Feast: A History of Grand Eating
by Roy Strong
372pp, Jonathan Cape, £20
Sir Roy Strong writes what one might call silver-fork scholarship - work that concerns itself with the lives of the wealthy and the fashionable of all ages, preferably royalty, usually the aristocracy, and at the very least with artists. His academic interests extend to practical enterprise - he has, it seems, designed gardens for Gianni Versace, Elton John and Prince Charles. He is Eric Hobsbawm's opposite.
Strong's latest book, Feast: A History of Grand Eating concerns the changing conditions of what he calls "admission to the table", something in which he is clearly very interested: he certainly does not strike one as a man who would be backwards in coming forwards, to the table or anywhere else.
He's clearly a gentleman of considerable appetites: one suspects he'd make excellent company, and a pretty acceptable madeira sauce. His qualifications for writing the book - apart from his obvious and presumably rubber-chicken-guzzling role as a time-served English grandee - is set out in a prefatory boast. "I am still cooking away most evenings with pleasure, having explored the cuisine of the majority of European countries."
It's a wonder that he finds the time: in Feast he gathers together information "scattered for the most part in hundreds of specialised articles, largely in French, Italian and English, given at conferences and colloquia over the past two decades", in order to present a panorama of the grand meal in western civilisation, from the Greeks to the Victorians.
Anyone who has ever sat through a charity or reunion dinner, a Masonic ladies night, or who has folded paper napkins, lined up a few favourite CDs and cracked open their Nigel Slater, will be indebted, amazed and depressed by what Feast has to offer.
Each age, Sir Roy claims, "has produced its own archetypal feast". The common feature of the feast throughout the ages, he argues, is that it always involves "the manipulation of one group by another for sociopolitical aims": bear this in mind the next time you're invited round to friends for a takeaway Cantonese banquet and a video.
As befits the work of someone who studied under the divine Dame Frances Yates, Strong offers firm theories, reasons and ideas to explain the sudden shifts of taste at table. He explores the subtle relationship between objects and food: the development of the credenza, for example, and its effect on serving habits. He analyses the movement from mere convivium towards formalised ritual drama.
In attempting to explain the beginnings of more informal eating arrangements in the 18th century, he offers several reasons: "One was the loss of faith in the old Renaissance cosmology of correspondences. Another was the emergence of the new social ideals of the philosophes of the Enlightenment. And yet another was the eclipse of innocent belief in the truth of what one sees, the principle behind the idea of the table as vehicle for ceremonial and allegory."
This is nice, but fine words butter no parsnips. What's really impressive about the book is not so much the depth of scholarship as the spread. Strong writes, for example, about the development of the napkin, the change from reclining to sitting positions, the advent and impact of menus, the inexorable rise of the fork, the beginnings of edible shortcrust pastry, the rite of assay, and the rise and fall of the trencher.
Only the most high-minded, thin and economical of readers would not thrill to Sir Roy's description of the feast of Assurnasirpal II (883-859 BC), with its 69,574 guests, or the feast of Elagabalus, who served his guests "camels' feet, the combs from live chickens and peacocks' and nightingales' tongues. Vast chargers filled with mullets' livers, flamingos' and thrushes' brains, parrots', pheasants' and peacocks' heads", on "couches scattered with lilies, violets, hyacinths and narcissi, while overhead mechanisms deluged the diners with violets and other flowers in such vast quantities that guests were sometimes suffocated."
Sir Roy is also very interesting on salts, sugar sculptures and table fountains, "items of extreme ingenuity, involving the movement of liquids, wine or perfumed waters, which spurted or spouted and whose pressure caused figures to move or bells to jingle".
To complain after such honeyed surfeit would suggest perhaps a terrible sickness of mind and of stomach, but Feast does fall short of satisfying. There are endnotes but no bibliography, and it is therefore difficult to follow exactly what and where Sir Roy has been reading: all the ibids rather stick in the throat. Another lack is of specific instructions on how to stage a feast at home. At a banquet held in Rome in 1513, apparently, the napkins were folded "so as to enclose a live bird which flew away when the napkin was opened by the guest". Never mind Nigella: that really would be something to impress friends with this evening.
· Ian Sansom is the author of The Truth About Babies (Granta)
