BECAUSE THERE IS no life without food, the theme of cooking plays an obviously central, and even strategic, role in defining the relationship between “natural” time and “human” time—that is, between nature and culture. These terms are symbolically contrasting but, in fact, are interwoven in a multiplicity of complex and ambiguous relationships, held together by the particular position of humankind in the world, in its double identity of object and subject of the action. Humankind, too, is an element of the natural world, affected by nature’s rhythms and laws, though to some degree the maker (or would-be maker) of its own destiny. In the physical space of the Mediterranean basin, humans at some point in time learned how to make bread, exploiting a “natural” element like grain but transforming it into something entirely artificial—bread does not exist in nature. Humankind is thus an eloquent symbol of the ambiguous attitudes that tend to govern the rhythms of nature by means of the rhythms of work, themselves partly based on natural rhythms but also partly destined to dominate them and modify them. That is why a food as seemingly “natural” as bread could become, in the ancient civilization of the Mediterranean, the symbol not only of the harmony of the natural world but also of humankind’s ability to become emancipated from nature, acquiring a civilized and human identity for itself: “bread-eater” in Homer is the epithet for man.1
The time of food is therefore suspended between natural and human times—in other words, between times of culture and work. These two terms should be understood as twin meanings of the same word. The production of food presupposes the existence of a raw material, of a “natural” offering, so to speak—an offering that, from the day humans were cast out of paradise, was acquired with the sweat of their brow. Thus, this offering is not strictly speaking “natural,” implying work, techniques, knowledge, and forms of intervention in the rhythms of nature. Humans had to start learning how to produce the plants and animals suited to their nutrition. Cast out of the unmoving time of an eternal edenic springtime, the terrestrial image of divine eternity, they had to adjust to the times of a difficult and capricious nature, always changing and deceitful. Hunters had to know the times when game could be found, gatherers the season when fruits would appear. Farmers had to adapt to the seasonality of the seeding, growth, and ripeness of plants to be harvested and reseeded. Shepherds had to adapt to the time for grass to grow and for trees to provide nuts for their animals. Dependence on natural rhythms determined the characteristics of every activity directed to providing food or, to be precise, the time of work in its essential function of assuring the daily survival of humans.
The hope that these rhythms would be regular, that the fertility of plants and animals would be guaranteed from year to year, became central to collective and individual concerns. “Oh, You who rule every single thing, why is it that the seasons are not always alike, distinguished only by four numbers?” This invocation by Merlin, appearing in a text by Geoffrey of Monmouth,2 clearly expresses a common wish but one that is not exactly in harmony with a certain romantic image of the balance between humankind and nature that we often attribute to the medieval period and to the premodern era in general.
Medieval documents attest to the population’s preoccupation with daily survival at every step. That there is a time for the harvest of wheat is obvious. That this time will be good (bonum) is a perpetually repeated, perpetually doubt-ridden wish seen, for example, in agrarian contracts where the amount of the share (of products owed by the tenant farmers to the owners) is subordinated to the size of the harvests, which are wholly dependent on the will of God: “quod Dominus Deux dare dignaverit [what the Lord will deign to give us].”3 Or in the expressions of certain polittici, the inventories of goods and income of large properties: per bono tempo (in good times)—we read in the polittico of Migliarina, a property of the monks of Saint Julia of Brescia—1,500 moggi of wheat and 150 amphora of wine are produced.4 In short, we are in the hands of God, or nature, which amounts to much the same thing. Alongside the bonum tempus wished for the grain harvest is the hope that the acorns will grow well on the oak trees to allow for a sizable herd of pigs: “when the acorn takes well [quando glande bene prinde] the tenth that we manage to collect amounts to 400 pigs”—we read again in the polittico of Migliarina.5 No less important is the wish that the weather will allow for good fishing in the rivers (quando ipsa pescaria bene podest pescare), that cold or drought will not interfere.6
The succession of the seasons determines the supply of food and marks the time with a series of preoccupations, changing according to specific productive interests. A ninth-century Tuscan document divides seasonality into a “time of acorns” (tempus de glande) and a “time of lard” (tempus de laride),7 expressing rather clearly the attention given to the forest and to herding during the high Middle Ages and how much was derived for alimentary use. Later, this attention was concentrated in an increasingly linear way on the production of grain, and the cycle of wheat took on the leading role in the perception of “alimentary time.”8 Also noteworthy is that during the later Middle Ages the iconographic cycles depicting the work to be done in each month devoted much space to raising pigs under oak trees and to transforming them into food, operations of undeniable centrality in the fall and winter seasons, between November and January.9 These representations are focused principally on three cycles of production—wheat, meat, and wine—with irregular digressions into fishing and the harvesting of fruit, and they offer incontrovertible testimony to the notion of seasonality, of a circular time to which the times of work and food are indissolubly connected.
