POWER AND PRESTIGE : FATS IN HISTORY

Fats are more than simply foods to be eaten. Throughout human history, fat has been a symbol to be wielded. Fats have been integral to the reinforcement and regulation of cultural, social, religious and economic values, simultaneously symbolizing and bestowing power, authority, luxury and distinction.

Humans’ larger brains and shorter digestive tracts mean that, biologically, we are much more dependent on nutrient-and energy-dense foods than other primates. At nine calories per gram, fat is much more energy dense than either protein or carbohydrate, which each consist of only four calories per gram. For most of the world’s hunter-gatherer societies, fats play a crucial role. In most traditional diets, fats comprise between 36 per cent and 43 per cent of the diet by caloric intake, but for some groups, the importance of fat is much greater. For example, the traditional Maasai diet is approximately 66 per cent fat calories, while the traditional diet of the Inuit is up to 70 per cent. In cultures with a high reliance on animal-based food sources, the right balance of fat and protein is essential: a diet with insufficient fat can be fatal. During times of food scarcity – such as during the late winter and early spring of temperate and northern regions when game animals are especially lean – excessive consumption of lean meat can result in a form of protein poisoning known as ‘rabbit starvation’, an agonizing and deadly condition in which sufferers experience intense pain and insatiable hunger.

The Canadian explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, who spent many years with the native peoples of North America, observed their careful avoidance of overly lean meat, writing:
"Rabbit eaters, if they have no fat from another source – beaver, moose, fish – will develop diarrhoea in about a week, with headache, lassitude and vague discomfort. If there are enough rabbits, the people eat until their stomachs are distended; but no matter how much they eat they feel unsatisfied. Some think a man will die sooner if he eats continually of fat-free meat than if he eats nothing."

Due to the essential nutrition fat provides, traditional societies have tended to favour the fattiest parts of the animal. The high value and desirability of fat, combined with its relative scarcity, means that within such societies fat operates as an important marker of social and cultural status. For many, it also functions as a vehicle through which power can either be conferred or diminished. A common practice in many parts of the world has been to give (male) hunters priority access to the fattiest, and hence most nutritionally valuable, portions of the animal, such as the bone marrow, the brain and the fat surrounding the kidneys and internal organs. Among the Kung San of the Kalahari, where animal fat is scarce for much of the year, male hunters may be permitted to consume most or all of the limited yield of marrow fat and fatty organs while snacking at the kill site. Animal fat also goes primarily to the men of the Hadza in Tanzania, who similarly have preferential access to marrow fat at the kill. Among the Mbuti pygmies of the Congo, it is men who customarily receive the fat-rich brain of large prey animals.

Women’s access to fat is often further inhibited by uniquely female food taboos. Among the Aranda people of Central Australia, for example, women are prohibited from consuming any meat or fat during the first months of pregnancy. In a number of Athapaskan societies of subarctic North America, pubescent girls are allowed to consume only lean, dried meat. Even among the Penan of Sarawak, on Borneo, where women have more equitable access to fat than in many other hunter-gatherer societies, fat is prohibited for lactating women. Indeed, some have argued that men’s and women’s differential access to fat has been instrumental in reinforcing patriarchal social structures in many traditional societies.

In part due to this association with cultural value and (masculine) power, fat serves important ceremonial and ritual functions for a range of cultural groups. Traditional marriage ceremonies among the Maasai of Kenya and Tanzania involve the smearing of fat and oil from a male sheep on the bride’s head and wedding dress. A widowed Maasai woman will customarily drink liquid fat as part of the rituals associated with the coming-of-age of her son: the fat acts as a laxative, with its expulsion from the mother’s body symbolizing the expulsion of the impurities of the relationship with her son.

Fat has also traditionally been used to treat the much disputed ‘Windigo psychosis’ among the Algonquin people of North America. The Windigo, a malevolent cannibalistic spirit, was believed to possess human beings, giving them an intense desire for human flesh. Fat-rich foods, particularly bear fat and deer tallow, were given to those suspected of being afflicted. This was done not so much as a curative but as a test: fat was such an important and desirable commodity that anyone who rejected it had clearly ceased to be human and must be executed. As long as the fat was taken, there was still hope for recovery.

