High Peaks of European Cuisine

 

     Growing up in a Midwestern suburb during the Eisenhower era, I came to feel that I lived in a cultural desert.  Not realizing then that everyone’s own culture tends to be invisible to the individual, I thought not only Chicago’s nearby Black neighborhoods, but also small Midwestern towns, not to mention every other country on earth, had more to engage the imagination than the trimmed lawns of my neighborhood where the height of aesthetic ambition seemed embodied in my parents’ artificial Christmas tree situated in the picture window and played upon by varicolored lights as it revolved.  The corresponding cuisine notoriously depended on ketchup, margarine, Wonder Bread, Jell-O salads, and casseroles using canned soups.  On the rare occasions that my family dined out, it was either for burgers or, for a fancy meal, steak or fried chicken.

     But I soon learned that other options existed and, in menus as in other matters, I became a dissenter.  My mother learned early that I preferred Oscar Mayer Smokey Links to hot dogs and Liederkranz to Velveeta and, as I reached high school age, I found access to lamb and eggplant from Diana’s on South Halsted, sausage with mumbo sauce from a stand beneath the 63^rd Street El, and pickled cabbage from the Assyrian-American Restaurant.  Now, of course, ethnic holes-in-the-wall are everyone’s favorites and salsa is America’s most popular condiment.  A combination of world travels and stacks of library cookbooks have given me some familiarity with what is done with food today.  I have learned that no other region produces such a grand variety of pickled foods as the Korean banchan, while Indian cooking excels in the harmonious orchestration of large numbers of aromatic herbs and spices.  At the same time, I came to reconsider white people’s food and to realize that the European continent has dramatically high peaks of its own culinary achievement.  Though I took a long way round, I had come to be able to appreciate the unique triumphs of white people’s cooking.    

     Bread is made in a good many parts of the world, but European wheat breads have been developed to a level of sophistication far outpacing other regions.  Most of the world’s breads are unleavened flatbreads like tortillas or chapattis, sometimes, like Ethiopian injera, fermented.  In the nineteenth century the first satisfactory chemical leavens became available, allowing the cook to make raised breads like biscuits, soda bread, coffee cake, and bannocks.  Oven-baked raised breads using barm, yeast, or sourdough starters include naan, Khamiri roti, and Arabic khubz, including pita, but in Europe an array of high-rising yeast breads unlike those known elsewhere arose.  Every region of Europe developed specialties: pain de mie, challah, pan gellego, ciabatta, pane Toscano, but the acknowledged masterpiece of European bread is the French baguette.  Countless excellent breads are made with whole wheat or with multiple grains, and I relish a sprinkling of sunflower, flax, and sesame seeds, yet for me as for most diners and bakers the acme of bread, the very best loaf, is a baguette.  (Baking all my life I continue to pursue the perfect baguette in my own kitchen.)  The contrast in texture between crust and interior and the pure and fresh wheaten taste, bland enough to complement any dinner made this the most common and iconic of French foodstuffs.  The very magic of the action of the yeast, creating bubbles and caverns, makes a light and variable loaf that is excellent with unsalted butter while not distracting from the other contents of a full plate.    

     People throughout the world, in the universal quest for intoxication, have made alcoholic drinks of whatever was hand: using the sap of palms to make wine in West Africa, agave for pulque in Mexico, rice for sake and mijiu in East Asia, even mare’s milk for Mongolian ayrag or kumis.  Each of these has its charms, particularly in its home territory with complementary climate and cuisine, yet the production of wine from grapes in Europe goes far beyond what was done elsewhere.  Surely the range is extraordinary from a dry and fine-bubbled sparkler, through the light fruit of Beaujolais, the grave and knotty flavor of pinot noir, the satin of Bordeaux, the musky hearth-like warmth of port, even the strong straw taste that lurks behind the sweetness of Tokay.  Surely for those who consume alcohol there is a wine for every taste and every moment.  The simple treatment of grape juice to preserve it and at the same time to induce inebriation became in Europe an elaborate aesthetic game, as any glance at wine literature will indicate, but one with resulting in dependable satisfaction.  

