Encyclopedia of the Exquisite: An Anecdotal History of Elegant Delights Read online

  Cupid hit a bull’s-eye in 1464, when Bartolomeo Benci, a young lover from Donatello’s hometown of Florence, fell in with Love’s winged crew. At carnival time, Benci costumed himself as Signor Amante (the inamorato), wearing a set of wings over his fashionable armor, and led through the streets a horse-driven love-themed carnival car mobbed with amorini figurines and topped with the image of a bleeding heart. A cavalcade of some 150 young men paraded behind him, and when they reached his sweetheart Marietta’s house they sang and shouted Love’s praises. Then, to prove the fierceness of his affection, Benci, with a sweeping gesture, threw his wings into the car and caused the whole thing to burst into flames, setting off devices that shot exploding arrows from the amorini’s tiny bows into the night sky. “And so it burned, and with such great shouting and thundering that the noise rose even to the stars,” wrote one witness. “One arrow indeed flew into the house of said lady, so that it was said that one had entered into her heart, a sign of her compassion for the said lover.” Having made his point plain, Benci took his leave, coaxing his horse backward until they were out of sight, never once turning his back on his beloved. We can only assume that they lived happily ever after.

  ATTITUDES

  Bodily postures and poses implying an action or mental state

  Although the auburn-haired muse Emma Hamilton (1765–1815) wasn’t born wealthy, bright, or ambitious, she made the most of her statuesque assets, posing for Regency England’s artists as a stand-in for ancient heroines—a fresh-faced Circe, a coy Medea, and, most often, a frolicsome bacchante. Artist George Romney (1734–1802), smitten, called Hamilton “superior to all womankind,” and during her early days in London he painted the runaway teenager dozens of times. His work was well received, but by transforming her goddess routine into a live performance—nimbly reenacting a brisk series of classical poses, her “Attitudes”—Hamilton caused a sensation across Europe.

  A blacksmith’s daughter turned professional beauty, she worked her way through a string of aristocratic lovers before winding up in louche Naples as mistress to Sir William Hamilton (1730–1803), the recently widowed British ambassador. Sir William, whose keen eye for antiquities supplied treasures to the British Museum, hosted a constant stream of well-heeled visitors at his Palazzo Sessa overlooking the sea. He played tour guide, taking guests to Pompeii, and stepped in as an interior designer, fueling the taste for Greek revivalism by brokering antiques deals.

  Doing her part to entertain their visitors, Emma slipped into a white gown and, working a shawl or a prop tambourine, posed rapid-fire in imitation of well-known Greek and Roman statues. She buried her face in sorrow one moment and flung out an arm in vamped victory the next. The legend of her Attitudes spread. “Sir William has actually married his gallery of statues,” Horace Walpole (1717–1797) said of their 1791 nuptials. Sir William was sixty to Emma’s twenty-six.

  At the height of her reputation, Hamilton was, as the visiting poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) put it, “the universal prototype for heroines, muses and demigoddesses.” Artist Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun (1755–1842), another lover of Greek art, just arrived from Paris, painted Emma as a bacchante and as Ariadne in 1790. But while she appreciated Emma’s antiquated beauty, Vigée-Lebrun judged Emma as having no style and “very little wit.”

  Frankly, most sophisticates found her less than scintillating company. “No Grecian or Trojan princess could have had a more perfect or commanding form,” admitted Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire (1757–1806), though Emma was, she added, “coarse and vulgar.” William, Lord Beckford (1760–1844), called her “not at all delicate, ill-bred, affected.” Elizabeth Vassall Fox, Lady Holland (1770–1845), criticized Emma’s lower-class accent. “Just as she was lying down, with her head reclining upon an Etruscan vase to represent a water-nymph, she exclaimed in her provincial dialect ‘Don’t be afreared Sir Willum I’ll not crack your joug,’ ” Holland huffed. “I turned away disgusted.”

  The Hamiltons took their act on the road at the turn of the century, touring Europe with Admiral Nelson, Emma’s lover, and inciting gossip along the way. Before long, however, both men were dead, and Emma arrived alone on French artist Vigée-Lebrun’s London doorstep.