I would like to return to the binomial tempus de glande/tempus de laride, which lends itself to a reflection on the relationship of nature/culture with regard to the food supply. Tempus de glande is clearly a “natural” time, measured by climatic and vegetative events. It is also a time that had become “cultural” insofar as humankind had learned to derive benefits from it by raising pigs under oak trees, a procedure that was not necessarily foreseen by nature. In any case, it is a time structurally bound to the natural growth rhythms of plants and fruits. Tempus de laride, on the other hand, is a wholly “artificial” time. Once we recognize what nature has (with our help) succeeded in doing, it tends to supersede nature, transforming seasonal resources—by definition, perishable and limited to a precise moment of the year—into conservable resources for the entire year and even (production allowing) beyond. Laridum is a term of multiple meanings, referring not strictly to lard but also to every part of the pig that can be stored. It is almost the definition of the human ability to make resources last beyond their “natural” limit through techniques of conservation that constitute the first and most important modification by humans of nature’s schedule.
The fear of hunger was always on the rise. The “time of famine” (tempus de caristia) is recalled by annals and chronicles as a regular, recurring event, almost foreseen within an alimentary organization that was hardly stable.10 Famine is “a structure of daily life,” in the felicitous definition of Braudel.11 The variability of harvests from year to year, the uncertainty of the future, and the ups and downs of a larder that was now full and now empty determined the perhaps dominant characteristic of a system, not only productive but also psychological, that profoundly affected medieval society. A “schizophrenia” between abundance and scarcity, a kind of collective psychosis in which “fear of famine” was more stressful than famine itself, has been admirably shown by Rouche.12
If the “time of famine” frequently affected whole populations, introducing a painful though not unanticipated variable in their perception of time, the principal means for defying it was having recourse to conserved foods. The techniques of conservation can therefore be seen as the prime agents in a strategy aimed at resisting the seasons and defeating the capriciousness of “natural” time.13 In particular, it is obvious that peasant alimentation—the one most often jeopardized by seasonal variability—had always aimed at products and foods of long durability. For this reason, grains have always played the leading role in the historical development of civilization. As for perishable foods, much effort has been devoted to the development of the most diverse techniques for extending their season. As suggested by the sociologist Girolamo Suneri, “conservation is anxiety in its purest state.” It is also a wager against the future. “Who would ever make jams without the hope of living at least long enough to eat them?”14
How do we preserve foods the way nature produced them (with human help)? In ancient times, it was thought best to keep them away from air: for example by wrapping apples in a layer of clay, as Aristotle suggested.15 The methods most commonly used were drying by the heat of the sun (in climates that permitted it) and smoking (in cold climates), but more generally, and in all climates, salt was the leading player in the history of food precisely because, aside from lending flavor to foods, salt has the ability to dry and thus preserve foods over time. Meat, fish, and vegetables under salt comprised the principal assurance of survival in a rural economy that could not rely on the daily market or the caprices of the seasons. During the Middle Ages, there were market centers in Italy—from Comacchio to Cervia, but mostly in Venice—that prospered primarily thanks to the commerce of sea salt.16 In addition, every possible local resource was exploited, from saltwater wells and springs to rock salt mines. On the Apennines near Piacenza, the monastery of Bobbio extracted enough salt for the entire community.17
Other conservation procedures were based on vinegar, oil (the first much more accessible than the second), honey, and sugar. This last, introduced into Europe toward the end of the Middle Ages, long remained a privilege for the few. A contrast between the taste for sweet and the taste for salt came to be seen as an alimentary attribute of social differences.18 In general, all of these substances (salt, sugar, honey, vinegar, and oil) made products preservable only at the price of modifying, more or less radically, their natural flavor. The same principle—of manipulating and modifying the natural qualities of foods—held for fermentation, another conservation technique in wide practice. Fermentation was decisive from a cultural standpoint (and even symbolic) in its expression of humankind’s ability to turn a “natural” process, negative in itself, such as putrification, to its own advantage by controlling it.19 From this ability came such extraordinary inventions as cheese, prosciutto, and other sausages that integrate fermentation with salting. The acidic fermentation of vegetables such as cabbage (kraut) was practiced in central and northern Europe and in other parts of the world.