     Similarly, the cheese produced in Europe is far more varied than most of the world’s cheeses.  While fresh cheeses like the Indian panir or the Middle Eastern ackawi which are widespread are made also in  Europe: the familiar cottage cheese, German quark, and French fromage blanc.  The most distinctive European cheeses are, however, prepared with particular molds, fungi, and bacteria.  The litany of their names might suggest a cheese cantata: Brevibacterium linens is used in making Limburger, Penicillium glaucum for gorgonzola, Propionibacterium freundenreichii makes the holes in Swiss, and Penicillium camemberti and its cousin Penicillium roqueforti for camembert and roquefort.  The flavors may be mild or sharp, bland or salty, perhaps nutty or smoky, the textures light or dense soft or hard, smooth or grainy, a grand array of possibilities unequaled elsewhere in the globe. 

     Many foodstuffs are most appealing in natural form.  Fresh apricots can scarcely be improved, new peas and a beefsteak need only a bit of cooking and seasoning, while oysters and clams are best utterly au naturel.  The satisfaction of fresh milk, salted peanuts, tomatoes just plucked from the garden, and countless other foods is universal.  Cuisines differentiate, however, when more complex preparation is employed, often resulting in a product that could not really be foreseen in its raw materials.  Bread, wine, and cheese are all the result of fermentation, and the astonishing variety of each of these basic foods is a testament to our species’ ingenuity, demonstrating the power of art to transform nature.  These products are not simply foods; they are feats of imaginative and aesthetic judgement.

     They are, we may be glad, artistic creations with physical substance.  I sit this afternoon on my front porch in a soft breeze, hearing the birds of late summer.  With a piece of baguette, some thin slices of Gouda, and a glass of Chateau Garreau, I may partake of these pinnacles of European cuisine all at once and, to enjoy such a feast, one need not do any preparation whatever, though today’s bread is homemade. 

Alkaios’ Happy Hour

These are new versions of a few poems and fragments of Alkaios, the Archaic poet. For the most part, I have not sought to mimic his meters, but only to maintain some rhythmic energy. Several editors have differently numbered Alkaios’ texts. The numbers in parentheses following translations refer to the ordering in J. M. Edmonds’ old Lyra Graeca, available on archive.org.


The works of Alkaios, who surely knew Sappho more than two and a half millennia ago in Mytilene, have been, like hers, largely lost. In antiquity the two were considered among the greatest of poets, and the Alexandrians counted both among the canon of nine. Sensation alone would perhaps have kept Sappho’s name familiar, if not always her words, but few readers know anything of her elder contemporary.

Alkaios was deeply involved in his island’s politics and was exiled for years as a result of his aristocratic opposition to the ascendancy of the “popular” party under a succession of tyrants. Many of his surviving poems are politically partisan poems, [1] but he also left hymns, war poems, and a few tattered remnants of what was once a book of love poems. [2] He wrote also a book of drinking songs, a genre popular in ancient China and the Latin Middle Ages as well as in Greece though quite neglected today even, I suspect, at fraternity parties.

The place of drinking songs in human culture is not difficult to explain. Though Camus thought the proper response of a human who realizes his identity with Sisyphus can only be revolt, many people have found intoxication a serviceable alternative. The implications of the surviving texts from Alkaios, whom one might reasonably assume to be socially if not politically normative, is that alcohol is an effective anodyne for mortal ills, appropriate for virtually any occasion.

According to Alkaios wine might, along with a blazing hearth and a good cushion, ameliorate the rigors of winter.


Zeus nods, the heavens open up
and all the streams are frozen hard.
[two lines missing]
Put down the storm, build up the fire,
and pour a good big bowl of wine,
so honey-sweet! Then pile soft pillows
on either side of your brow.
(157)


Here sky-god Zeus is associated with the rigors of winter, implying as well all the rigors of life. The loving list of cozy sensual comforts promises instant if temporary pleasure, and the emphasis is on a generous serving of alcohol.

Yet summer heat provides an equally compelling reason to drink. Alkaios reworks a description in Hesiod’s Works and Days:


Wet your throat with wine -- the dog-star's here again
and hard days, too. In this heat all people drink.
Cicadas sing from under leaves, and from their wings
the shrill song pours when heat-fire flashes
and spreads across the earth. Everything is dry.
* * * * *
But the artichoke blooms. And the women do as they like,
while the men grow thin and wasted in brain and limb by
that scorcher,
the dog-star.
(161)


The sound image of the cicadas suggests the punishing temperature, further emphasized by the mention of artichokes with their desert-like toughness and sharp bract-ends. The peculiar gender contrast that follows perhaps signified more the lassitude of the persona than any actual claim of sexually confident women, equivalent to declaring, “Let them do whatever they please. I’m not moving.”

