Fresco of Shah Abbas I receiving Vali Muhammad Khan, Chehel Sotoun Palace, Isfahan, circa 1657. Ninara/Wikicommons
July 05, 2015
In
April prior to the Expo Milano 2015, Secretary of State John Kerry gathered the
chefs who would represent America at the world fair. “You can make connections
around the dinner table you can’t around the conference table,” he told them.
In 2012, the State Department had formed a Diplomatic Culinary Partnership with
the James Beard Foundation, proclaiming that chefs would “elevate the role of
culinary engagement in America’s formal and public diplomacy efforts.”
Such nods to the kitchen seem quaint in light of
history’s deep association between cuisine and politics. From the earliest
empires, a ruler had to eat and drink to maintain his personal prowess, gather
his strength for battle, ensure his virility in bed, and outperform those who
aspired to his throne, all the while making sure his enemies did not poison
him. Cuisine, like monumental buildings and fine dress, demonstrated and
reinforced a sovereign’s power. During ages when transport was slow and
expensive, dining on exotic luxuries showed off a leader’s command of the
resources of his domains. When cuisine was shared it bought loyalty from
followers, and when withheld it humiliated and punished his enemies. Farm products
were central to generating revenues, and once processed were used to pay
bureaucrats, bodyguards, and warriors. When annual food shortages before the
harvest were a regular reminder of the ever-present threat of famine and riot,
it was the ruler’s responsibility to make sure that the poor, particularly the
urban poor, did not go short.
For more than two thousand years, from circa 550 BC to
1700 AD, Persian high cuisine was as important to the politics of Eurasian
states as French gastronomy would become to international diplomacy in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Its long reign began when Cyrus the Great
led his charioteers down off the high plateau to the plains of Mesopotamia,
conquered the rich lowlands, named himself King of Kings, and established the
largest empire yet seen, stretching from Turkey in the west to the borders of
India in the east. Not the least of his prizes was the world’s most
sophisticated culinary tradition, the Babylonian, which stretched back another
thousand years to the first written recipes recorded in 1750 BC. Cyrus adopted
its cooks, its dishes, and the organization of its kitchens.
The organization of the imperial
kitchen, one of the most important government departments, was to remain
remarkably stable over the centuries. Into it was checked and recorded much of
the ruler’s revenue, whether as tribute, taxes, or the products of his own
farms, orchards, game parks, and fisheries. Tribute bearers from around the
empire, depicted on the ceremonial staircase that Cyrus’s successor Darius I
had constructed at the palace of Persepolis, brought grains, oil seeds, fruits
and vegetables, and domesticated animals along with showier gold, silver, wild
animals, and beautiful slaves. In the elaborate series of kitchens in the palace,
and in satellite operations such as bakeries, fisheries, and game reserves,
perhaps thousands of workers labored to process and cook these foodstuffs. The
head cook, or executive chef, as he would now be called, was responsible for
logging the offerings into storage and then out to the kitchens, for organizing
the staff, and for getting the multiple meals of the palace served to the
appropriate groups. He worked with the steward, one of the ruler’s right-hand
men, who was responsible for protocol and administration of the palace.
Somewhat less senior but also crucial was the royal physician, who with his
staff prepared strengthening foods before battle or if the king seemed ill, and
monitored the ruler’s health, checking his digestion, urine, and excrement to
see that foods passed properly. Finally, royal gardeners, huntsmen, and others
delivered delicacies such as dates, pomegranates, and game.
The imperial kitchens added value to grains and
carcasses, turning them from useless, bulky objects to fine white bread,
delicious oils, or aromatic roasted meats, by slaughtering and butchering,
threshing and grinding, boiling and crushing, and multiple other difficult,
laborious operations. Processed foods were handed out as rations, payment in
kind, to the ruler’s bodyguards and bureaucrats, and to all artisans, women,
soothsayers, entertainers, and of course the cooks, who kept the imperial
machine humming. A bronze pillar was inscribed with the rations for Cyrus’s
meals, reported the Macedonian writer Polyaenus. These included different
grades of wheat and barley flour; carcasses of oxen, horses, rams, geese, and
birds; milk both fresh and fermented; seasonings and condiments such as garlic
and onions, apple and pomegranate juice, cumin, dill, turnip pickles and
capers; cooking fats including ghee, sesame, and almond oils; wine of both
dates and grapes; “cakes” of dried fruits and nuts bound with a resin; and
firewood for preparing meals. Far too much food for any single person, even a
King of Kings, these lists bear witness to the way palace provisions were
distributed.
