Groaning Boards
Consuming Passions: The Anthropology of Eating
Peter Farb & George Armelagos
Washington Square Press
New York 1983
On the inside front cover is a sticker 'From the library of Angela Carter.' I would love to do a product recall project and reunite all her library books. Any Amount of Books on Charing Cross Road bought her library a while ago in auction and has gradually been selling them off. The odd title can still be found on their shelves.
The following excepts are from the topical chapter on 'The Feast and the Gift.'
'As societies grow more complex, the privilege of levying taxes, rents and tributes from those of lower status is accompanied by the privilege of eating very much better than the great mass of the population. In medieval England the table of nobles were so laden with every sort of food that they became known as 'groaning boards,' and a knight might put away a dozen dishes in a single sitting. The menus for royal banquets in the fifteenth century list as many as forty dishes, although it was considered proper merely to sample rather than gorge on them. The purposes of the these opulent feasts were social and political, a display of the control a noble had over both people and sources of supply... Serving food in an important household was an avenue of social and political advancement; most of the knights of the medieval courts began their careers in this way. Each server had his own title and rank. The most exalted was the carver, who was expert in the use of an extraordinary number of butchering utensils, along with technical terms and social rules. He had to know, for example, that only the left wing of the capon was suitable for the lord and that the kidney of a fawn was the delicacy served first. The panter was schooled in the the use of a variety of knives, such as the one for the smoothing the edges of trenchers, hard squares of bread that served as plates upon which meat was heaped (whence the word 'trencherman' to describe a hearty eater). The butler had responsibility for the butts or casks of wine and ale.'
'When the Arctic explorer Peter Freuchen was given meat by Eskimos with whom he had been living he thanked them, as he had been trained to do at home. An old man promptly corrected him:
You must not thank for your meat; it is your right to get parts. In this country, nobody wishes to be dependent on others. Therefore, there is nobody who gives or gets gifts, for thereby you become dependent. With gifts you make slaves just as with whips you make dogs.
Thanking anyone for food is a serious breach of etiquette among hunter-gatherers because it implies both that the giver is not generous as a matter of course and that he is not a good enough hunter to afford to give away meat. More important, by his thanks the recipient seems to deny the obligation to repay at a later date. A hunter shares because that is the appropriate thing to do in his society; he later expects to receive and that is his right. The well-brought up recipient in hunter-gatherer society praises the giver for hunting prowess, never for his generosity.'
posted by Caroline at
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
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