Sunday, June 24, 2012
Minor Keys No. 14
The
importance of food in societies through time has two obvious sources. The first
is that we eat to survive and so we ritualize food and exalt it, making it
central to our various measures of the quality of life. We are what we eat. The
second is that it represents the most obvious route to friendship. We offer
food to bond with another. Traditionally, particularly in more nomadic or
isolated societies, a stranger is housed and fed and no questions asked. Do you
bite the hand that feeds you? For royal courts the opportunity to eradicate the
ruler, at the moment when all guard is down, is always there. Food poisoning
was an act that struck at the heart of the ritual of proclaiming friendship and
kinship, where all enmity was supposed to be banished. It is hard today to feel
the intense power of this human tradition given that everything we do today has
become distanced and displaced, particularly through our virtualising of relationships
with mobile phones, laptops and social media. People still go out to
restaurants to eat together but the act is almost always a carefully
choreographed one, even on first dates with strangers. They are not usually
invited into the home for a first viewing, nor is a cold call knock at the door
answered with, “Come in and eat.”
To
guard against the royal guard being dropped, so to speak, food tasters were
employed by courts. None took this more seriously than the head cook whose very
life depended on food reaching his/her masters, perfectly presented, tasting
sensational – and carrying a guaranteed list of healthy ingredients excluding
additives such as strychnine or arsenic. In Azimuth we never meet the head cook
but he is referred to here, by a royal maid:
“The head cook
is well liked as a master. Though he swears and shouts he is very fair to all.
Why, he had to dismiss a young cook only yesterday for pilfering but he still
took pity on him and gave him a week’s wages.”
I’d imagine, like many of the minor
characters being fleshed out in these blogs, he comes from generations of
cooks. From an early age he was groomed by his father, himself the revered chef
of a noble family, to go out to the market, to choose produce carefully, to
experiment with complementary flavours and textures, to explore the staple
crops, herbs and spices of other cultures, to research the effects of food on
sexual activity, physical health and sleep until, in the end, the head cook
became an expert all round therapist.
To remain at the top of his profession –
head cook to the emperor – he had to be a harsh task master. He was
sympathetic, if loud and dictatorial, to his staff and developed a tight
coterie of loyal workers. It was very hard for any family to get a son
apprenticed to him for he refused bribes on that score. His most difficult emotional
issue was in the employment of a food taster. It was a paradox that this
individual , the recipient of all that was great in the culinary arts, would be
the ultimate indicator of the head cook’s professionalism at the kitchen end of
the food chain. At the other end, at the emperor’s own table, was a second
taster who tried everything on his plate in case an assassin had poisoned the
food en route from kitchen to table. He was never allowed to meet this second
taster in case the bond that they developed would represent an Achilles heel in
the security of the Emperor. The head cook’s fame came not only from his
immense gifts in cookery but from the fact that at least ten tasters had died
in his kitchen, defending the emperors with their stomachs. The head cook
consoled himself while crying bitter tears, by insisting to himself that these
victims had tasted food that would have caused the very gods to salivate.
(Azimuth by Jack Sanger also in Kindle
books at Amazon)
All works by this author at www.chronometerpublications.me
Labels: #Writing. #Cookery. Minor characters. The head cook.
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