Nothing established the ruler’s position within his
own court and with foreign dignitaries more than the great feast. Whole
carcasses were roasted, an extravagance in a land where fuel was scarce.
Sauces, time consuming to prepare, accompanied the meat. Confections were
created from sesame oil, honey, barley meal, and fresh mild cheese. Guests went
home with leftovers and the elaborate silver and gold drinking horns from which
they had quaffed their wine. A fine gift induced loyalty in humans, “just as it
does in dogs,” sniffed Xenophon, the Greek historian who served in the Persian
army. The Greeks might sniff, but a hierarchy of benevolence was the working
assumption of most of the ancient world.
Power to
Feed
With food and cooking so important, it’s not
surprising that the universe was thought to be a giant kitchen in which fire
and water were the chief agents of change just as they were in the sculleries
and bakeries of the palace. The sun beamed down fire (thought to be a real
living thing that danced and died if it were not fed), the moon water. Fire and
water were the driving agents of a world made up of a hierarchy of living
things, each with their own way of dining. Minerals, then believed to be alive,
needed little more than water. Plants thrived on water and earth, cooked by the
sun until they flowered and seeded. Animals ate raw meat or vegetables, alone
and standing. Nomads who (at least by reputation) ate raw meat but no grains,
were considered little better than animals; civilized humans ate meat and
grains only if they had been further cooked in the fire, and they ate them
reclining, sitting, or kneeling with their fellows. The poor among them ate the
less prestigious grains, the darkest bread, and rarely saw meat. The
privileged, perhaps 10 percent of the population, enjoyed high cuisines that
included fine white bread, meat, sauces, and sweets. At the pinnacle of the
hierarchy was the monarch, who ate the most refined foods, dining alone since
he had no equal. He was the pivot of the cosmos, poised between the natural and
the supernatural, the gods who supped on ethereal aromas and smoke. The more
cooked the food, the more refined, the more concentrated, and the more powerful
it was.
A chain of culinary benevolence
(or bribery) bound together gods and humans, rulers and subjects. The gods had
given food to humans, especially the grains and the domesticated animals, it
was believed. In return, the king offered sacrifices of grains and animals to
the gods to guarantee fertile women, good crops, and success in war. The king
thus ensured the peoples’ well-being, receiving in return grains and animals in
tribute from his subjects. As historian Amy Singer puts it, it was the power to
feed that fed power.
And so Persian cuisine, a cuisine that satisfied these
multiple political needs, was refined during a thousand years and more of
successive Persian empires, the Seleucid, the Parthian, and the Sassanid. Other
empires that bordered on the sequence of Persian empires copied what they
could. The Greeks, for example—although suspicious of imperial
extravagance—adopted Persian sauces, Persian wine cups, and Persian dining
benches, while Alexander the Great took cooks as part of the spoils of war. Drawing
on these intermediaries, the cuisine of imperial Persia found echoes in the
cuisine of imperial Rome.
In 762, the second caliph of the Abbasid Dynasty
founded Baghdad. He modified the Persian culinary tradition to fit the
gradually emerging Islamic culinary strictures, as Cyrus had co-opted the
cuisine of Babylon a thousand years earlier. By the end of the century, Harun
Al-Rashid, best known today from the Thousand and One Nights
(although the stories about him are probably fictitious), took it to new
heights. For the caliph and his court, the cooks prepared chicken, tender young
goat, and lamb in sauces rich with almonds and pistachios, spices, vinegar, and
green herbs. They seized on newly available sugar to create pastries and
confectionary that went beyond the halvas and brittles prepared with honey. For
the people, agricultural reforms and new ways of food processing improved the
diet.
