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

a new sensation? Some call it moral rot, but, of course, one man’s rot is another man’s wine. So the eleventh-century Indian king Shrenika threw vegetarian orgies whose courses were defined not by the dish served, but how it was consumed; the first course consisted of fruits that were chewed, then a course of the sucked, then the licked, and so forth. Turn-of-the-century American millionaire Diamond Jim Brady would put away twelve dozen oysters in a sitting and hired naked girls to feed them to him by hand. England’s King James I threw a memorable party in 1606, at which noble ladies playing the Seven Virtues ended up so sodden with food and drink they were unable to play their parts. “Faith was left sick and spewing in the lower hall,” wrote one correspondent describing the scene, “and Victory slept off the ill effects.” The most notable modern effort was a series of secret meals in the 1990s that featured endangered species like the
ortolan
, wood-cock, and, presumably, dolphin and whale (all denied by the participants, of course).
    But it’s the normally abstentious Greeks who have the last word. Literally, because the longest single word in their language was a dish recorded by Aristophanes in his work
Ecclesiazusae
.
    Now must the spindleshanks, lanky and lean,

trip to the banquet, for soon will, I wean,

high on the table be smoking a dish,

Brimming with game and with fowl and with fish.

(called)

Plattero-filleto-mulelto-turboto-cranio-morselo-pickleo-acido-silphio-

honeyo-poureontehtopo-ouzelo-thrusheo-cushatao-culvero-cutleto-

roastingo-marrowo-dippero-leveret-syrupo-gibleto-wings

So now ye have heard these tidings true,

get hold of a plate and an omelet too!
     
    Ovis Apalis
    While not as tasty as potbellied rats, the following recipe for eggs with pignoli sauce gives a hint of Roman hedonism. Served with honeyed wine (made by adding half a cup of heated clear honey to a bottle of white wine and chilling), it would be a fun way to start off a dinner party. The recipe is from the West’s oldest cookbook,
Apicius de re Coquinaria,
written by Apicius sometime in the first century.
    2 ounces pine nuts
3 tablespoons vinegar, preferably red-wine vinegar
1 teaspoon honey
A pinch of pepper
A pinch of lovage (celery leaf)
4 medium boiled eggs (about four minutes)
Soak the pine nuts in the vinegar for four hours. Puree with all other ingredients (except eggs) in a blender. Serve sauce separate from eggs, and allow guests to add according to taste. The sauce will stay good for days.
     
    Cocktails with the Devil
    The gravity with which Christian moralists viewed Rome’s gluttonous frolics is best measured by the exquisite horrors assigned food lovers in Hell. One medieval Irish manuscript leaves them to float forever in the Lake of Pain, a single drop of which “would destroy all the creatures on the face of the Earth by the bitterness of its chill.” Others have them lounging before a dinner table groaning with delicacies that they can never quite sink their forks into. But the most popular torture is to have a demon shove frogs and snakes down their jaded gullets. Hardly prestigious, but more telling was the man who administered the punishment, none other than Satan’s right-hand man, Beelzebub. Other cultures mete out similar unpleasantness. The Buddhists devote not one, but two levels of their eight-story inferno to chastising gourmets. On the first floor is
Samjive
, where meat eaters relax in a pit full of dung that is a-crawl with maggots that gnaw the gourmand’s tongues. Three levels down is
Raurave
, also known as the “Screaming Hell,” where restaurant critics bob helplessly in a river. Every now and then a solicitous demon fishes one of them out to ask if he’d care for refreshment. “Oh please, just water and bread,” cries the epicure. “I’m not fussy!” Ha! Ha! laughs the one rogue devil. Then he pries open the critic’s mouth and pours down a goblet of molten lead.
    The