For the Kwakiutl (Kwakwaka’wakw) of British Columbia, fat was central to massive potlatches. These potlatches were social gatherings held to celebrate major life events, such as births, marriages and initiations, at which feasting lasted for days and enormous quantities of food were offered as a sign of the power and status of the host. When guests could no longer eat another morsel from among the mounds of seal blubber and eulachon (a type of fish) oil, the leftovers were burned in fires in a dramatic display of excess. Such feasts served as a form of one-upmanship among powerful Kwakiutl men, enabling them to improve their status rankings by placing guests in their debt.

The Kwakiutl were not the only ones to use potlatch-style feasting as a technique to shore up social status and power. For the ancient civilizations of the Fertile Crescent, palatial banqueting was used as a way to define and confer hierarchies. Meat, particularly fatty meat, was a key symbol of luxury and power at palatial meals. The royal banquets of Mesopotamia, for example, were gigantic fatty feasts. When the palace of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II was completed in 879 BC, a ten-day feast for 69,574 guests included 1,000 fat oxen, 14,000 sheep, 1,000 lambs, hundreds of deer, 20,000 pigeons, 10,000 fish, 10,000 desert rats and 10,000 eggs.

In Bronze Age Greece, palatial feasting was an important tool for legitimizing elite authority. Banquet contributions of fattened livestock were obligatory for those of high status, while those of lower status made what contributions they could as a means of seeking favour. During the feasts, extravagant quantities of meat and fat were consumed. However, the bone marrow – an otherwise highly desirable source of animal fat – was burned as part of a ritual offering to the deities.

The royal banquet was a similarly important public relations exercise in imperial Rome, with opulent, fatty dishes – such as a whole pig stuffed with sausages and songbirds, and platters of birds’ tongues – serving as symbols of the palace’s wealth and authority. The excessiveness of such feasts was satirized in the Satyricon, attributed to Gaius Petronius and written during the age of Emperor Nero (first century BC). In one of the key scenes from the text, ‘Dinner with Trimalchio’, course after course is served with food that is not ‘real’ – that is, food masquerading as other animals or objects. From a whole pig, its insides bloated with fatty sausages and blood pudding designed to look like entrails, to pigeons moulded from lard (pork fat), the feast is a vulgar and nauseating display. Although written as a satire, the Satyricon was not an entirely wild exaggeration of feasting practices of the time. In a period when the ordinary population had limited access to meat and fat, extravagant feasting on such foods took on great symbolic power and significance.

Along with animal fats, olive oil was also an important tool in the demonstration of monarchical power. First cultivated by the inhabitants of Syria and Palestine at least as early as 4,000 BC, the olive created one of the foundational economies of the ancient world. Olive oil served as the backbone of the export trade, with the Greek trading posts of the Black Sea becoming an important hub for merchants from as far afield as the southern steppes of Russia. At Knossos in Crete, oil was the king’s treasure and its export one of his major sources of revenue. Subjects of the Roman Empire were excused from military service if they planted a certain number of acres with olives. So important was olive oil to these ancient empires that the classical Greeks and Romans considered butter to be the food of barbarians – although in Mesopotamia, butter had been culturally significant enough to be depicted in Sumerian temple friezes from as early as 2500 BC.

In the medieval West, where feudalism, inclement weather and persistent warfare posed ongoing issues for food security, feasts were central to the social duties of the rich and powerful. Medieval lords used banquets to persuade the loyalties and opinions of their guests. Domestic animals (cattle, pigs, sheep and goats), with their greater proportion of fat than game animals, were the most highly prized banquet foods. The lavishness of the table conveyed the wealth and power of the host. For example, during a feast at the French court in 1420, supplies of 100 fat oxen, 130 sheep, 120 pigs, 200 piglets, 60 fat pigs (for larding purposes), 200 kids and lambs, 100 calves, 2,000 poultry, 6,000 eggs and 1,600 kg (3,600 lb) of flour and cheese were used each day.