The preservation of fresh produce was not the only way to alter the seasonality of foods. Another way was to affect production, diversifying the maturing times of plants: extending the times, making plants bear fruit as long as possible, going beyond the “natural” limitations of their growth and maturation. When Charlemagne recommends the cultivation in the imperial orchards of “different varieties of apples, different varieties of pears, different varieties of plums, different varieties of peaches, different varieties of cherries,”20 he is thinking not only about the variety of flavors but also about the diversification of plantings that guarantee continuity in time. And all the better if some of the species cultivated are suitable for conservation: of the seven types of apples listed, the first six are “preservable” (servatoria); only the early ones (primitive) have to be eaten right away. Similarly, of the pears, four are “preservable.” Peasants had all the more reason to follow this path: trees of many species, in orchards or in fields, made it possible to reposition the growing time of fruits. However, landowners also wanted to keep their larders full. Texts on agronomy from the late Middle Ages devote extraordinary attention to such matters, as they do in modern times. In this way, fruit was made available over a long span of many months, almost inconceivable compared to today.
To differentiate the available resources (along with techniques of conservation) was the surest strategy for preventing hunger. One need only think of the multiplicity of grains cultivated in the high Middle Ages to compensate for their meager yields.21 The cultivation of rye, oats, millet, or spelt, in addition to wheat and barley, was a means of defense against the vagaries of weather. The varying times for growing and harvesting represented a measure of security against recurring climatic misfortunes.
Yet another strategy was recourse to the marketplace, it, too, capable, under certain conditions, of abrogating the narrow limitations of seasonality and diet. This, obviously, did not apply to local markets, which were the only ones available to the peasantry. Only distant markets that brought in products from far away made this further magic possible. It was the cities, above all, that managed to resolve a carum tempus (a time of scarcity) by flooding the markets with products from outside the region and by employing a shrewd municipal policy of rationing, even keeping prices artificially low.22 Across commercial exchanges, there was space for infringing “natural” time—moreover, was the merchant not the very one who sold the time gained elsewhere?23
Questions perplexing medieval moralists arose from this substantial “denaturalizing” action on food (and much else), although these questions were not limited to mercantile activity. The major difference was in the elitist significance of the procedure in question. This struggle for control over space—an alternate or variant of the manipulation of time, this was an attempt to overcome the restrictions of the territory beyond the variability of the seasons—was reserved to the few and remained for a long time a social privilege and, even more, a mark of social privilege. As Cassiodoro wrote in the sixth century, referring to King Teodorico: “Only the ordinary citizen makes do with what the territory produces. A royal table must offer everything and arouse astonishment merely to look on it.”24 In this way, it manifests and celebrates its difference.
Our consideration of the time of food has so far dwelled on the first phase of the alimentary itinerary, that of production and distribution. I would now like to enter into the phase of cooking—that is, the transformation of raw material into something edible. It is a preeminent cultural phase in which humans give form to their food, determining its use, its function, and its taste. I return to the example of bread. The agricultural act of cultivating wheat is in itself a cultural choice that, by adjusting itself to the rhythms of nature, “adopts” it so to speak, reworking it to suit human needs. The alimentary act (of transforming wheat into bread) adapts itself as well to the reality of nature because there would be no bread without the gluten of wheat. But that, too, presupposes active intervention, a combination of techniques and knowledge that are concentrated in the fabrication of bread, making it, even more than a food, a symbol of human ingenuity. This is what I mean by cooking—it is everything in the manipulation and combination of raw material that leads to the creation of what we will later eat.
