Literary gastronomic offerings I

Literature is filled with gastronomic offerings. Some are more appetizing than others, many are symbolic, some funny. I thought I would share here some fragments of better or less known texts that explore different kinds of foods. As a Spanish teacher, I must begin in the Spanish Golden Age with Cervantes’ “Don Quijote de La Mancha”, considered the most influential work of literature. 

As much as I appreciate Don Quijote’s pursuit of honour and nobility, when it comes to food, I find a bit of Sancho Panza in me. Don Quijote claims that he only needs spiritual sustenance rather than food, while his servant appreciates the fine offerings throughout their adventures. The feast at Camacho’s wedding in chapter XX of part II of the novel is impressive. I still cannot get over the whole ox on a spit, stuffed with a dozen of suckling pigs for flavour. Wouldn’t you want to be invited to this dinner? 

The first thing that presented itself to Sancho’s eyes was a whole ox spitted on a whole elm tree, and in the fire at which it was to be roasted there was burning a middling-sized mountain of faggots, and six stew pots that stood round the blaze had not been made in the ordinary mould of common pots, for they were six half wine-jars, each fit to hold the contents of a slaughter-house; they swallowed up whole sheep and hid them away in their insides without showing any more sign of them than if they were pigeons. Countless were the hares ready skinned and the plucked fowls that hung on the trees for burial in the pots, numberless the wildfowl and game of various sorts suspended from the branches that the air might keep them cool. Sancho counted more than sixty wine skins of over six gallons each, and all filled, as it proved afterwards, with generous wines. There were, besides, piles of the whitest bread, like the heaps of corn one sees on the threshing-floors. There was a wall made of cheeses arranged like open brick-work, and two cauldrons full of oil, bigger than those of a dyer’s shop, served for cooking fritters, which when fried were taken out with two mighty shovels, and plunged into another cauldron of prepared honey that stood close by. Of cooks and cook-maids there were over fifty, all clean, brisk, and blithe. In the capacious belly of the ox were a dozen soft little sucking pigs, which, sewn up there, served to give it tenderness and flavour. The spices of different kinds did not seem to have been bought by the pound but by the quarter, and all lay open to view in a great chest. In short, all the preparations made for the wedding were in rustic style, but abundant enough to feed an army.