In cases when nobility entertained royalty, the expense and luxury of the feast items signified their loyalty and allegiance. The historian Pierre Jean-Baptiste Legrand d’Aussy (1737–1800) described a typical banquet hosted by the Count of Anjou in 1455 as including table decorations consisting of two enormous pies surmounted with smaller pies, which formed a crown. The crust of the large ones was silvered all round and gilt at the top; each contained a whole roe-deer, a gosling, three capons, six chickens, ten pigeons, one young rabbit, and, no doubt to serve as seasoning or stuffing, a minced loin of veal, two pounds of fat, and twenty-six hard boiled eggs, covered with saffron and flavoured with cloves.

Fat was used as a tool of elite control not only in the extravagant display of the feast, but in the annual rents extracted from the peasants of the feudal estates. In cooler climate regions, these taxes were dominated by animal fats. The Frankish emperor Charlemagne (r. 800–814) stipulated the annual production and collection of sheep fat and beef tallow in the Capitulare de Villis, the court’s manual for estate management and productivity. In Bavaria, butter and pork fat were included in peasants’ annual burdens. The Saxon king Ina collected similar rents of butter and animal fat in the seventh century. With milking yields much lower than they are today, butter was an especially expensive fat to produce: between 9 and 35 litres (2–9 gallons) of milk were required to produce 1 kilogram of butter.

So while the food rents enabled the accumulation of food stores that likely protected feudal estates against the worst exigencies of famine, the annual burdens placed a heavy toll on the peasants, who suffered nutritionally from their limited access to dietary fat.

Historically, differences in social standing were expressed primarily through the access to, and display of, food in large quantity. By the seventeenth century, however, the manner in which food was prepared was becoming progressively more important. In western Europe, the previously dominant acidic sauces, based on vinegar or verjuice, were increasingly replaced with butter- and fat-based sauces that came to signify the luxury and opulence of aristocratic cooking. For example, seventeenth-century Florentine feasts continued to deploy vast amounts of food in the displays of wealth and power witnessed in previous eras, but the dishes served also highlighted the growing popularity of refined, butter-based cookery. The celebrations to mark the reluctant marriage of Marguerite-Louise d’Orléans to Cosimo III de’ Medici in 1661 included an afternoon tea featuring no less than seven services, with the first service alone consisting of 35 separate dishes, many of them rich, fatty and buttery. Dishes included capirottata (roasted chickens and larded and roasted capons served with roasted sweetbreads); fat-rich mortadella sausage; salted and fried pigs’ cheeks; and a shortcrust pie filled with candied citron, pistachios, marzipan, ham, roast capon breast, roasted sweetbreads, agresta (verjuice grapes), approval approval sugar and cinnamon. Plates of butter carved in the shape of a lion with a raised paw to represent the bride were also part of the banquet.

Such ostentatious displays of wealth were typical of the ceremonial feasting of the Medici and the other grand families of the era, but throughout the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth, social distinction and power were conveyed increasingly through the cultivation of delicacy, rather than of excess. The French Revolution of 1789–99 accelerated the development of the restaurant trade in France and, with it, the emergence of haute cuisine. The closure of aristocratic kitchens had left the cooks of these grand households in search of work. Many of them became restaurateurs. This was the era of luminaries like Marie-Antoine Carême, who created beautiful and elaborate sculptures from lard, sugar and marzipan, and later, Auguste Escoffier, who elevated sauce making (and sauciers, or ‘sauce cooks’) to an area of specialized expertise. Escoffier, building on the earlier work of Carême, consolidated French cookery’s varied and complex sauces to five key sauces: béchamel, espagnole, velouté, hollandaise and tomate. Each of these sauces included butter as a key ingredient, cementing the place of butter-based sauces as a characteristic of haute cuisine.

The expansion of the restaurant trade heralded the diffusion of elite food, with haute cuisine accessible not just to the aristocracy but to anyone who could afford it. Consequently, the restaurant became an important public site for the demarcation and affirmation of social status, particularly for the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie. Internationally, French cuisine became a model of culinary excellence, with ‘classical’ training for chefs still considered synonymous with ‘French’ cookery.

Perhaps more so than any other ingredient, butter became a key symbol of classical French cuisine. The influence of Carême and Escoffier is still evident in the cuisine of contemporary chefs such as Joël Robuchon, awarded the Meilleur Ouvrier de France in cuisine in 1976 and recipient of Gault et Millau’s ‘Chef of the Century’ in 1989, who popularized the mashed potato as a luxury dish: his extravagant purée de pommes de terre is famous for being loaded with butter.

