In the Devil's Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food by Stewart Lee Allen Page A

cow-stuffed-with-lamb-stuffed-with-pig-stuffed-with-rooster-stuffed-with-chicken-stuffed-with-thrush. Dessert comes in the form of cakes that descend from the ceiling and squirt saffron-scented juice in your face. For those guests still peckish, there are pickled rabbit fetuses to nibble while Trimalchio stages his own funeral and has his obituary, praising his good taste and generosity, read out loud.
    Trimalchio was the kind of arriviste that caused the Roman Senate to ban hundreds of dishes around the first century B.C., a former slave turned multimillionaire who blew his fortune on the most obscene luxuries money could buy. Almost everything he served at that famous dinner—described in the anonymous first-century book
The Satyricon
—was criminal contraband at one point or another. During one course, a whole roast pig is carried triumphantly into the dining room, only to have Trimalchio go berserk when he “realizes” that his chef has neglected to gut the beast. The cook is about to be strangled in front of the guests for his incompetence, but Trimalchio decides that his last act on Earth should be to gut the animal with everyone watching. When the chef, weeping, begging for his life, plunges a knife into the carcass, a sea of sausages gushes out. Ha! Ha! It was all a joke. The cook receives a gold crown, and the guests all make a quick visit to the vomitorium to empty their stomachs before digging in. This kind of dish was called
porcus
Troianu
, or Trojan pork, because like its namesake, the Trojan Horse, it was stuffed with piquant surprises. It was banned so often that the dish must have figured on the Top Ten Most Wanted list of the Roman police.
    Equally illegal were those poppy seed–crusted dormice. The dormouse was a long-tailed rodent that Romans kept from birth in ventilated clay jars called
dolia
, where their inability to move, combined with intensive force-feeding, ensured they would become a ball of butter-soft flesh. These potbellied rats were apparently so delicious, the government feared it would turn their army into a bunch of spineless, rat-eating gluttons. Guards were posted at the markets with orders to seize any specimens offered for sale. When dormice grew scarce, the elite simply “crammed” (force-fed) chickens and pigs until they reached unnatural size and tenderness. Clerks recorded the animals’ weight at the dinner table, before oohing guests. Moralists like Cato the Elder then required that people dine with their doors open so everyone could see exactly what was being eaten. He then limited the number of dinner parties per week. He punished guests as well as hosts. Cato was such a prude, he even campaigned against the civilized fad of building statues to chefs instead of generals.
    Roman excess eventually ate the empire alive by making it overreliant on foreign imports. (Unless you subscribe to the theory that their lead-lined wine flagons caused their downfall via brain damage, in which case they drank their empire to death.) During the ensuing Dark Ages, when there was nothing to eat, much less overeat, laws restricting gluttony disappeared, only to pop up again in sixteenth-century Florence, which sternly restricted cardinals to a mere nine dishes per meal. Japan’s nineteenth-century royal family allowed only certain produce to be sold in designated seasons, thus ensuring no merchant ever got a better
matsutake
mushroom than the Emperor. Wild fowl was banned for similar reasons, as were new cake designs and, of course, “thick green tea.” The number of courses served at dinner was determined by one’s social class. Peasant farmers were allowed only one plate per course, as compared to the Samurai’s nine, and were not allowed to drink sake. Peasant parties also had to end by sunset. The message was clear— farmers were meant to grow food for the emperor’s dinner, not enjoy it.
    All these laws were in vain, thank God, for what is civilization if not an eternal quest for