Feast of Famine Page 2

The next platters were fruits and salads, but these salads were of meats and starches and seafood, sodden with dressing, clinging to the sides of huge wooden bowls. One bowl of greens had been peppered with chickpeas and cherry tomatoes, and soaked with olive oil and Tabasco. The spoons dripped. The fruit was overlarge and swollen; the oranges had unborn twins of themselves grafted onto their navels, and the twins were segmented and seedless, too. The apples were lumped at the bottom, and were so sweet they stung the teeth. The bananas were the size and shape of cucumbers, and a waxy, uniform yellow.

The main course was half a cow, split from nose to anus and served in that form, except that the chef had been obliged to saw it laterally in half in order to fit it in his ovens. He charged extra for this. The chef then reassembled the cow, using suture floss to rejoin the two segments, and warned his servers not to cut too closely to the stitches. Some of the meat was crisped and black, while close to the bone it was gooey crimson, the tendons shining through. Where it was well-cooked, the flesh fell effortlessly from the bone.

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