  Vigée-Lebrun was more successful than ever, having recently left Catherine the Great’s St. Petersburg court. Emma was obese, alcoholic, and desperate. Out of pity, the artist invited her former model to perform at a party for some visiting French nobles. Though Emma’s drinking shocked the Duc de Bourbon, once more her Attitudes did not fail. “She went from sorrow to joy, from joy to dread, so well and with such swiftness that we were all amazed,” Vigée-Lebrun wrote in her memoirs.

  Nineteenth-century dance masters laid the foundation of classical ballet—another dynamic series of postures—on Hamilton’s Attitudes and the evocative poses she lifted from antiquity.

  BLACK

  Black, the timeless color of mourning and of elegant restraint, is also the color of resistance, worn head to toe by both seventeenth-century religious reformers and 1960s-era revolutionaries. In imitation of the strict Catholic Spanish court of the 1600s, nobles across Europe adopted an austere all-black wardrobe, an unwavering sobriety carried on by Dutch merchants and English Puritans. Perky brights offended God, argued the Protestants, and anyone who wore them was “but a blowne bladder, painted over with so many colours, stuft full of pride and envy,” as one grumbled.

  Centuries later, black epitomized the ascetic reserve so admired by Victorians. First among them, of course, was Queen Victoria (1819–1901), who buttoned herself into mourning clothes at age forty-two, when Prince Albert died, and was still dressed in black forty years later at her death. “A mourning dress does protect a woman while in deepest grief against the untimely gayety of a passing stranger,” one etiquette writer explained in 1884. “It is a wall, a cell of refuge.” Inspired by their queen, proper widows throughout the era shrouded themselves in black for two and a half years, from their black dresses to black gloves, and from jewelry made from jet—carved black coal—to black bonnets with crape streamers, and black veils. Their petticoats were slotted with black ribbon. Their stationery was bordered in black. Some even dressed their beds in black. And widows were expected to remain at home, lest seeing a mourner at a party snuff out everyone else’s fun.

  But when mourning dresses began to follow fashion more closely in the 1860s, black took on a theatrical new edge. French actress Sarah Bernhardt (1844–1923), who kept an ebony coffin in her bedroom and lay in it “to learn my parts,” liked to wear black velvet gowns onstage. Silent-movie vamp Theda Bara (1885–1955) dressed in black to play the femme fatale, as did the film noir vixens who followed. All this set the stage for the success of Coco Chanel’s now-iconic Little Black Dress of the 1920s.

  Few have worn black to better dramatic effect, however, than the women of the Black Panthers did in the 1960s, standing together at a rally shaking their fists in the air in sleek black skirts and knee-high boots with their Afros coaxed high, embodying the Black Is Beautiful ideal. Kathleen Cleaver (1945—), a diplomat’s daughter, dropped out of Barnard College to join the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and married founding Panther Eldridge Cleaver a year later. “At the time we weren’t running around thinking ‘we look cool,’ ” she remembered. “That wasn’t on the top of our minds.” Cleaver’s style was cool by necessity, as her limited wardrobe consisted of only one black dress, one black jacket, and one black skirt.

  With the release of style-heavy films such as Cleopatra Jones, Shaft, and Superfly, the Panthers’ rebellious look turned trendy and nearly overshadowed their political agenda. But by then the real revolutionaries had moved on. Eldridge had been shot by California police. The Panthers’ slick separatist style was too easy to target. “The orders went out for everybody just to wear regular clothes,” said Cleaver. “We didn’t want to encourage police by standing out. So we just stopped wearing that stuff.”

  BLANCMANGE br />
  A milky, sweet, almond-flavored pudding

  Blancmange tastes like heaven. Creamy, fluffy, and sweet, it’s an old-fashioned white pudding flecked with ground almonds and scented with rose water. It’s easy enough to make, but it’s a little ritzy, too. Back in the fourteenth century, when going on a pilgrimage was rough and hiring a private chef for the trip was expensive, blancmange was one of the delicacies that made doing so worthwhile. Geoffrey Chaucer’s Cook in The Canterbury Tales, a rowdy, ribald Londoner, is known for his nasty temper and his questionable hygiene, but is redeemed by his blancmange: “That he made with the best.”