Alkaios is ready to rush the cocktail hour.


Let’s drink! Don’t wait for dark! A finger’s all
that’s left of day. So from the shelf get down,
my dear, the biggest cups, for wine that frees
from care was given us by Zeus’s son
and Semele’s. Pour cups brimful and mixed
quite strong; let one cup quick pursue the last.
(163)


Here the persona’s depth of feeling is signaled by the multiple intensitive terms: “biggest cups,” cups filled “brimful,” “quite strong,” and rapidly refilled with no end in sight.

The justification for drinking is explicitly the inevitable woes of life which leave a tender human sufficiently battered to appreciate a pharmacological insulation from suffering.


One mustn’t give over one’s heart to one’s pain.
Rejecting Bakkhos no one can move on.
So surely all that one can do
is order wine and then drink deep.
(158)


Pour perfume on my head that’s been through much
and on my greying chest. Oh, he who suffers --
let him drink! Olympians send woe
to everyone.
(164)


But then for Alkaios, any excuse will do.


Let’s drink! The star is coming round again!
(162)


If Alkaios repackages clichés, they are clichés none the less powerful for their familiarity, clichés that have become established through their resonance to generations of people who have found life to be so full of suffering as to be all but unbearable. With sufficient attention one may hear this millennia-old voice calling out a refrain that might be seconded by millions of moderns who have never heard his name.


“here, let’s have a drink”
(441)


Greetings! Have a drink
(170)


Come here! Let’s drink!
(171)



1. One bit yet extant (42) declares in effect of his political foe: “Now that Myrsilos is dead, let’s go get really drunk!”

2. Quintilian reversed the modern reflex by judging on moral grounds and finding the political poems to be excellent and the love poems dubious at best.

3. l. 581 ff. though, significantly, unlike the aristocratic Alkaios, Hesiod depicts the busy farmer pausing in his harvest to enjoy some wine with his frugal meal of curds.

The Role of Wine in Nonnus’ Dionysiaca

I have here used the same forms of Greek names as Rouse’s Loeb Library edition of the Dionysiaca (thus Nonnus. Dionysus, etc., but Ampelos).