On this matter of cooking, the first comment to be made is that the “time of cooking” during the Middle Ages was remarkably expanded compared with our idea of it today.25 In general, cooking can be defined as techniques perfected for the preparation of food. But even in a simple definition like that, we can see that, depending on societies, times, and places, the whole of such techniques can be more or less inclusive, meaning that it can comprise a variable number of operations related to the specialization of the activities, their greater or lesser level of professionalism, and their eventual integration into the economy of commerce. For example, activities such as the milling or grinding of grains and the slaughtering and butchering of meat are excluded from the daily practice of cooking in contemporary Western societies, whereas they once were part of it (and still are in numerous traditional peasant societies). The complexity of culinary operations is not bound to the professional level of court cooks or urban upper bourgeoisie, to whom the cookbooks of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were addressed.26 On the contrary, it was precisely for the preparation of the most ordinary subsistence foods that the most complex manual techniques were devised, those that demanded more time and ability. Once again, one need only think of the lengthy operations needed for the preparation of bread (or, on the other side of the Mediterranean, couscous, which at the end of the Middle Ages reached European cookbooks as well). Such operations demanded hours and hours of highly specialized work, handed down by means of experience and imitation. This was work accomplished daily by the women of the house (who make an occasional appearance between the lines of documents) in the city as in the country—the protagonists of kitchen work and the depositaries of the techniques that define it. This is not to overlook men in certain situations, such as monasteries, who took the place of women, developing their own skills and a specific culinary tradition that justified such stereotypes as the one, hard to dispute, about a monastic gastronomy, unquestionably competent and refined.27
To this broad and inclusive idea of culinary activity, requiring extensive work, can be added analogous cooking practices that are also of long duration. Meat was boiled for many hours in a cauldron suspended in the fireplace of every peasant house. This accounts for its characteristically tough consistency, either because the animals, free to move in open spaces for most of their lives, developed hard, compact muscles or because peasants commonly fed on old animals, previously used for field work—and, in either case, raised over a longer period to increase their weight. A shorter cooking time could be accomplished on the spit or the grill, more typical of upper-class cooking and normally reserved for younger animals.28 In general, the few indications to be found in cookbooks imply not only prolonged but also multiple and repeated cooking procedures for meat: boiled before roasting, boiled before frying, roasted before braising, and so on.29 This affected the consistency of the meat as well as its flavor.30
About the cooking of vegetables we know very little, but even in this case, we can easily imagine patient and prolonged cooking techniques, boiling and reboiling so as to make use of every leftover scrap. Practices like the one documented in the monastic rule known as Maestro, which instructs that every scrap be collected so as to be recomposed in a torte at the end of the week,31 do not appear to be motivated by moral reasons alone; they were also prompted by reasons of economy, which every peasant family could hardly ignore. Thus, attention, respect, care of food, and time, much time, were dedicated to this essential protagonist in human life. In the Consuetudines, which he wrote for the Cluny monastery,32 Ulrich describes all the phases in the preparation of broad beans, going into minute detail and defining the times of the operations with extreme precision. It is an extraordinary example of this attitude toward food and of the work required to prepare it. Of course, all the moralists teach that one should not live to eat, but eat to live. Quite so.
Long cooking times also applied to pasta dishes, which began to acquire a certain importance in the last centuries of the Middle Ages.33 The cookbook by Maestro Martino, around the middle of the fourth century, prescribes cooking vermicelli “for a period of one hour.”34 When we think of pasta in the Middle Ages, the model is not the current Italian one of pasta al dente but the one still in practice in northern countries, particularly in the Germanic area, which, from this point of view, as in others, seems more generally conservative.