Because of the historical associations with nutritional health, abundance and wealth, fats have operated as important symbols of utopia and paradise in a range of folklore and religious traditions. Stories abounded in medieval Europe of mythical places where food fell from the sky, pastries grew on trees and roast animals wandered about offering their meat to hungry inhabitants. These gastronomic paradises – known across artistic, literary and oral traditions as the land of Cockaigne – satisfied the dreams of a poor, deprived peasantry by offering images of abundance in which people never needed to go hungry again. In Scandinavian versions of the Cockaigne myth, rivers flow with sour cream. In French tales, houses are built of meat and trees are made from butter. German variations of the stories feature goats pulling cartloads of fat and salt, while hotcakes grow on trees.

More recent versions of the Cockaigne myth have also appeared in African American folk tales. In these tales, the mythical place of Diddy Wah Diddy is a gastronomic utopia for weary travellers: as they sit and rest, a baked chicken with a knife and fork stuck in its sides offers itself to be eaten, as does an endlessly replenished sweet potato pie. Depictions of Diddy Wah Diddy have appeared in a range of popular texts, such as in songs like ‘Big Rock Candy Mountain’, and in Disney’s adaptation of the Br’er Rabbit tales, Song of the South (1946), which features a Garden of Eatin’ containing baked hams, a chicken gravy river and a forbidden pork-chop tree. The different versions of the Cockaigne myth share in common an emphasis on meat and animal fats – foods that would have rarely featured in the diet of the poor and whose scarcity not only associated them with the wealthy and the powerful, but made them coveted objects of desire. The fatty indulgences offered by the lands of Cockaigne made them places of endless pleasure, satiety and celebration: not just temporary or fleeting feasts, but permanent places free of hardship.

Such desires for the pleasure and security of cornucopias of endless food are also reflected in conceptions of the afterlife in a range of religious traditions. From the Viking feasting halls of Valhalla to the Islamic paradise of Jannah, meat and fat are often the centrepieces of never-ending feasts. Fat is Jehovah’s preferred food, with Leviticus 3:14–16 stipulating that the ‘fat of the beast’ be burned at the temple for His consumption. In Isaiah 34:6–7, acts of sacrifice are said to enrich the land through the introduction of fat, with the Lord rewarding His chosen people with rich, fertile soil. In fact, it has even been argued that the biblical reference to a ‘land flowing with milk (hālāb) and honey’ is more correctly translated in Hebrew as a ‘land flowing with fat (hēlebh) and honey’.

Due to the religious importance of fat, Jewish festivals are often observed by eating fat-rich foods. Since medieval times, the most desired celebratory dishes among Egyptian Jews use the rich tail fat of the fat-tailed sheep. In northern France, beef marrow is a delicacy. For the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe, schmaltz – rendered goose or chicken fat – holds a special place in feasting practices. Schmaltz was essential for the observance of kosher food practices in cold climates as it enabled adherence to prohibitions on the mixing of meat and dairy and on consuming foods from non-kosher animals in places where butter and lard were generally the fats of choice. Schmaltz is traditionally used in a range of festive breads and pastries. It is also used to fry latkes, the potato pancakes enjoyed during Hanukkah when fried foods are eaten to commemorate the miracle of the oil, in which a one-day supply of ritual oil miraculously burned for eight days. But fat’s spiritual value also makes it the subject of religious food taboos. Kashrut (Jewish dietary law) prohibits the consumption of certain kinds of fat. Chelev, the suet that surrounds the kidneys, cannot be eaten; this fat is reserved for korban, a ritual burning or offering of food to the divine.

Christian traditions of Lenten fasting, during which luxury foods are given up as a form of penance, similarly highlight the careful regulation of fat consumption in religious communities. During Lent, a period of approximately six weeks leading up to Easter Sunday, foods including butter and animal fat are forbidden. ‘Fat’ or ‘Shrove’ Tuesday, the Tuesday before Lent, is a time to use up the fats in the larder. In the Protestant tradition, pancakes are a traditional way of emptying the larder of the fats prohibited during Lent. In the Catholic tradition, Fat Tuesday is celebrated with the festivals of Mardi Gras, the most famous of which is Rio de Janeiro’s Carnival. It is a time for feasting on rich, fatty foods; in Brazil, these include acarajé (black-eyed bean fritters fried in dendê, or palm, oil) and feijoada (a hearty stew of black beans, beef, pork and lard).

