The Decadent Cookbook (11 page)

The serving dishes were mostly faience from Limoges or enamels from Bernard de Palissy. Sometimes, beneath the food, a carver’s knife would encounter a porcelain reptile, frog or bird. The edible eel mixed its coils with those of the moulded viper.

A simple-hearted philistine would have felt a certain alarm at the sight of these hairy, bearded, moustachioed guests, some with the most unusual hairstyles, brandishing their 16th century daggers, Malaysian kriss or navajas, bent over their food which the guttering flames of the lamps cast into the most suspicious-looking shapes.

As the dinner drew to an end some of the more fervent members began to feel the effects of the green paste. I was already experiencing a complete transposition of tastes. The water I was drinking seemed to me a most exquisite wine, the meat turned to raspberries in my mouth, the raspberries into meat. I could not have distinguished a cutlet from a peach.

My neighbours began to look rather odd; great owl-sized pupils stared at me; noses stretched in probosces; mouths widened into sleigh-bell slits. Faces were tinted with unnatural colours. One man, a pale visage in a black beard, cackled loudly at an invisible comedy; another made incredible efforts to raise his glass to his lips, his contortions provoking deafening shouts of laughter. A man next to me was shaken by nervous spasms, and whirled his thumbs at fantastic speed. Another slumped back in his chair, eyes glazed, arms limp, floating voluptuously on a bottomless sea of annihilation.

With my elbows on the table I contemplated this scene in the light of my remaining reason, which guttered fitfully like a candle about to go out. Dull shudders of heat passed through my body, and madness, like a wave that foams round a rock and draws back before flinging itself forward again, entered and left my brain, finally invading it completely. Hallucination, that strange guest, had come to stay…

Théophile Gautier, ‘Le Club des Hachichins’,
Revue des Deux Mondes
, 1846.

One morning in February 1783 a card arrived at the houses of various Parisian notables. The card was bordered in black and bore a picture of a sarcophagus surmounted by a crucifix.

Grimod de la Reynière, one of the great gourmets of 18th century France and editor of the
Almanach des Gourmands
, not only invited guests to this dinner, but 300 spectators as well. When the guests arrived, they found the dining room draped in black. The centrepiece of the table was a sarcophagus, and the proceedings were a grim theatrical joke. One course consisted of nothing but pork dishes, which Grimod proudly announced to have been supplied by a member of his family. This shocking revelation of low social connections was untrue (although his grandfather had been a pork butcher and notorious glutton), but Grimod’s aim was to humiliate his arrogant mother by pointing out where her family had made its money. His parents were duly offended and had him exiled from Paris. He took his revenge a few years later with a second funeral dinner, where the pork-trade theme was even more heavily underlined: the black velvet hangings on the walls were embroidered with symbols of charcuterie, and the ivory handles of the cutlery were carved in the shape of pigs.

This meal was almost certainly the model for another black meal - that given by Jean Des Esseintes in Huysmans’ novel,
A Rebours
.

The dining room, draped in black, opened onto a garden swiftly transformed for the occasion. The paths had been dusted with charcoal, the ornamental pond filled with ink and edged with black basalt, and the shrubberies replanted with cypresses and pines. The black tablecloth on which dinner was served was decorated with baskets of violets and scabious. Tapers flickered in chandeliers and green-flamed candelabra cast a strange glow.

To the accompaniment of a hidden orchestra playing funeral marches, guests were waited on by negresses, naked but for slippers and silver stockings embroidered with tears.

The guests ate off black-bordered plates and enjoyed turtle soup, rye bread from Russia, black olives from Turkey, caviare, mullet botargo, black pudding from Frankfurt, game served with sauces the colour of liquorice and boot-polish, truffle purées, chocolate creams, plum puddings, nectarines, black grape jellies, mulberries and dark-fleshed cherries. They drank wines from Limagne and Roussillon, Tenedos, Valdepeñas and Oporto out of glasses tinted black. After coffee and walnut cordial, the evening was brought to a close with kvass, porter and stout.

