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A Carthaginian feast: Friday's food quotation

First they were served birds in green sauce, on red earthenware plates decorated with black patterns, then all the kinds of shell-fish found on the Punic shores, wheaten porridge, beans and barley, and snails in cumin, on plates of golden amber.

Then the tables were covered with meat dishes: antelopes with their horns, peacocks with their feathers, whole sheep cooked in sweet wine, haunches of she-camels and buffaloes, hedgehogs in garum, fried grasshoppers and preserved dormice. In wooden bowls from Tamrapanni great lumps of fat floated in saffron. Everything overflowed with wine, truffles, and assa foetida. Pyramids of fruit tumbled over honey-cakes, and they had not forgotten a few little dogs with big bellies and pink bristles, fattened on olive-pulp, that Carthaginian delicacy which other people found revolting. The unexpected sight of novel food aroused their greed. Gauls, with long hair tied up on the top of their head, snatched watermelons and lemons, devouring them peel and all. The Negroes who had never seen lobsters tore their faces on the red claws. But shaven Greeks, whiter than marble, threw behind them the peelings from their plate, while shepherds from Bruttium, dressed in wolf skins, munched in silence, heads bent over their food.

1862 Flaubert, Salammbô chapter 1. Translation by A. J. Krailsheimer

For a longer extract, with the French text and another translation, click here