Since at least the Middle Ages, it has been common practice for wealthy Christians to buy dispensations from the Church to avoid the religious obligations of Lenten fasting. One of the towers of France’s Rouen Cathedral, reconstructed in 1506, is also referred to as the Tour de Beurre, or Butter Tower, because its building works were allegedly funded by donations from wealthy citizens made in return for permission to eat butter during Lent. For pious Christians who did not buy exemptions, fasting tended to conclude with large feasts. In France during the Renaissance, Martinmas (St Martin’s Day) feasts included substantial quantities of goose fat. At that time, there was a belief that the further away from the earth a food was, the better its flavour would be, so birds – and geese in particular – were especially valued. Martinmas feasts also included the popular menus oiseaux, or ‘bird menus’: thrushes, blackbirds, nightingales, sparrows, buntings, finches, quail, ortolans, woodcocks and snipe confited in fat.

So central is fat to the symbolic repertoire of Christianity that Catholics even have patron saints of butter. Haseka, a thirteenth-century German ascetic who lived on whatever food was donated to her, was beatified by the Church when a gift of spoiled butter was made fresh in answer to Haseka’s prayers. St Brigid of Ireland also experienced butter-related miracles: when an elderly woman appeared at her door begging for food, Brigid had little to give. But miraculously, her only remaining food – a dish of butter – multiplied to allow her share her meagre supplies with the woman in need.

The role of fats in religious iconography draws upon a broader history of the symbolic importance of fat, and of butter in particular. Butter represents fertility, prosperity and cleansing in a range of traditions. An Old English wedding custom saw newlyweds presented with a pot of butter to guarantee fertility. In Brittany, carved and decorated blocks of butter were displayed during wedding celebrations; these were later auctioned off with the proceeds going to the newlyweds. But people from parts of the world that prefer oil have traditionally viewed butter with great suspicion. Accounts of Provençal and Catalan travellers in medieval Europe suggest that many took with them their own olive oil for fear that the consumption of butter would make them vulnerable to leprosy.

As they do in Europe, fats occupy a prominent place in religious ceremonies in South Asia. In Indian Vedic ritual, ghee – a type of clarified butter, often spiced and/or cultured – is thrown into the fire as a source of sacred energy and as a re-enactment of Creation. This is because in Hindu belief, Prajápati, lord of creatures, sired his progeny by rubbing or ‘churning’ his hands together and pouring the resultant butter into fire. Ghee is thus a symbol of fertility and virility; at traditional Hindu weddings, male guests compete with each other to see who can consume the most ghee in one sitting as ‘proof’ of their virility. A fermented drink called madhuparka, made with ghee, honey, sugar and herbs, is traditionally offered to suitors about to ask for a girl’s hand in marriage. Because it is made with the milk of the sacred cow, ghee has been used as a source of religious salvation to the higher castes. Food cooked in ghee becomes pukka – purified, acceptable to be eaten even by Brahmins, who otherwise adhere to a series of complex food rules and taboos. Ghee is also used to prepare breads and sweets to be served at temples and during festivals.

For the Sherpa people of Nepal, butter is used in a ritual offering to secure divine protection. The gods are presented with tormas, dough sculptures coated in coloured butter and ranging from several inches to several feet in height. An additional torma, called a gyek, is thrown out of the temple as food for the demons, in order to temporarily sate them and divert them from eating up the other offerings. In Tibet, butter is smeared on temple statues and used to create elaborate sculptures of the offering goddesses and other Buddhist symbols. Prior to the Chinese annexation of Tibet in 1951, dead lamas were embalmed in ghee according to traditional funeral rites.

Throughout history fats have been vital, and symbolically central, to many civilizations around the world, and there has consequently emerged a remarkably consistent set of religious and social systems associated with the regulation, circulation and consumption of these foods. This significance is also reflected in the different forms and methods of cooking, and cooking with, fats that exist across the globe.

By Michelle Phillipov in "Fats - A Global History", Reaktion Books, London, 2016. Excerpts p.13-38. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.