The big event of the 14th century was the Black Plague. After killing off half the population of Europe, the Black Death (its street name) left the other half living with hunger, fear, and poverty. Regular people had to make do with scraps while the elites lived in luxury. The mood was dark, what the behavioral scientists call social tension and class conflict.
What Does a Good Indian Curry Have to Do With a Mythical Horse Named Fauvel?
Back in the 1300s, poets and writers couldn’t criticize the excesses of church and royalty directly. So they made up fictional characters and stories, creating plausible denial for themselves even as insiders knew who the characters represented.
A clerk named Gervais du Bus wrote a poem
He called it The Romance of Fauvel. Actually he called it Roman du Fauvel because he was French.
The poem is what’s called an allegory
Allegories are fictional stories operating on two or more levels at the same time. Bullwinkly fans know the writers slipped in lots of slick bits in the cartoon show supposedly written for kids alone. In his poem, du Bus uses fictional characters to mock the corruption and hypocrisy of the French Royals and the Catholic church. And does a thorough job of it that his horse story of more than 3,000 verses is accompanied by 169 musical pieces and 78 ornate illustrations in the style of the times.
The story begins with Lady Fortune outwitting Lady Reason and taking a shine to a likable muddy-colored horse
The horse is named Fauvel. Lady Fortune leads him out of the stable and into the Royal Palace with his bride, Vainglory. Important people come from afar just to suck up. They bow and scrape before him in the manner of well-trained servants and slaves in powdered wigs. Because Fauvel’s a horse, they stroke him by brushing and cleaning his coat from head to tail to make sure he has no dung on him. Seriously, that’s how it translates. Wikipedia calls people who grovel like this, “fawning groomers.”
“Kings lie, rich people flatter, the clergy indulges in vice, the merchants lie, the judges have no mercy, and even the children are dishonest.”
Severalfriends.org called the poem a critique of society’s moral decay. “It took aim at the vulnerabilities of royal governance and skewered their victims in the manner of many a Saturday Night Live skit.”
Remember that bit about operating on several levels at once?
- The horse’s name, Fauvel, refers to his fawn color, sort of a pale brownish-yellow also called dun.
- Fauvel also means “false veil,” a fitting name for a symbol of vanity, envy, flattery, greed, and worse.
- And get this, acrostic lovers. The letters of Fauvel’s name are also the initials of the cardinal sins of Flattery, Avarice, Villainy, Variability, Envy, and Laxity.
Now we know all we need to know about the mythical horse, so let’s move on to a good Indian curry
For centuries, natives of the Indian subcontinent called any meal of meat in spicy sauce kari. The occupying English turned kari into curry. British soldiers and government bureaucrats stationed in India missed their curries when they returned home to all those bland dinners of boiled cabbage and room-temperature mutton. This created demand.
Curryfoodie.com says the first curry shop in London opened in 1733
By 1820, the spicy sauce had gone viral as influencers showed it was an easy way to add flavor to leftover meat, which could sometimes be a bit ripe, as they say. I wrote the following about how the early use of powerful flavorings such as chili peppers and vinegar made it possible for people to eat rotted meat instead of throwing it away in A Closer Look at Ketchup, Jun 28, 2021.
“In the days before air conditioning, poultry, meat, and fish rotted in the sun, heat, rain, and humidity. The worse the condition of the flesh, the more starving people poured sauces made from chili peppers and vinegar to cover up the taste so they could choke down the foul-smelling maggotty food.”
The endless varieties of curry have long since been homogenized into nearly-alike concoctions of chili powder, coriander, cumin, and turmeric, the source of the yellow-orange coloring. So what started out as true curry is essentially an Indian Mrs. Dash.
The lesser-known meaning of curry is to groom an animal, typically a horse, with a currycomb
Is a currycomb anything like a zen garden sand rake? Nix. A currycomb is a fundamental part of proper horse maintenance and upkeep. The one I used as a kid had a wooden handle and rows of small metal teeth and serrated ridges. It’s designed to remove dirt, thick clumps of mud, and loose hairs from a horse’s hide.
The invigorating rub and itch-relieving scratching is called currycombing
Currycombing stimulates the animal’s blood flow and most horses enjoy the experience. Follow the currycomb with a stiff-bristle brush to remove all the loosened debris from the horse’s pelt and hide. A good brushing not only keeps the animal clean, but it makes the horse’s coat shine, too.
When did you see it coming?
Regular readers would be the first to figure out that people who were currying Fauvel eventually turned into people currying favor with anyone in a position to give them preferential treatment.
The term currying favor is used to describe the activity of ingratiating oneself by groveling, sucking up, boot licking, and worse to gain personal advantage.