  The dish, originally thickened with capon or chicken bones, probably came from Arabia to medieval Europe via Spain and appears in some of the oldest existing French cookbooks, grease-spattered manuscripts detailing refined menus of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when aristocrats developed a taste for sugar. (Its name—whether blankmange, blancmanger, or blanc-mange—comes from the French: white, blanc, and to eat, manger.)

  Naturally, France’s first true culinary star, chef Antonin Carême (1784–1833), was big on blancmange. Carême, a Left Bank urchin abandoned during the Revolution, cooked his way to the top with a chip on his shoulder, and, at the height of his career, created the wedding cake for Napoleon and his empress. His heavy, two-volume Le Pâtissier royal parisien includes his recipe for blancmange, which, at its best, is lighter than a crème brulée but richer than a mousse. When making the dessert at Château Rothschild, Carême pressed almond milk through a piece of silk. He spooned alternate layers of creamy pudding and fresh orange marmalade into hollowed-out orange peels, then arranged his clever concoctions into pyramids garnished with laurel leaves.

  The fanciful dessert did not die with Carême. Like the famed chef, American photographer Solomon Carvalho (1815–1897) was devoted to blancmange. In 1853 he was invited by explorer John Frémont to document an expedition from Missouri to the Pacific, and, despite being a novice to the trail, signed on for the five-month trip. In the Rocky Mountains that winter, when temperatures fell to thirty degrees below zero and the snow was neck-high, food rations ran dangerously low. The men butchered their horses for meat when the time came. Then they took a solemn pledge not to eat each other.

  On New Year’s Day, Carvalho, born in Charleston, South Carolina, did both Chaucer’s English pilgrims and the French chef Carême proud. Hidden in his luggage were two tin boxes: one filled with preserved eggs, the other with powdered milk. He mixed the contents together with arrowroot to thicken it, boiled up some snow, and made for the starving crew “as fine a blancmange as ever was mangéd on Mount Blanc,” he wrote to his wife. “The satisfaction and astonishment of the whole party cannot be portrayed when I introduced, as dessert, my incomparable blancmange …”

  Blancmange

  from Dorie Greenspan’s Paris Sweets: Great Desserts from the City’s Best Pastry Shops

  1 packet (2½ tsp) powdered gelatin

  3 tbs cold water

  1½ cups chilled heavy cream

  ¾ cup whole milk

  ¾ cup ground blanched almonds

  ½ cup sugar

  2 to 3 tbs kirsch or to taste

  1 peach, peeled, pitted, and cut into small dice

  2 slices canned or fresh pineapple, cut into small dice

  ½ cup strawberries, preferably fraises des bois, hulled and halved (if using larger berries, cut them into small dice)

  Have ready an (8×2-inch) round cake pan or springform pan, preferably nonstick. Fill a large bowl with ice cubes and cold water and set out a smaller bowl that fits into this ice-water bath.

  Sprinkle the gelatin over the cold water. When it is soft and spongy, heat it for 15 seconds in a microwave oven to liquefy it (or do this stovetop); set aside. Whip the chilled heavy cream until it holds medium-firm peaks; refrigerate.

  Bring the milk, almonds, and sugar to a boil in a medium saucepan over medium heat, stirring occasionally to make certain the sugar dissolves. At the boil, pull the pan from the heat and stir in the dissolved gelatin, as well as the kirsch. Pour this into the set-aside small bowl and set the bowl into the ice-water bath. Stir regularly, and lift the bowl out of the ice bath as soon as the mixture cools and starts to thicken.

  Working with a flexible rubber spatula, fold in the whipped cream. Still working with the spatula and a light touch, fold in the fruit. Scrape the blancmange into the pan and refrigerate for at least 2 hours or for up to 24 hours.

