passage celebrations. Or female birthday luncheons with fake for-hire male cops who brazen their way in, strip and flip their truncheons on command. Yes, sensibilities are variously stimulated, and satisfactions are variously gained.
Many crazy feasts were prolonged or lasted several days. For these, several menus were needed, along with music, dance, magicians and dramatic interludes. Prolonged feasts also sponsored ‘time out’ breaks so diners could rest, recover, frolic, and allow food and drink to settle in. A change of pace, scene or even of dining rooms, as wealthy Romans practiced, eased the mind and stomach if hours of feasting remained. In his Decameron (1351), Giovanni Boccaccio described feasts that lasted several days and included interludes with recondite niches for naps, dallying or intercourse between courses. It is probable that Boccaccio also drew the illustrations that decorated his Decameron’s earliest original publication. (Readers can consult Decameron texts on Project Gutenberg.)
In point of fact, most guests enjoy a feast, crazy or not, if it offers good food and the comfort of dining with like-minded friends. These factors shape the basic components of successful banqueting any time. The explosive humanist creativity of renaissance Italy generated many exuberant and pleasurable feasts. Peers liked to banquet together, and special clubs dedicated to serving feasts with imaginative food or arresting visual presentations sprang up in most major Italian cities. They were typically sponsored by co-worker Guilds that dominated the crafts. Painting was considered a craft learned through guild membership, and some of their feasts were definitely pleasantly crazy.
For example, the Campagnia del Paiolo (Cauldron Club), to which the famous painter Andrea del Sarto belonged, vied with similar Guilds to prepare the most interesting and amusing feasts. For one banquet, del Sarto constructed a temple with sausage columns and a Parmesan courtyard that housed a songbook made of lasagna, its pages inscribed in peppercorn notes, resting on a lectern of sliced veal (cf. Willan, 37ff.). What, no woven spaghetti tapestries? Food as ephemeral artwork was central to such events, some of which were so interesting they became written history.
Similar feasts were sponsored by a rival gourmand Guild, the Campagnia della Cazzuola, (Casserole Club). One time, dressed as construction workers, guild members sponsored a feast for which they built edifices of bread-bricks and sweetmeat-stones cemented together with pasta. Both creative feasts resemble early ‘performance art’ events which sidestep sheer taste appeal to become interesting aesthetically. So food presentation can – as often happened in history – become an occasion for ephemeral art.
Many equally absurd banquet excesses characterized later Restoration and nineteenth century Regency feasts among the wealthy or royals of Great Britain. Their feasts typically offered multi-page menus (still heavy on meat dishes), elaborate decorations and baroque costumes that were pure hyperbole. Their lust to wax opulent was often acted out through food-related rituals. And dare I mention that well-documented upper class British penchant for genuine food-fights? The ‘lower-classes’ were not so foolish as to throw food at each other; they simply ate it. Or should I say ‘et it’?
And we must not forget Lord Bridgewater, the famous British writer and expatriate. He lived mostly in Paris and managed to astonish even the French by giving lavish dinner parties for his many dogs. A self-styled animal lover, he dressed his doggie-guests in the latest of fashions, right down to miniature shoes. However, this self-described animal lover never balked at shooting captive game when residing at his English estate. Lucullus reincarnated? He reminds one of Oscar Wilde’s defining quip about fox hunting: the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.
Our more modern society has made conscious efforts (consistent with economic trends) not to have so many serve so few. Then as now, however, feasts requiring opulence and servile attendants can only be considered successful if the participants believe that God and power politics are on the same side. I won’t go there, but shall settle for bits of culinary history.
During the early years of the twentieth century, the United States of America – the new social braggart on the world-block – was guilty of sponsoring many deliberately crazy feasts. After all, there were those newly-minted robber barons, some of whom delighted in acting imperial. One example suffices. In 1903, a wealthy horse-loving host sponsored a feast for thirty members of the New York Equestrian Club. That much seems normal. The crazy part was that the guests dined on horseback, although each horse had to be hauled by freight elevators to a fourth floor of the Fifth Avenue restaurant. Waiters costumed as grooms served each course on trays firmly fastened to the pommels and flanks of each horse. Champagne was served in ice buckets suspended from saddlebags, and suckled through long nipple-tipped tubes. The surrounding environment was remade to feature murals of outdoor scenes, while real birds flitted and perched in genuine bushes under a fake harvest moon and twinkling stars. The horses dined on oats while the guests chewed their way through many courses washed down with gallons of champagne. It was a crazy soup-to-nuts, fruits, cheese and coffee feast (Fletcher, op. cit., 227-8).
Accounts of several crazy surrealist feasts (mostly in France) by such famous wealthy curiosities as Harry and Caresse Crosby were common gossip (see Carolin Young’s Apples of Gold in Settings of Silver, 273-295, passim). They entertained in various states of dress. For one example, while the host was painted ochre, wearing a necklace of dead pigeons and carrying a sack of live snakes, the hostess wore a blue wig, was bare-breasted and encircled her torso with a paper dragon. Guests were assured a rollicking time and much champagne.
Vienna – a city renowned for its unique blend of outré fantasy and bad politics – sponsored many crazy feasts, especially during Carnivals. For example, in January of 1913, when economic downturns were critical, Vienna’s bank employees held a Bankruptcy Ball (irony in action) for which ladies arrived costumed as balance sheets with voluptuous debits and garnished décolletage. Meanwhile, thin men were deposits,
