The Decadent Cookbook (8 page)

The second course consisted of venison broiled in stock, pies of every variety, pressed tongue, spiced sausages and salamis served with chopped melon and figs, and savoury egg flans. These delicacies were followed by huge roasts: more partridges and pheasants, larks (their tongues, basted in honey and orange with
basilico,
served separately), wood doves, pigeons, young chickens, and whole lambs. Then came a huge array of dishes made from butter, eggs and cheese - pies, flans, pastries, and so on; bowls of
melanzane
marinated in white wine and sprinkled lavishly with fragrant herbs, celery chopped with onions and peppers drenched in oil, also put in an appearance. The wines flowed as freely as a drunkard’s piss.

After several hours of continuous eating, I was feeling quite faint; indeed, I could not imagine how so many of the other guests were still happily cramming themselves. Leo, unsurprisingly, chomped his way through the lot; however, he had not as yet farted (although I expected a real stinker at any moment), which was some small blessing. Lorenzo Strozzi, at the head of the table, finally rose to his feet a little unsteadily.

“Your Holiness - ah - Your Eminences, I meant to say, of course! - my dear and very
special
guests! I offer you now the climax, the apotheosis, the summit of this rather
unusual
evening.”

He clapped his hands, and four servants entered the hall, bearing on their shoulders a massive silver dish, in which was heaped what looked like half the cream in Rome; it was decorated more richly than Leo’s tiara, with bright red cherries, brown pine kernels, thin green strips of angelica, all kinds of nuts and berries, and was wound about with a great length of dried leaves that had been dipped in gold. The entire assembled company (including myself, I readily admit) drew in its breath.

Strozzi went on, clearly drunk:

“Ah, but all is not what it seems to be, my very dear and
special
friends! No indeed. What you see before you is but the phantasm of the thing itself - the accidents which occlude and conceal the substance, as our good Tomaso d’Aquino would have said. You see, Your Eminences? I am not entirely unversed in the queen of sciences. Excuse me, I digress. Yes, invisible to your eyes, most cherished guests, is a delight more subtle, more - what shall I say, what term to employ? - more
sensuous
(for that must surely be the word!) than the simple sweetness which mere appearances promise. And let me give you a small clue, a tiny hint, so to speak, of the secret which is shortly to be revealed: I provide no implements for this, my final and most exquisite offering; you must use
only your tongues
.”

And with that, he collapsed back in his chair.

The dish was placed somewhat awkwardly in the centre of the table; for some moments we all sat and stared at it. Then Cardinal Salviati stood up, leaned as far as he could across the table, stuck out a greenish, corrugated tongue, and dipped the tip of it into the great mound of cream. He closed his eyes for a moment, licked his lips, then opened his eyes again and nodded.

“Very delicious,” he pronounced. “Very delicious indeed. Flavoured with
grappa
and wild honey, if I am not mistaken.”

“Bravo, Eminence!” Lorenzo Strozzi cried drunkenly.

Embolded by Salviati’s initiative, several of the gentlemen and two of the ladies did likewise; they giggled and nudged each other as they extended their tongues to taste their host’s culinary ‘apotheosis.’ The technique, awkward though it was, was clearly catching on. It fell to Cardinal Ridolfi however, to finally expose the ‘secret’ of the extraordinary
dolce
; bending across the table and wiggling his tongue, he pushed it into the creamy mass only to withdraw it again with a piercing and womanly shriek.

“It moved!”
he cried. “God’s bones, I tell you it moved! Ah! -”

There was a general commotion as it was observed that the great mound of decorated slop was indeed moving; it shuddered and wiggled, as if suddenly endowed with an alien life of its own. Clotted lumps of cream fell away, nuts and cherries flew off and showered onto the table. It seemed to be
growing.
Ridolfi by now was having an attack of the vapours, wiping his lips furiously with the back of his hand as though he had ingested poison; indeed, had this been a banquet given by Pope Alexander VI Borgia, whose memory still haunted curial slumbers, it might well have been.

Everybody was at the thing now, licking and scraping the cream off as fast as they could; people were stretched out across the table, plates were pushed aside or even fell to the floor; there was screeching and laughing and vulgar gestures. I do not think I have ever seen so many protruding tongues in my life, and it is a spectacle I care never to witness again; human beings look utterly ridiculous with their tongues sticking out. Leo should ban people doing it in all papal states. As a matter of fact, I had entirely forgotten about Leo: he was slumped in his chair, spellbound by the goings on. His eyes bulged and watered.