We have now arrived at the final phase of our itinerary: the consumption of food. About the times of day for meals we know little, except for the monastic communities, about which we know almost everything because every event of daily life was precisely determined by the rules. From those texts, we learn that the meals of the day were normally, as they are today, two (apart from periods of “fasting,” when they were reduced to one) but at earlier hours than in most of Europe today. The first was in late morning and the second at dusk, with the circumstantial variations imposed by the length of the day depending on the season. The same mealtimes lasted virtually unchanged until recently in the peasant tradition, which reasonably goes back to medieval times. The timetable for meals evidently corresponds to the obligations of men, like peasants, who start working early in the morning, or of those, like monks, who are engaged in various activities, liturgical but also manual. The mark of social difference, in this case, lies in moving mealtimes ahead. The few studies made on this subject for the late Middle Ages and the modern era indicate that upper-class banquets started only in the afternoon and later in the evening, continuing deep into the night.35 There are no accounts, however, about a breakfast meal, which only in the modern era took on it own structure and character. As far as we know, and that knowledge is minimal, in the Middle Ages what was eaten in the morning—if anything—only anticipated and replicated the same foods and models of consumption that followed throughout the day.36
As to the duration of meals, one need only observe the extreme variability of circumstances: from simple domestic conviviality to street food offered by rural and urban inns; from the quick meal of food brought from home and downed by the peasants in their fields to the annona domnica provided by the master on the days they worked in his fields;37 from the Sunday banquet that ends the week, stressing the contrast between workdays and holidays,38 to the political—even before gastronomic—event that accompanied aristocratic weddings and could last for days. If we are to believe the account of Donizone, the banquet organized by Marchese Bonifacio de Canossa for his marriage to Beatrice of Lorraine in 1037 went on for all of three months.39
So far this has been a rapid overview, but here I would like to linger on the criteria that regulate the choices of foods—for those who could do so—and in particular on the relationship, yet again ambiguous, between these criteria and respect for seasonality. With this, we return to the heart of the question, which is the dialectic between “natural” times and “cultural” times. On the scientific level, a general rule seems to be imposed by the advice contained in medical texts and manuals of applied dietetics: organize your own diet around seasonal foods, adapting yourself to the “natural” rhythms of the world around you. This completely coherent framework, based on the Hippocratic tradition reexamined and systematized by Galen and detailed by a long line of commentators throughout the Middle Ages, brought together microcosm and macrocosm, human times and natural times, playing on the contacts among the four elements and the four humors, the four temperaments and the four ages of man, the four cardinal points and the four seasons. … What could be more evident, more “natural”? Except that, paradoxically, this same scientific tradition places food among the res non naturales, those items that belong not to the “natural” order of things but to the “non-natural” (meaning “cultural”) order, determined by the will and action of humankind.40
The paradox is only in appearance because dietetic strategies have to take into consideration different and often contradictory variables that demand complex alchemies and a continual effort at adaptation, definable only as artificial. The fundamental correspondences are determined by a logic of corrective compensation: cold, dry autumn required warm, moist foods; cold, damp winter required warm, dry foods; warm, dry spring wants cold, dry foods; and warm, dry summer wants cold, moist foods. Far from being perceived as a harmonious adaptation to natural rhythms, this series of rules is more like the exhausting chase after a goal never really reached. The adaptation looks more like stress because, as the texts of the Salerno school of medicine explain, “reddit non paucis mutatio temporis aegros [not a few maladies are caused by the change of seasons].”41 This was the notion of ancient doctors when they recommended a change of diet to accompany the change of seasons.42
Moreover, seasonal variations were complicated by other factors, both objective and subjective: the particular climate of the location; the particular temperament of the individual; the person’s state of health, age, sex; and so on. The interweaving of these factors generated situations that were hard to evaluate and to manage. For example, the requirements of seasonal adaptation (on the subject of ex contrario corrections) could conflict with the need to adapt the diet to the humoral nature of the individual—in this case, not in the sense of correction but in the sense of maintenance. The apparent simplicity of the basic rules left them open to every kind of discussion and alternative choice.
Monthly dietetic regimens, prescribed by the medical calendars of the high Middle Ages43 and continued in the texts of the Salerno school of medicine, contain alimentary recommendations in a host of rules concerning bleeding, baths, physical exercise, sexual activity, and intellectual work. In February, one should eat (with certain precautions) chard, duck, and dill and banish from the menu legumes and water birds; in March, root vegetables are in order, along with roasts and boiled foods, seasoned with hot spices; in May, absinthe and foods cooked in goat’s milk; in June, lettuce leaves and fresh vegetables; in July, sage and dill; in August, one should eat little and avoid wine and any warming food; in September, pears cooked in wine and apples cooked in goat’s milk; October is the time for game, lamb, and poultry, to be eaten as much as desired without fear of stomach upset; in November, one drinks hydromel and wine laced with honey, ginger, and cinnamon; in December, cabbage is to be avoided and salad eliminated, but beans are encouraged, and drinks should be spiced with cinnamon. Rules like these, which I have selected only as examples from a monthly calendar of the Salerno school,44 cannot easily be explained in the context of a “seasonal diet” as we understand it. The tie with seasonal food does appear in some instances, but the reference is mostly bookish, abstract, and often in conflict with the natural cycles of food production.
