Ómós Digest #128: Carnival - A Celebration of Excess
The history and traditions of Carnival around the world, and if we need it anymore? By Chris Kissane
This week you’ve probably participated in a centuries-old food protest without really thinking about it. Carnival, the celebration of excess before the restraint of Lent, is today mostly marked in Ireland as ‘Pancake Tuesday’, and it is telling that its political significance here now is limited to the cost of living crisis, with the Central Statistics Office highlighting the rising cost of pancake ingredients.
For hundreds of years, though, Carnival meant something much more political, and much more radical. In pre-modern Europe and its settler colonies in the Americas, it was a time when the normal rules and order of society were turned upside-down. As the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin wrote, Carnival ‘makes sense from nonsense and nonsense of sense’. The powerful were mocked, ridiculed, and satirised in the most outlandish ways. Religious and moral rules were subverted in a profane explosion of lust and greed. And perhaps most radically, people of all social ranks ate, drank, and danced together, often masked or in costume, meaning anyone could be anything.
Food was at the centre of it all. Since Lent would mean abstaining from meat, eggs, and dairy (along with, theoretically, marriage, sex, and war), those foods were prepared and eaten in abundance during Carnival celebrations. Beyond the pancake, many of those survive today. There are fried doughnuts like the pillowy Polish paçzki filled with jam, Louisiana beignets, Sardinian zippole and Swiss schenkeli (‘little thighs’). Crispy fried dough, like the Swiss küchli, have all sorts of descriptive names, from the common ‘angel wings’ to the Portuguese ‘cat’s ears’. In the Nordic countries, there are spiced buns filled with cream, often known in English by the Swedish semla.
Yet contrary to the recent Irish focus on giving up sweet things for Lent, Carnival’s most iconic foods were not those designed to use up sugar, fat, and eggs. The key ingredient in Carnival was flesh, uniting a trinity of food, sex, and violence. Carnivals today often still involve whole animals being roasted over open fire, but the most Carnival meat of all was the humble sausage, sold by street sellers at festivities all across the continent, making use of every bit of a butchered animal’s body.
In Catalunya there is the botifarra d’ou, made from pork head, shoulder, and belly, mixed with egg. In northern Portugal and Galicia the butelo includes even the pig’s bones, cooked down with off-cuts before being smoked and served with beans. In the Rheinland, the blood sausage flönzi (made with blood from all sorts of animals and birds) is a Carnival tradition, often in the local combination of ‘Himmel und Erde’ (‘Heaven and Earth’) with apples.
It doesn’t take very much imagination to understand the long-standing association of sausages with male sex and virility (and indeed with male impotence and anxiety). In early modern German cities, all-male butchers’ guilds were known to produce and parade giant sausages weighing hundreds of kilos, a tradition carried on by recent Carnival attempts to break the world’s longest sausage record in Hungary and southern Italy.