Cows, gold, booze — turns out you can be extravagant with anything you fancy.
Nothing Exceeds Like Excess
The Founding Fathers’ Bar Tab
A whopping bar bill for a 1787 farewell party for George Washington is still intact. Who needs to read books when you can read bar tabs, right? According to the receipt, what the Founding Fathers drank during their shindig in Philadelphia is enough to put anyone’s binges to shame — and its total would top more than 17 grand in today’s dollars! Keep in mind there were only 55 attendees, and they supposedly packed away 54 bottles of Madeira, 60 bottles of Bordeaux, eight bottles of whiskey, 22 bottles of porter ale, eight bottles of hard cider, 12 jugs of beer, and seven large bowls of spiked punch. Impressive.
Eat Rich Verification: “USA Today” … (because that’s a bastion of scholarly excellence).
Gordon Bennett Jr.’s Cow Yacht
The son of the founder of the New York Herald was born to riches. While his father was well respected for being a hardworking businessman who thrived on making money, Gordon Jr. was merely known for spending it. He once threw a roll of money into a fire simply because it was too large to fit into the pocket of his pants. He bought a whole restaurant because he was annoyed that someone else was sitting in his usual seat. Plus, he had a yacht built with a room especially reserved for a cow, so he could have fresh butter every morning. Believing he would get better butter if the cow was happy, he installed a fan to cool the cow in the heat and supplied a stack of wool blankets to keep it cozy in the cold.
Eat Rich Verification: “Mental Floss” … (because flossing is important).
Chowing down with King Louis XIV
Imagine eating so much your stomach ends up twice the size as that of the average human. That’s what happened to French King Louis XIV. Louis, who reigned for 72 years until his death in 1715, was renowned for running his daily routines around food. His evening meal took place around 10 p.m. and typically consisted of 20 to 30 dishes. There were hors d’oeuvres and huge pyramids of fruit served, as well as roasts, chicken pies, turkey, duck, boar, venison, oysters, salmon, sardines, and even turtles with rice and vegetables. His sister-in-law, Princess Palatine, is recorded as saying, “He could eat four plates of soup, a whole pheasant, a partridge, a large plate of salad, two slices of ham, mutton au jus with garlic, a plate of pastry, all followed by fruit and hard-boiled eggs.” Some guests would join him — not to eat but just to sit and watch him chow down.
Eat Rich Verification: “The Roaming Boomers” … (They’re old. They wander.)
E. Berry Wall’s Bonkers Wardrobe
You would have found Evander Berry Wall strolling the streets of New York City toward the end of the 19th century. He became a millionaire by the time he hit 18, and when he turned 22, he inherited more millions from his father and grandfather. He famously spent it all on clothes. There are reports he bought 5,000 neckties and 300 pairs of gloves, refused to drink anything except Champagne and once changed his outfit 40 times before lunch. He outdid even himself when he rocked up to a party wearing black patent leather boots up to his hips.
Eat Rich Verification: “Men’s Flair” … (because sometimes they forget to have any).
Emperor Caligula’s Gold Rush
Yeah, yeah, we know that Emperor Caligula loved wild sex parties, but he also had a fetish for gold. The third Roman emperor, whose reign ran from 37 to 41 A.D., forced his servants to pile up his gold reserves simply so he could roll around on the metal because he loved the feel of it on his skin. He also fed his favorite horse oats mixed with gold, and to show off how rich he was, he served guests loaves of bread made of solid gold. Sometimes, just for the hell of it, he threw it on the ground so he could walk across it.
Eat Rich Verification: “Museum Hack” … (because just walking through the door is SO 2019).
Marie Antoinette’s Chocolatier
Think obscene luxury — then double it. Marie Antoinette loved anything and everything to excess and threw ridiculously lavish parties. The last queen of France before the Revolution had extravagant taste in clothes, accessories and food. Each day, she started with coffee and a pastry and then sat down for a big lunch, which sounds pretty standard. But some of her snacks included macaroni, cheese and vegetables cooked in cream. And she loved sweets and desserts: petit fours, crystallized fruits, wafers and whatever her staff could serve up to make her eyes dance. She loved chocolate so much she had her own chocolatier at the Palace of Versailles. The wife of King Louis XVI especially liked liquid chocolate, which she drank with whipped cream.
Eat Rich Verification: “Histoires de Parfums” … (because it’s in French, so it’s gotta be fancy).
As you likely pick up on by this point, we ended up in some pretty bizarre places in our efforts to verify the blithe claims made in the first Penthouse Magazine issue this year — which fit the space they needed to fill exactly, by the way. Not that they would just make things up for sure, but MSPUIYI and Tahlia Paris were pretty darned distracting, so we could not blame them if they got distracted for a second. … Well, in our digital travels we ran across a wonderfully illustrated list of the most expensive food in the world. While we would not normally send people off to click-bait sites, we found the pictures and the information — NOT fact checked, btw — wonderful and facinating.
Around here we ended up really, really wanting to taste chocolate pudding that costs $35,000 a serving. Sadly, we could not get a volunteer to pay for it (let alone share it). We also have some serious doubts about being able to run that through the expense account for reimbursement. So if any of you out there ever make it to the wilds of England to try it, please let us know what you think. Oh, and if you install the free privacy-protecting DuckDuckGo browser extention, it will block all those annoying tracking ads, by the way.