     The sprawling and ornately decorated hexameters of what is perhaps the greatest little-read book of antiquity, Nonnus’ Dionysiaca, [1] detail the adventures of Dionysus with many narrations of sexuality and violence (sometimes violent sexuality) as well as ecstasy and intoxication. In the first third of the over 20,000 line poem one encounters monsters like Typhon and Ares’ dragon, murders such as Zagreus’ death, the derangement of Ino, Themisto, and Athamas, while numerous characters are bewitched by love. At the outset the author invokes not only the Muses but also Proteus of many turns (polytropon) to guide the poem’s composition as a manifold or richly-wrought song (poikilon hymnon). (I, 14) Some find it difficult to reconcile this massive and disorderly work which goes far to define “decadent” to the same author’s grave paraphrase of the gospel of John. [2] Their styles may differ widely, but there is little in the epic celebration of the unruly god that would ill-fit a Christian believer.
     Dizzyingly extravagant in content and style, Nonnus’ poem concerns the deity known in antiquity for his followers’ transports of enthusiasm and specifically identified with the grape, with wine, and drunkenness. It is true that the verse gains some stability with its quite regular clopping hexameters (written when quantitative verse was already being abandoned) and its archaic Homeric dialect (itself freshened with a great many neologisms), but the themes themselves are ultimately a safe distance from the transgressive.
     The role of wine itself is a case in point. Though used in small quantities ritually by many groups including ancient Chinese, Jews, and Christians and more generously in observances by groups including ancient Egyptians, old Norsemen, and, surprisingly, early Mormons, alcohol has proven a far poorer alternative than many other psychoactive drugs for religious inspiration. Even the Greek Dionysia is distinguished more by the dithyrambic (and later theatrical) contests and by the processions of phalluses than by drunkenness. (If one believes Livy, the Roman Bacchanalia was a far more licentious festival, in need of civic regulation since 186 C.E.)
     Surprisingly, wine appears in Nonnus’ Dionysiaca not as a gateway to altered consciousness but only as an amelioration of suffering, a simple anodyne. Indeed, the poem’s Book VII prophesies that Dionysus’ advent will ease the trials of human life as Semele is told “You have conceived a son who will make mortals forget their troubles.” (367) Her offspring will not cause their suffering to vanish nor will she grant a transcendental wisdom from the height of which suffering will seem trivial; rather, he will allow them to temporarily escape the woes inevitable in life.
     Dionysus, who was often depicted as a beardless youth and was ridiculed as effeminate by Pentheus, falls in love with “the rosy form of a young comrade” Ampelos (X, 175) and takes him as his “playmate” (homepsion). (X, 193) Like many Greek men the god delights in the boy’s dancing (X, 240) and fears rivals of his beloved’s own age. (X, 248) Indeed Ampelos inspires the love of a satyr (X, 278). Dionysus begs Zeus to be allowed to possess Ampelos’ love exclusively, saying that his favorite outshines even Zeus’ choice Ganymede. (X, 317) Ampelos and his divine lover enjoy each other’s company, joining, for instance, in “honey-sweet wrestling” (X, 345) and other athletic contests.
     Ate interferes then in their idyllic relationship, suggesting to Ampelos that he has received insufficient favors from his lover (XI, 113) and raising again the comparison to Ganymede: “The Trojan wine-pourer had the better of you -- he is at home in the court of Zeus.” (XI, 138) Ampelos allows himself to be persuaded to ride a bull, presumably to impress Dionysus, but he is thrown from the animal’s back, breaking his neck. (XI, 217)
     Thrown into uncharacteristic mourning, Dionysus hears Atropos telling him that Ampelos lives yet in the wine (XII, 142) in which form he will be worshiped with song and dance and the triumphant cries of the Muses. (XII, 152) Wine is called “the heavenly nectar, comfort of the human race.” (XII, 152) Wine is contrasted with war, its red juice a pleasure utterly unlike the blood of battle. (XII, 164) [3] Dionysus’ suffering is nearly Christ-like, though his wounds are those of the lovelorn rather than the victim of judicial torture: “Lord Bacchus has wept tears, that he may wipe away tears.” (XII, 171)
     The virtue of this ability of wine to overcome suffering is sufficient that the grape becomes the chief plant of all, receiving the homage of lesser greenery. [4] Its divine qualities betray the fact that it grew from ichor. (XII, 295) But is it not expecting very little of god to provide some temporary surcease of sorrow and grief? Drunkenness is a modest compensation for mortality, more like the psalmist noting that wine “gladdens men’s hearts,” Christ’s miracle at Cana, [5] or the wine promised in Paradise in the Koran [6 ] than like Jesus Christ, "the true vine" or the grapes borne on a staff later identified with the savior. [7]  On the Greek tragic stage Euripedes declared in The Bacchae “When we pour libations out, it is the god himself we pour out, and by this bring blessings on mankind.”
     If there is less of the tremendum of the Grail symbols, there is more of the usable in everyday life. In Nonnus wine is well represented in the repeated image of Ganymede offering a glass. (XII, 40; XII 105) That convivial drink promises no enlightenment or even transport, but it does provide a reliable anaesthetic, an insulation against the harsher of life’s blows as well as a positive source of pleasure in better times (though neither use would be sanctioned by modern psychologists). If one thinks with the Living Theatre that Dionysus should be in a more ambitious business, at least this more modest one possesses the convenience of remaining still within reach.



1. The 1940 Loeb Library edition was translated by W. H. D. Rouse. The entire text of Northrup Frye’s copy with his marginalia is conveniently available at archive.org.

2. Though some readers choose to think the apparently pagan work was written before the writer’s conversion, I prefer to think of Nonnus as a figure like Snorri Sturluson, a good Christian but an antiquarian as well who saw value in the old beliefs and the art to which they had given rise.

