Listening to: Nightminds (The Painted Veil remix), Missy Higgins
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We were in Brugges the other day. Apart from bad weather (pretty much the norm in Belgium, despite the unusually sunny periods we’ve been enjoying of late) and some glorious pasta lunch (albeit served by an idiotic waiter), of course our guests stopped for chocolate shopping.
I didn’t take any pictures because batteries had died, but R and I observed an array of cock-shaped chocolates, in different sizes and colours. Startingly realistic, veins an all. Boobies were there as well, only noticeably smaller and in lesser numbers (it was a phallocentric chocolate display through and through).
It’s not the first time I’ve seen things like that; years ago, I was asked by a friend if I could bring her some cock-shaped pasta from Italy. I’ve seen that same pasta in Italian shops in Mallorca as well (R was shocked indeed).
But the funny thing is that I discovered a couple of months ago that this tendency to shape food items into genitals is not something new or particularly ‘modern’; in Sydney Mintz’s book Sweetness and Power (1985), one can find an interesting note (page 243), which I shall quote (nearly) in its entirety:
52. Warner 1791:136. Surely one of the most interesting passages ever written about the subtleties is to be found here: “Hence arose an extraordinary species of ornament, in use both among the English and French, for a considerable time; representations of the membra virilia, pudendaque muliebria, which were formed of pastry, or sugar, and placed before the guests at entertainments, doubtless for the purpose of causing jokes and conversations among them: as we at present use the little devices of paste, containing mottos within them, to the same end….Nor were there obscene symbols confined to the ornaments of the person, or to the decorations of the table, but, in the early ages, were even admitted into the most awful rites of religion. The consecrated wafer, which the pious communicant received from the hands of the priest, was made up into a form highly indecent and improper…” Not until 1263, according to Warner, did the English Church halt the apparently common practice of baking the communion wafers in the shape of human testicles: “Prohibemus singulis sacerdotibus parochialibus, ne ipsi parochianis suis die paschatis testes seu hostias loco panis benedicti ministrent, ne ex ejus ministratione, seu receptione erubescentiam evitare videantur, sed panem benedictum faciant, sicut aliis diebus dominis fieri consuevit” (Stat. Synod. Nicolae, Episc. Anegravensis An. 1263).
Later he goes on to mention that there’s been “a revival of such odd practices”, and mentions an article (in the Baltimore Evening Sun of 1982) recounting “the success of “adult” gingerbread cookies and “erotic chocolates”". Clearly, these had been to a shop quite like the one we saw in Brugges.
It’s hard to reconcile the idea most people have about the Church in medieval times, and “highly indecent and improper” shaped consecrated wafers, no? Yet there they are, according to Warner.
Btw, ‘subtleties’ are described by Minzt as
confections (…) based primarily on the combination of sugar with oil, crushed nuts, and vegetable gums, to make a plastic, claylike substance. It was possible to sculpture an object out of this sweet, preservable “clay” on any scale and in nearly any form, and to bake or harden it.
Sometimes we believe we’re being oh-so original and transgressive, and then we discover even English priests were doing it on the 11th century, as well as many English and French blokes (those with enough money, I suppose) well before the 18th century. Go figure.
(Photo: Brugges’ street. No, no indecent pictures I’m afraid).