There was a young woman buried under that grotesque hillock of cream; furthermore, it quickly became obvious, as first a thigh was exposed, then a foot, a wetly glistening pink nipple, and finally a hairy pubic mound, that she was a very naked young woman. The cacophony of screaming and guffawing rapidly swelled in volume as people began to applaud. And still the tongues were at work, probing and wiggling and scraping lasciviously, lingeringly, across the smooth, pale flesh. Two men - one of them rather young for this sort of thing in my opinion - were licking at the same breast, contending for the stiff little nipple, occasionally looking into each other’s eyes in a sly, knowing manner as they did so. Much to my surprise however, it was a lady (I use the term cautiously) whose face was buried deep between the shuddering thighs, sucking, slurping shamelessly, her long tongue darting rapidly in and out of the private opening hidden beneath the bush of black hair. I can well imagine what sort of cream she hoped to find down
there
. The young woman stretched herself out in the dish, still half-covered with rapidly liquifying slop; she writhed and groaned and fluttered her eyelids in a sexual ecstasy. The colloidal sludge oozed and squelched beneath her buttocks. Then she uttered a low moan:

“Ah … ah!”

The last two things I noticed were that the young man sharing a breast with a fellow diner had drawn out his quivering penis and was rubbing it surreptitiously up against a leg of the table, while the female devotee at the
other
end had pushed a cherry up into the hairy labial glory-hole which was so occupying her attention - presumably for the pleasure of sucking it out again.

“Your Holiness,” I said to Leo, “it is time for us to take our leave.”

“Yes, you are right, Peppe. Yes, yes.”

David Madsen,
Memoirs of a Gnostic Dwarf.

Dedalus 1995.

David Madsen is also the author of
The Confessions of a Flesheater Cookbook
and
A Box of Dreams
.

A meal was hardly a meal in Renaissance Italy, it seems, without a few dozen marzipan goddesses to decorate the table. They brought a note of grace and refinement to the occasion, transforming it from an exercise in stomach-filling to an elevating cultural event.

Decadent cooks go one step further, and make sculptures of the food itself. If life is to be spent in the pursuit of the extravagant, the extreme, the grotesque, the bizarre, then one’s diet should reflect the fact. Life, meals, everything must be as artificial as possible - in fact works of art. So why not begin by eating a few statues?

The golden age of food sculpture lasted from about 1500 to the First World War, but there were pioneers before then and it’s not entirely forgotten even now. Scraps of the old magnificence survive in the oddest places…

The bakeries of King Stanislas gave birth to the most ingenious fantasies. One day four servants placed on the royal table a huge pie in the shape of a citadel. Suddenly, the lid rose and out of the pie jumped Bébé, the King’s dwarf, dressed as a warrior, with a helmet on his head and a pistol in his hand, which he fired, terrifying the ladies.

(M
AUGRAS,
L
A
C
OUR
DE
L
UNÉVILLE
AU
XVIII
ME
SIÈCLE
)

In the last century the Intendant of Gascony gave a magnificent banquet on the birth of the Duke of Burgundy. The centrepiece was covered with wax figures moved by clockwork, which at the conclusion of the feast were set in motion, and gave a representation of the labour of the Dauphiness and the happy birth of an heir to the monarchy.

(E S D
ALLAS,
K
ETTNER’S
B
OOK
OF
THE
T
ABLE,
1877
)

Most extravagant of all is a galley. Its hull is made of forcemeat baked in a specially shaped container. When cooked the meat is unmolded and filled with little birds in a ragout; they in turn are hidden under planking made of veal. From each side of the ship project skewers laden with sweetbreads, cockscombs, meaty bacon, and foies gras. The mast is a larger skewer that flies a cockscomb pennant, and it is festooned with sausage-hung rigging.

(B
ARBARA
K
ETCHAM
W
HEATON,
S
AVOURING
THE
P
AST
, 1983)

The last familiar example of these ancient ornaments must be the English wedding-cake, the three-tiered ones having, in fact, something in common with the old eighteenth century Chinese temple, which was really a sort of pagoda. It is perhaps some memory of these obsolete conceits which makes chefs produce the inedible fantasies one sees at modern catering exhibitions… the loving representations of Swan Lake in aspic and mutton fat, the Bands of HM Grenadier Guards composed entirely of boiled lobsters…

(S
HEILA
H
UTCHINS,
E
NGLISH
R
ECIPES,
1967)