  To serve, unmold the cake onto a cake plate. (If you’ve used a cake pan, the easiest way to unmold the blancmange is to dunk the pan into a sink full of hot water. If you’ve used a springform, warm the sides of the pan with a hairdryer before opening the latch.)

  Keeping: Once assembled, the blancmange can be stored in the refrigerator, away from foods with strong odors, for 1 day, although it is preferable to serve it the day it is made.

  THE BOB

  A women’s style of short haircut

  “Do you think I ought to bob my hair, Mr. Charley Paulson?”

  Charley looked up in surprise.

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m considering it. It’s such a sure and easy way of attracting attention.”

  So wrote the twenty-four-year-old F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940), conjuring Bernice, a society belle on her way to becoming “a society vampire” in his story “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” published in 1920, when a woman’s threat to visit the barbershop for a bob stupefied, and when the sight of her there could draw a crowd.

  History credits French libertines with inventing the scandalous hairstyle, cut sharp and short at the jawline. Take, for example, the eurhythmic dancer Caryathis, who, when rejected by a would-be lover, lopped off her tresses in a fit of heartbreak in 1913, and inspired her dance student Coco Chanel to do the same. Across the ocean in America, where short hair and short skirts defined an audacious new breed of coquette called the flapper, incredulous style watchers traced the bob’s origins to bolshevism. Intellectual Russians on the run adopted the style “for convenience in disguising themselves when the police trailed them,” the New York Times explained. Once they’d escaped, they settled in Greenwich Village, where they were imitated by artists like Clara Tice, who bobbed her hair in 1908. (In the seventeenth century, “bobbed” described a short traveling wig, and later the blunt cut of a horse’s tail.)

  A lithe American dancer, Irene Castle (1893–1969), popularized the racy hairstyle in the United States. Castle and her dashing husband, Vernon, known for their smooth tango and mincing maxixe, were ballroom idols when she gave herself a drastic pre-appendectomy haircut, making headlines in 1914. “I just couldn’t stand the thought of having strange nurses and attendants fussing over my head,” she said. “The next week, 250 women had their hair cut. The week after it was 2500—and then it was impossible to keep count.” A ribbon decorated with pearls—soon called the Castle band—held flyaway locks in place, as did the newly invented “bob pin.”

  As popular as it was, the look was still controversial. Conservative matrons played it both ways, wearing bobbed wigs. Others suffered. One foreign correspondent explained that the bob offered her “comfort for the first time in my life,” free from the burden of styling her long, unruly hair. Still, she grew it out before returning home from covering the war in France. “My husband is numbered among the group opposed to bobbed hair.”

  Opposition was formidable. Schoolteachers, nurses, shopgirls, and railroad office workers were prohibited from wearing the cut in various regions. “If a girl goes so far as to bob her hair, her work will probably be affected and she could not give 100 per cent efficiency,” argued a Baltimore insurance executive, convinced a bob demonstrated a distracting vanity. Newly shorn teens explained their haircuts to parents and policemen with “Jack-the-Clipper” tales. A Bronx girl said a highwayman seized her on the street and chopped her hair, while an eighteen-year-old in Queens claimed “an Italian man of 50” had snipped off her flaxen bra
ids.

  Modernization called for drastic measures. The story of Fitzgerald’s Bernice grew from a pointed ten-page letter he’d written from Princeton at age nineteen to his sister Annabel, then fourteen, instructing her on how to become a fascinating, modern woman. He told her to groom her eyebrows, choose jaunty hats, refine her awkward walk, and kid the boys, while cultivating a “pathetic, appealing” expression to win them over (head hung, staring up directly into their eyes). “You have beautiful hair,” he conceded, assessing her best traits. “You ought to be able to do something with it.”

  BON CHRÉTIEN

  The most commonly grown variety of pear in the Western world

  We assume Eve served Adam an apple, though the book of Genesis never actually names the forbidden fruit. Mightn’t it have been a juicy pear? The pear has a democratic, sober reputation, but its easy-bruising delicacy makes it all the sweeter—and that much more tempting.