Life Is Meals_ A Food Lover's Book of Days - James Salter [45]
SUN KING
Louis XIV, known as the Sun King, whose long reign in France lasted for seventy-two years (1643–1715), was among other things, a great patron of the arts, cordial to Molière, Racine, and La Fontaine, among others. Under him, the immense palace at Versailles was built, and the court inhabiting it, the court of Europe, became ceremonial and introverted.
The king’s long list of mistresses included Mlle de La Valliere, Mme de Montespan, and Mme de Maintenon, whom he eventually married. He was fond of food as well, and cooking was spectacular at the court. One observer noted that she had frequently seen the king consume at a sitting four different plates of soup, an entire pheasant, a partridge, a large salad, mutton, and two large pieces of ham, followed by a plateful of cakes, fruits, and jams.
He ate in two ways, au grand couvert, which was by himself but in public, or at least in courtiers’ view, and at the petit couvert, private and intimate, where he and the ladies sometimes threw little balls of bread at each other.
RUM
1655. Admiral William Penn, whose son of the same name became the famed American colonist, seizes Jamaica, a relatively unimportant provisioning base, from Spain. Rum, distilled there and throughout the West Indies, began to replace beer as a British seaman’s ration in Caribbean waters. The custom would later spread throughout the fleet and remain in effect until 1970.
Distilled from sugar cane juice or molasses, a process that occurs almost naturally in the hot climate of the islands, rum is essentially colorless. Caramel, added as a matter of style, makes it pale gold, amber, tawny, or dark brown. There is mention of it in Barbados in 1600, and it became the overwhelmingly favorite drink of American colonists, as well as an essential part of the triangular trade that made considerable fortunes for New England ship owners. Their ships sailed to Africa with a cargo of rum, returned to the West Indies with black slaves to work on the plantations, and took molasses from there back to New England to be made into rum. When Paul Revere started out on his famous ride to warn of the coming of the British, he began shouting only after a stop and several drinks of rum at the house of a distiller, Isaac Hall.
Many fine rums have beautiful island names: Rhum Barbancourt from Haiti; Demarara from Guyana; Mount Gay from Barbados, rich and smooth; Rhum St. James and Rhum Clement from Martinique, the latter aged for six years; and Ron Rco and Bacardi from Puerto Rico. Were it not for rum, who would ever have heard of the tiny West Indies island called Dead Man’s Chest?
Cuba was once famous for rum, and, in fact, Bacardi originated there in 1862 but later moved to Bermuda and Puerto Rico. A mass producer, it has come to dominate both the U.S. and world markets.
Legend says that when Horatio Nelson was killed at Trafalgar, his body, in order to be preserved, made the voyage back to England in a cask filled with the spirits of the navy—rum—although, in fact, it was brandy.
VEGETARIANISM
Eating honey for breakfast and barley bread and vegetables for dinner, Pythagoras in the sixth century B.C. developed the theorems that underlie the mathematics of geometry and much of music and astronomy. One of the first vegetarians, he believed that animals have souls as we do and should not be killed. Later, Diogenes, Plato, and Plutarch followed his precepts, if not his exact diet.
Ovid and Seneca were vegetarians, and it was the Romans who gave the practice its name, referring not to vegetables but to the Latin word vegetus, meaning “vigorous” or “active.” Leonardo da Vinci, Voltaire, Shelley, Tolstoy, and Wagner were all vegetarians. But it was not only a Western idea. Buddha forbade killing any living creature and, by extension, eating meat. Gandhi taught that the protection of the sacred cow was meant to include the entire animal kingdom, but