Near a Thousand Tables by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

Author:Felipe Fernandez-Armesto [Fernandez-Armesto, Felipe]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Published: 2002-06-04T04:00:00+00:00

COURTS WITHOUT CUISINE?

Courtly cuisine is the high point of socially differentiated eating and in much of the world kingly kitchens have set the standards of high-class cooking. Indeed, in most of Eurasia and North Africa, the evidence is overwhelming: the development of peculiar cooking techniques and eating habits was a feature of court life in every instance we know about. In some parts, at least, of the Americas, similar generalizations can be supported by documents.

When Bernal Díaz reported his part in the conquest of Mexico, for instance, he was anxious for his readers to know the greatness of Montezuma. In part, this was for the usual conquistadors’ reasons: to enforce or inflate their own achievements in subjugating impressive empires. He had an additional, personal reason. He was sensitive about the modesty of his origins—his greatest boast was that his father had been a town councilor. He was a minor figure among Cortés’s men, and is virtually unmentioned in the early annals of the conquest, except those he wrote himself. He was therefore inordinately proud of his claim that Montezuma had hailed him as a gentleman: from a truly majestic sovereign, this would be almost equivalent to an accolade. So he took every opportunity to write up the magnificence of Montezuma’s person and the luxury of his court. Nevertheless, Díaz’s description of Montezuma rings true. It accords with other accounts of Aztec palace life and the prodigal ethic of conspicuous consumption which dazzles readers of Aztec tribute lists.

The chieftain ate behind a painted screen in a hall illuminated by scented torches of smokeless wood, at a table laid with white cloths and napkins. Three hundred dishes, kept warm by burners, contained thirty different preparations, including chicken, turkey, small songbirds, doves, ducks both wild and domestic, rabbits and hare, game birds which Díaz calls pheasants, partridges and quails, “and many kinds of birds and things they grow in this country that are so numerous that I would not have time to name them all.” Díaz “heard say that they used to prepare the flesh of boys of tender age for him” but witnessed no such thing. After Montezuma had washed his hands, tortillas were served and bitter chocolate in a gold cup. Fruits from all over the empire were also offered but with a proper sense of abstinence the chief tasted little of any of them. The large snakes which were featured at other lords’ feasts seem not to have featured on Montezuma’s menu. Of course, Montezuma’s meals were not merely a display of indulgence, wealth or power, but part of a system of lordly giving and redistribution of resources. When he had finished eating, a thousand dishes of the same food were distributed among his entourage. The ingredients came from the stupendous weight of tribute delivered to the major cities of the Aztecs’ predatory empire, every day, on the backs of carriers. At the palace of Montezuma’s ally, the chief of Texcoco, enough tribute was delivered daily to feed over two thousand people with maize, beans, tortillas, cacao, salt, chilies, tomatoes and squashes.

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