Keys Corner

There are some things which I am happy to consider lost to history. For example, this passage describes a 16th century papal feast:

They serve wine that a woolen rag wouldn’t deign to lap up (as Juvenal puts it), which, if you’re insane enough to drink it, will make you vinegary, watery, corrupted, dropsical, sour; either chilled, or tepid, with a bad color and taste…. And don’t think you’ll be drinking from vessels of silver or glass; there’s the fear of theft with the former, and of breakage with the latter. You’ll be drinking from a wooden cup, black, ancient, fetid, with dregs caked on its bottom, which the lords have used as a pissoir. And you won’t get your own cup: so whether you want your wine mixed with water or pure, you’ll get what everyone else wants, and wherever you bite down some louse-ridden beard or a slobbering lip or rotten teeth have gone just before. Meanwhile the king is receiving toasts in vintage wine so fragrant that it fills the whole palace….

Cheese will come your way only rarely; if it does, it will be full of worms, perforated, squalid, harder than a stone. Fetid butter and rancid lard are your condiments. You’ll only get eggs when they already have chicks inside; your bread and apples are rotten or green, and if you didn’t eat them they’d go to the pigs….

Found in The New York Review of Books, reviewing the book Feast: A History of Grand Eating

This entry was posted on Monday, June 28th, 2004 at 16:06:05 and is filed under Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.