Scientific discussions—directed toward an elite audience but intended to reach across all of medieval society, in all of its cultural aspects45—were not the only point of friction between the “natural” and the “artificial” dimensions of the seasonality of foods. Other rules and other kinds of logic dictated another alimentary calendar, one that was also suspended between nature and artifice—the one imposed on Christians from the fourth century on by the ecclesiastic authorities, structured in tandem with liturgical times according to the two dietary models of fat and lean: when one could or could not eat meat or any animal products.46 Alternating during the course of the year and the week, the two models eventually produced a kind of artificial seasonality during medieval Christianity that, by adding some priorities and superseding others, determined the priorities in the choice of foods. Before asking what there is in the larder or at the market, the cook will ask what day it is with regard to the liturgical calendar. In this way, even Church time—as Le Goff47 came to call it—powerfully affected the definition of alimentary customs.
It is, above all, this idea of season that we find in medieval cookbooks. Let us look at a few examples from Maestro Martino. After having explained how to make salsa agliata (garlic sauce), he specifies that it can be “served and suited to all fat and lean seasons as you like.”48 Similarly, l’agliata pavonaza (garlic sauce tinted with black grapes) can be “served in times of meat or fish, however one wishes.”49 The same concept is inferred when, speaking of a turnip torte, Martino indicates that it can be varied “according to times and seasons.”50 Various recipes are specifically designed for the period of Lent51 or else adapted to it: apple fritters, cooked “in good fat,” meaning lard, “during Lent can be fried in oil.”52 The very structure of cookbooks was marked for centuries by this fundamental distinction: preparations for fat or lean, with or without animal products. Meat marks ordinary times and holiday celebrations; fish, eggs, and dairy products mark times of abstinence—although not necessarily of penance. I would add that it was precisely through its growth as a “lean” food that pasta slowly established itself in Italian alimentary practices, as of the late Middle Ages.53
It was the liturgical calendar once again that reinforced or, so to speak, absorbed and channeled the traditional custom of marking the principal recurring holidays with certain foods, often sweets. In medieval Italy, every holiday had its food, and a writer endowed with a sense of humor, Simone Prudenzani from Orvieto, could smile at the excessive piety of certain women who never missed a holiday: “If you knew the devotion / That she has to the lasagne of Christmas / And to the spelt cakes of Carnival / To cheese and eggs of Ascension / To the goose of All Souls Day and maccheroni of Fat Thursday / and also to the pig of Saint Anthony and the pascal lamb / No one could say in so brief a sermon / For all the gold under the stars / She would not let Ash Wednesday go by / Without eating a quart of fritters; / Sweet and ample wine is even more fitting / Nor would she add water for no reason / Because she says it cures every ill.”54
Of course, it is possible, and even probable, that some of these products and foods became customary because they were associated with the “natural” calendar. The pascal lamb obviously evokes the Bible story, but it cannot be denied that is the “right” time to enjoy it. And to eat pork for the feast of Saint Anthony in January is “economically correct” because that is the season for slaughtering pigs. This also applies to other local specialties associated with particular holidays in the religious calendar. However, this is not true for many dishes (such as the lasagne and maccheroni of Prudenzani) and for many sweets (fritters, sweet breads) that, scattered throughout numerous holidays during the year, are not related to any seasonal production. It is then primarily the forms that signify the differences—in other words, human intervention in the natural product or, as in the case of sweets, in the filling. But even with sweets, ingredients such as raisins or candied fruit (typical enrichments of holiday pastries) do not seem to suggest a seasonal relationship; on the contrary, they seem to represent the optional use, on one occasion rather than another, of products “set aside” for long-term keeping.
Once again, the “time of food” reveals itself as a complex phenomenon. It lies at the point of intersection between cyclical time and linear time, between natural time and human time.