On the invitations, which looked like funeral announcements, the dinner was described as a memorial banquet for the host’s virility, lately but only temporarily deceased.

Grimod de la Reynière, however, was not the first to combine the banquet and the grave. Cassius Dio relates just such an occasion when Domitian entertained various senators and nobles. In the dining room walls and furnishings were all in black. At each guest’s place his name had been carved onto a
stele
, or grave marker. They were treated to a frightening dance performed by naked boys painted black and offered food normally presented at sacrifices for the dead. None of the terrified guests dared to talk during the meal, and the Emperor spoke of nothing but killing and death. It was with great relief that they were allowed to return home.

If you’re planning a
fête macabre
give some serious thought to location. Setting is all important. The necropolis of Sakkara in Egypt would be most appropriate. There you could find a suitable 2nd dynasty tomb and reproduce this menu, provided for an Egyptian Princess who was buried about 3000 B.C.

A
TRIANGULAR
LOAF
OF
BREAD
MADE
FROM
EMMER

WHEAT
ON
A
POTTERY
DISH
.

B
ARLEY
PORRIDGE
ON
AN
ALABASTER
DISH
.

A
COOKED
FISH,
CLEANED
AND
HEADLESS
.

A
PIGEON
STEW
.

A
COOKED
QUAIL
(CLEANED
AND
DRESSED
WITH
THE
HEAD

TUCKED
UNDER
ONE
WING)
.

TWO
COOKED
KIDNEYS
.

R
IBS
AND
LEGS
OF
BEEF
.

S
TEWED
FIGS,
IN
A
POTTERY
BOWL
.

N
ABK
BERRIES
(
SIMILAR
TO
CHERRIES,
FROM
S
IDDER
)
IN
A
DIORITE
BOWL
.

C
IRCULAR
CAKES
SWEETENED
WITH
HONEY
.

S
MALL
JARS
PACKED
WITH
CHEESE
.

W
INE
IN
A
LARGE
JAR
.

Ideally, of course, the princess will return from the dead to share it with you. Especially if the meal is preceded by a cocktail - 2 parts brandy, 1 part calvados, 1 part sweet vermouth - vulgarly known as a ‘corpse reviver’.

Another suitable location is Death Row at the State Prison in Washington, where the murderer Thomas Grasso was executed in January 1995. With the agreement of the authorities, one might re-enact Grasso’s final meal, which consisted of mussels, scallops, tinned spaghetti served at room temperature, and a double hamburger. Should the prison authorities prove unco-operative, there is no reason why the meal should not be prepared at home. At a little additional expense, replica electric chairs (in which many a goose has been cooked) could be provided for the guests. Some people might find this idea tasteless however. The thought of having reproduction furniture in their house is too awful to contemplate. So here’s another suggestion for one of those deft little finishing touches that make the difference between a meal and an Experience: garnish with syringes filled with cyanide, arranged on swabs of cotton wool and served on kidney dishes by men in white coats.

Of course most of us are far too busy to go off to Sakkara or Washington for dinner, so here are some humbler dishes for everyday decadence.

The best way to prepare gravlax is to send someone extremely rugged and bold to Scandanavia in early winter. There they should dig a hole in the soft sandy earth on the shore of a lake and bury a salmon in it, sandwiched between two layers of birch twigs and fir branches weighted down with stones and covered with earth. The wooden cross is optional. The salmon has to be left for three to six days before it is ready to eat. (Alternatively it can be left for between six and twelve weeks by which time the flesh will have fermented). Of course, burying a fish for three days before resurrecting and eating it can be interpreted as a blasphemous parody of Christian ritual - but as we said, the wooden cross is optional.

If you don’t know any outdoor types you can make gravlax in the comfort of your own fitted kitchen like this.

3 - 4
LB
SALMON,
FILLETED,
SKIN
ON

A
BIG
BUNCH
OF
DILL

CURE
FOR
THE
SALMON,
MADE
WITH: