Three Coarse Meals: Representations of Pirate Dining

Abstract: This article approaches buccaneers and pirates as a crucially culinary demographic in the European imagination. In a popular engraving from Alexandre Exquemelin's Bucaniers of America , a passage from Frederick Marryat's novel Percival Keene , and a scene from HBO sitcom Our Flag Means Death , I identify a long-standing rhetoric of pirate dining: a small set of tropes recycled across more than three centuries, repeatedly employed to mediate pirates' political-economic alterity in bodily performances of difference through shocking and outrageous cuisine. I build on work in eighteenth-century food studies to consider how combinations of violence and intimacy in scenes of culinary aberration, frequently with racial or sexual import, continue to be central to representations of these dissident figures. Testing the limits of artists' and artworks' ability to represent difference, scenes of pirate dining show their makers grappling with the political and moral significances of excessive consumption in a rapidly changing imperial world.