A Drop of History 59

Cannibals: A meal not like the others
The difference between civilised savages and savage civilised men

Let me invite you to an exotic meal on a Pacific island, in 19th-century Melanesia. The description belongs to a European sailor, Sir Hugh Romilly, who happened to attend a feast among natives of the island. The feast was preceded by a fierce battle between rival tribes of the island, and the spoils were nothing but the meal’s ingredients. A very shocked Sir Hugh Romilly relates:

“The bodies of six enemies who had been killed in battle and subsequently butchered were hanging from a tree with their feet close to the ground, giving the impression that the victors were allowing the meat to mature. Then the women made the necessary preparations for the men to cook the meat: first they drenched the bodies in boiling water and then skinned them with bamboo knives. The procedure differed little from that followed for the preparation of pork.

“Afterwards, the women carefully cut the dead men’s hair and kept it, in order to use it as decoration in their huts. Once the women finished with the preliminaries, the male cooks got to work. They seemed quite familiar with the sight of disfigured human bodies, and in some cases they did not hesitate to jest about each body’s individual features. In the meantime, the remaining men of the tribe had started the ovens, lighting big fires. It was time to take down from the tree what was left of the human bodies.

“Then the old chieftain appeared, who took on the very important task of cutting the meat into portions. The carving was done on a mat of woven palm leaves. The heads were respectfully cut off from the rest of the bodies. While carving the meat, the chieftain praised the dead man’s warlike skills, but did not fail to proclaim joyfully that his wife and children would starve now, since they had lost their protector. The portions were allotted before cooking the bodies. The men of the tribe would eat the best pieces, while the inferior pieces were given to the women.”

Here ends the shocked sailor’s relation. But a difference in ways of thought and life does not automatically entail a difference in ethics or culture. There is a well-known legend about a dialogue between a phlegmatic British officer and the chieftain of a cannibal tribe. The discussion topic was their respective troops’ prowess in war:

“We have wars that can have up to ten dead!” boasted the chieftain.

“That is no feat at all,” replied the Englishman. “In our wars, there are many thousand dead.”

“Really? And how do you eat so many thousand dead?” asked the amazed chieftain.

“We don’t eat them, sir,” snapped the Englishman, annoyed. “We are not savages like you. We are civilised men.”

“You don’t eat them? Then why do you kill them?”

© Dimitris Kambourakis 2003, All Rights Reserved
Translation from the Greek © M.A.K. 2007, All Rights Reserved

A Drop of History 34

The grand banquet
A Turkish jamboree for a prince’s circumcision

In the archives of Proussa [modern Bursa], an important city of the Ottoman Empire, we find extremely detailed catalogues concerning a public feast organised to celebrate a prince’s circumcision, in 1720. The celebrations lasted fifteen days, but the archives make no mention of the number of guests, only the numbers and values of purchases. The quantities, however, suggest that the guests were quite numerous, possibly thousands, and the festival quite magnificent. Check out the items on the catalogue and tell me whether – gastronomically, at least – we Greeks belong to the East or the West.

The basic dish was lamb and meat broth, but both were saturated with spices, since the catalogue mentions the purchase of 113 kilos of pepper, ten kilos of cinnamon and cardamom, as well as 52 kilos of saffron, an outrageously expensive spice. The basic dessert was baklava, for the preparation of which 12,088 kilos of honey were bought. Sugar-glazed fruit were also a specialty, hence the purchase of 4,153 kilos of sugar. What kind of fruit? 64 kilos of chestnuts, 519 kilos of almonds, and also raisins, dates, apples, walnuts and apricots in smaller quantities. Add to those 2,817 lemons and two kilos of mastic of Chios. The quantity of butter procured was huge – 13,404 kilos. There were also sixteen loads of flour, although it is not clear exactly how much a load was. Flour and honey were used in the filling of various kinds of baklava, as well as in the confection of another pudding, with rice as its primary ingredient. For that, 1,745 kilos of rice were bought.

The catalogues showcase the love of Turkish cuisine for yoghurt and vegetables, which extends to the present. Yoghurt was bought in 209 crocks, plus another 300 kilos unpackaged. As for vegetables, we find 39,437 eggplants and 1000 kilos of squash, an unspecified large quantity of okra, and 302 bunches of parsley. On the contrary, references to olive oil and bread are impressively cursory, considering that it is well known that they both were staples of the Turkish diet. Despite everything, the list of purchases relates directly to the preparations that a Greek household would have made – maintaining proportions – for a feast, up until some 30 years ago.

Concerning the rest of the celebrations, beyond food, the catalogues mention nothing, but we can imagine. Music with lyra fiddles, long, languid songs, harem girls in ring dances. After all, the space of our fantasies is the space where we basically belong. And our fantasies squint eastwards…

© Dimitris Kambourakis 2002, All Rights Reserved
Translation from the Greek © M.A.K. 2006, All Rights Reserved

A Drop of History 31

The humble potato
How the potato saved fifty million Europeans

History, as we learn it through our lopsided and narrow-minded educational systems, is always written in palaces, mansions and battlefields. Its habitual protagonists are rulers, warlords, statesmen. Alright, the odd scientist or artist too.

But next to those there are always the common people, the wretched populace, which turns to dust and disappears from memory and books alike. How did those people live throughout history? How did they think? Where did they live? What did they eat? If that is not history, then what is? Not to mention that is the history of our forefathers, since our chances of being descendants of kings and war chiefs are virtually nil.

In medieval Europe, the search for food was the sole aim in the poor people’s lives. They lived just to find enough food to keep living. Their staple food was bread, while meat was very expensive and vegetables practically nonexistent. Recurrent years of bad grain crops brought famine, which led hundreds of thousands of people to death, while vitamin deficiencies were common among the masses of the poor, due to the lack of vegetables and fruit. That was the basic cause of a series of dermatological ailments which went down in history under the general term “leprosy”. Why do you think there are so many lepers in movies depicting that age? Because there were a lot of them back then, as a result of malnutrition.

Do you know what reversed all this? The humble potato, which was brought from the New World (Peru, to be exact) by the Spanish, in 1530. For the poor, the introduction of the potato was what the discovery of the compass had been for seamen, what gold was for the rich. Unlike “aristocratic” wheat, the potato thrived in poor soil, its cultivation did not require expensive animals or machinery, and a couple of tubers in the garden could ensure a good meal for a large family. Renaissance historian Chamberlain estimates that the introduction of the potato saved fifty million people from famine between 1580 and 1700. The potato was the poor man’s gold then, and if you tell me that things remain the same today, I will consider it completely incidental and beyond the historian’s intent.

© Dimitris Kambourakis 2002, All Rights Reserved
Translation from the Greek © M.A.K. 2006, All Rights Reserved