3. See also line 252 which again contrasts the blood offered to Ares to the grape juice which is Dionysus’.

4. XII, 273 ff.

5. See Psalm 104:15 and John II, 1-11.

6. Surah XLVII, 15 promises wine in paradise Quran, XVI, 67 recommends it.

7. See John 15:1 and Numbers 13:23.

The Valley of Beautiful Women

     The site of a celebrated (if temporary) victory over the Turks in 1552, the town of Eger lies between the Bűkk and Mátra mountains of northeast Hungary. On its edge is the Valley of Beautiful Women (Szépasszony-völgy) ringed by vine-covered slopes. There’s a tale in a guidebook that the name may derive from a pre-Christian goddess, but the visitor quite soon encounters a statue of the current ruling deity, Bacchus. This particular theophany may be the version of the local Viticulture Chamber of Commerce -- there are two hundred separate growers each of whom makes wine, stores it in caves in the hillside, and offers it in rudimentary cafés consisting of a few tables and chairs in front of the vine-covered slope. Well before catching sight of the first of these establishments, the visitor can smell the grape in the air -- and the odor, too, of its transformation to wine. Open dumpsters with the fresh grapes or the refuse after crushing sit among hoses and barrels. The entire process, from growing the fruit to the customers’ consumption, takes place on these premises in public view. As it is October, the fresh juice (or must) is sold here and there, as is food, but wine rules, and among the wine, surely the most well-known is the Egri Bikavér, called in English Bull’s Blood. This wine, sometimes regarded as similar to Bordeaux and, in modern times, made from varieties like Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot, is available here for 70 HUF a glass, less than 35 cents.
     We had lunch and a taste of wine and strolled about. Musicians were playing the old melancholy “Gypsy” tunes, flirtatious bits of operetta, and folk songs of love longing. They seemed all to be non-professionals -- we never saw any asking for tips. In the park-like center areas each picnic table was provided with, not a barbeque grill, but a stand on which to hang the great kettle called a bogracs, a cookery tool associated both with the original Magyars who arrived over a millennium ago, and with the “cowboys” of the great plain (the puszta). In one a rich stew (pörkölt) was already started, and the people stirring the pot seemed to welcome our interest and offer every friendly gesture though we shared no language. Walking away, however, another member of the party approached and, in a working class British voice, asked if we spoke English.
     John Cross was the son of a Hungarian mother and a British father who, after eleven years in the submarine service of the Royal Navy (including a term in the brig for cannabis smuggling) and work, he said, on security details protecting the prime minister, decided at the age of fifty to move to Hungary where he opened a pub and worked in a supermarket. He disdained all religions, all politics, considered simple pleasures and sociability the proper end of life. He had lost most the proceeds from selling his London flat to some broker’s speculative manipulation, but said, “As long as I have the coins to buy a packet of cigs, a sandwich, and a drink, I’m happy.” He rejected the very concept of career. “A man can always work. Just ask one place after another and someone’ll take you to do something.”
     So our lunch hour stretched out toward evening, our table filled with convivial Hungarians. John’s friend (whose name was something like Choppy) whom we had seen cutting the potatoes for the stew, and Choppy’s girlfriend (called something not distant from Auggy), the peeler, sat across from us as we drank Bull’s Blood and the shadows lengthened. We had got on to carafés (just under than a dollar).
     Musicians from the party with which John had come sang and played an accordion, a saxophone, tambourines. Everyone was singing along with the familiar songs. A round-faced, dark-haired man with the pain of centuries in his face and a suit so surpassingly dark it seemed, like a black hole, to threaten to pull everything into itself, made his violin weep and dance complaints. When the stew was ready, it was distributed to all in the neighborhood, along with dishes of pickles and hot peppers and vinegared slaw. There seemed no longer to be any distinction between John’s party and others in the café and those in the café next door and whoever happened by. Everyone ate and drank and sang and talked and drank again. More wine. More song. Talk and wine. We felt as though we were in a Bruegel peasant wedding, a dinner-party with Alkibiades, Li Po downing a few with Wang Wei. (And such semi-intoxicated revels on the face of this dark earth will surely be re-enacted as long as people feel pain and love and sorrow and joy.) As night settled, spirits rose and sentiment and the jollity was in full swing, but we were weary by nine and offered regrets and set out toward town and the Dobo guesthouse in the shadow of the castle. John seemed genuinely pained, but only for a moment.
     Had we met a hidden Buddha?