Playing With Food : Eating Crazy Is the Best Revenge

About 20 years ago I was living in another city and working upwards of 60 hours a week, and there came a time when I couldn’t have told you what month it was. That was the year I didn’t realize it was Easter until around noon on the day itself.

It was too late to fly home and spend the holiday with my family. I swallowed my pride and called all my friends, hoping to get a dinner invitation without openly fishing for one--a fool’s errand if there ever was one.

The markets in my neighborhood were closed. The special-occasion restaurants were fully booked. Everybody I knew was at Easter dinner, and I was at a chain restaurant having the ham slice with raisin sauce.

So I swore a mad revenge. The next year, I invited 12 people to an Easter dinner of roast rabbit with julienne carrots and hard-cooked eggs in the stuffing, accompanied by eggplant tarts shaped like rabbits’ ears. This followed the spicy rabbit soup and the grilled rabbit-and-carrot salad, and for dessert I had laboriously made bombe andalouse : a globe of vanilla ice cream with an orange center, like a giant egg.

Some of my guests looked a little uneasy, and in fact there are quite a few gourmets who think there’s something corny, even creepy, about playing with your food this way. Mostly, though, people love it.

It’s a tradition that goes back at least as far as Roman times. Everybody who saw “Fellini Satyricon” remembers the scene at a banquet given by the wealthy Trimalchio where the host loudly berates a cook for not having gutted a pig before roasting it. Then the pig is cut open and it turns out that not only had it been gutted, it had been crammed full of all kinds of sausages. At the same Roman banquet a roast wild boar had been stuffed with live songbirds that flew out when it was cut open, like the four-and-twenty blackbirds in the nursery rhyme.

Trimalchio also served his Roman friends pastry “birds” filled with raisins and nuts, and “sea urchins” that were really quinces stuck with pieces of almond. In his opinion, the crowning masterpiece of the dinner was a fat goose surrounded by fish and game--all made out of pork. Trimalchio boasted that his chef could “produce a fish out of a sow’s belly, a pigeon out of the lard, a turtle dove out of the ham and fowl out of the knuckle.”

Roman decadence, you might say, but this tradition lived on in the Middle Ages. The blackbird pie of the nursery rhyme was really served in medieval England--we have authentic recipes for it. In Baghdad, fashionable people considered it amusing to make imitation “omelets” without eggs, sauteed “brains” made of eggs and nuts and so on. One medieval Arabic cookbook gives a recipe for an “orange stew” (naranjiyyah) where the “oranges” are meatballs dipped in egg yolk made yellower with saffron. In France, these same gilded meatballs were known as pommes dorees or “golden apples.”

In European courts, it was traditional to serve peacock at important banquets--not because it was a tasty meat (it wasn’t, as everybody agreed) but because the peacock meat could be replaced in the skin so that it looked as if a live peacock, with its tail gorgeously fanned out, were sitting on the table. Sometimes a medieval cook would make a roasted “cockatrice,” representing an imaginary monster that was supposed to be hatched of a rooster’s egg. The usual way was to stitch together the forequarters of one animal onto the hindquarters of another--a chicken’s head on a rabbit’s body, for instance.

Haslet was the innards of game, a rough-and-ready dish made by hunters when they dressed their catch. At banquets, they served mock haslet made of prunes, dates, figs, almonds and dried pear halves fried in batter.

Sugar, because it stiffens in convenient ways, is the greatest play food ingredient ever discovered. European pastry chefs have sometimes gone totally overboard on the possibilities. Marie-Antoine Careme, the early-19th-Century codifier of classical French cuisine, considered pastry-making the highest branch of cookery and was famous for cakes made in the shape of Gothic cathedrals and ruined Greek temples. He once wrote, “The fine arts are five in number, to wit: painting, sculpture, poetry, music, architecture--whose main branch is confectionery.”

Apart from certain caterers, though, and contestants at events such as the Culinary Olympics, few people practice sugar, ice and butter sculpture these days. Still, certain whimsies have become regular parts of culinary tradition, such as tomato “roses” and carved melon cups. In Belgium, perfectly straight-faced people serve “toadstools” made of hard-cooked eggs topped with tomato slices.

And Chinese cooks have always loved this kind of thing. “Ants climbing a tree”--the ants being grains of rice. “Lion’s head”--a meatball with a “mane” of cabbage leaves. Carrots carved like ascending phoenixes.

Playing with your food will never die.