Once again, surrounding states emulated this powerful
cuisine. It was recreated in Indian sultanates and central Asian states and
across northern Africa. Elements crept into the newly prosperous princedoms and
kingdoms of Europe. A version was found in Al-Andalus; because Christian
conquistadors set their sights on the Americas, traces are found across Latin
America.
In 1330, the court physician Hu Szu-Hui presented the
Mongol emperor of China with a cookbook-cum-dietary manual and food inventory
called the Proper
and Essential Things for the Emperor’s Food and Drink.
As he explained in the introduction, “There is none, near or far, who does not
come to court and offer tribute. Rare dainties and exotic things are all
collected in the imperial treasury.” That meant that the Mongols, although best
known in the public imagination as fierce warriors who pierced their horses’
necks and sucked on the blood for sustenance, followed centuries of precedent
and co-opted Persian cuisine for the court. They had begun their conquests in
the 1220s and by mid-century controlled northern China, Persia, Russia,
Baghdad, and by 1280 southern China as well.
In the Chinese capital
Khanbalik, near present-day Beijing, Kublai Khan asked Chinese advisors to
devise a cuisine that would display the Mongol court as powerful and
cosmopolitan as befitted emperors who portrayed themselves as heirs to the
world’s great empires, calling themselves King of Kings like the Persians, Son
of Heaven like the Chinese, Caesar like the Romans, and Great King like the
Indians. Captives from Persian lands were instructed to set up flourmills and
oil presses, grow grapes and make wine. In the kitchens, traditional Mongol
meat soups were prepared with Persian (or with Chinese) thickeners, vegetables,
and spices as part of imperial culinary policy.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a trio of
Islamic empires, the Safavid, the Ottoman, and the Mughal, which stretched from
the Mediterranean to much of India, continued the Persian tradition, with
delicate rice pilaus now added to the cuisine. In Isfahan, Shah Abbas I served
envoys such as Vali Muhammad Khan of Bukhara. In Istanbul, the Topkapi kitchens
of Suleiman the Magnificent had earlier prepared meals for the ruler and his
janissaries, as well as elaborate festivities in which sugar sculptures were
paraded to the delight of his subjects. And to the east, on the terrace of the
fort of Agra, Shah Jahan, the Mughal emperor who built the Taj Mahal and ruled
one-seventh of the world’s population, gave white banquets by the light of the
moon, his retinue dressed in white kneeling on white carpets. Prepared by cooks
brought from different parts of the Islamic World to work in the kitchens in
Delhi or in the sixteen large kitchen tents that were part of the emperor’s
train, they featured chicken breasts in a sauce of almonds and creamy yogurt
and pilau rice rich with butter and white raisins. They were served on dishes
of gold, silver, and Ming porcelain, while the shah drank wine from an
auspicious milky white Chinese jade cup, perfectly sized to fit in his palm,
and believed to turn color if the drink were poisoned. The Savafid, Ottoman,
and Mughal courts received European envoys who reported on the magnificence of
the cuisine.
European diplomacy, though, was headed in a different
direction. High French cuisine had been created in response to the scientific,
political, and religious changes of the mid-seventeenth century as part of the
court ceremonial of Versailles. Adopted by the aristocratic diplomatic class,
it became first the cuisine of European diplomacy, then over the course of the
nineteenth century, the cuisine of world diplomacy. To participate, Asian
courts added second, French kitchens. Those of republican persuasion—first the
Dutch, then the young American republic, drawing on traditions that went back
to republican Rome and democratic Greece—were opposed to such monarchical
displays. They embarked on a reform of culinary politics, maintaining the
commitment to provide decent diets for their citizens, but distancing diplomacy
from the deeply entrenched model of extravagant dining. Although American state
dinners have most frequently been French, they have always been modest by
historical standards. And the Barack Obama administration’s Diplomatic Culinary
Partnership continues the move from historical precedent by choosing, for
diplomacy, the culinary traditions of the United States.
Rachel
Laudan is
a visiting scholar in the Institute for Latin American Studies at the University
of Texas at Austin. She is author of Cuisine and Empire:
Cooking in World History; The Food of Paradise: Exploring Hawaii’s
Culinary Heritage; and co-editor of the Oxford Companion to the History
of Modern Science. On Twitter: @rachellaudan.