Medieval Tastes: Food, Cooking, and the Table

WATER HAS NO flavor, but it is the element that carries all flavors, allowing them to exist. This notion, formulated by naturalists and philosophers in ancient Greece and taken as the basis of medieval scientific thought, contains in essence all the ambiguity of any discussion of water focused on the theme of flavor—or taste, which perceives and distinguishes flavors. If water has no flavor, then the two terms have no reason for standing together, and our discussion would end here. But flavors arise out of moisture, meaning water, and there is no discussion of taste that is not, by definition, a discussion of water. As Guillaume de Saint-Thierry explained in the twelfth century, each sense is bound to one of the four elements in the universe: sight to fire, touch to earth, hearing to air, and smell to air as well (or rather to smoke, which is a kind of variant); in short, taste is “of an aqueous nature.”¹ The relationship of water to taste is therefore an essential one.

But before we investigate the taste of water, we must first go over a few preliminaries. Water must exist materially because without water there is no life. This primary, essential value, stunningly simple, is what the documentation makes clear first of all. “How can we live here, without water?” the monks ask Abbot Brendano when they land on an island in the middle of the sea.² The same monks, during their peregrinations, meet an old hermit who lived only on water: “He lived for sixty years without any food other than this source.”³

To live solely on water is an extraordinary feat, but to live without water is impossible, which is why the people of the high Middle Ages, “a time of scarce water,”4 were constantly in search of springs, wells, rivers, and lakes for drinking water. During the Roman era, such sophisticated public works as aqueducts⁵ could transport water across great distances, but in the Middle Ages, what mattered was the local availability of water, a criterion for distinguishing between one village and another, one territory and another. Rural and urban settlements, noble fortresses, hermetic solitudes, and monastic centers literally laid siege to springs and water courses. The luogo ameno,^* in which fresh water flows abundantly, was a literary cliché that corresponded to a genuine need in daily life.

Innumerable proofs of saintliness mentioned in hagiographic literature relate to this need: the miraculous production of water that flows out of rock or arid land is a recurrent theme in Christian texts as of late antiquity.⁶ The illustrious precedent of Moses, who succeeded in quenching the thirst of his people in the rocky desert,⁷ is the explicit reference,⁸ so that the prayer for invoking water can be made “according to the Mosaic ritual [Moysaico ritu].”⁹ But textual references are not all there is to it.¹⁰ The miracles attributed to the saints are not pure and simple replicas of models to imitate but replies to a request, a need, a genuine thirst that has to be appeased. A miracle is always a response to a specific request.

The typology of miracles is extremely varied.11 It can concern provisions for monasteries, as in the episode narrated by Gregory the Great in the Dialogues, whose protagonist, Benedict of Norcia, constructed three monastic houses among the cliffs of the Apennines. For the brothers, it was tiring and dangerous “always to have to go down to the lake to draw water.” For this reason, they went to him and suggested moving to another site. That night Benedict climbed to the summit along with a boy named Placido; he stopped to pray, and with a simple and solemn gesture, he placed three stones to mark the right place. He returned to the monks and exhorted them to go up to the summit and, “where you will find three stones one on top of the other, dig a bit. God will make water flow from now on to spare you the fatigue.” They went and found that the rock was already oozing, and they prepared around it a cavity into which the water could flow, and from the top of the mountain, the water was directed below.¹²

Elsewhere, the miracle concerns solitary hermits. Again in the Dialogues, Gregory writes about the hermit Martino, who lived in a cave in the mountains of Marsica, in Abruzzo. His first miracle, when he had barely settled into that place, was that “from that very same concave rock in which he had arranged a little grotto for himself, a drop of water emerged,” no more or less than he needed every day to survive.¹³ Even more astonishing was the intervention of Colombano when he lived in a grotto near Annegray. A young man, Domaolo, responsible for bringing him water, complained about the hardship of not having water available in the immediate surroundings and the fatigue of having to carry it up amid the sharp rocks of the mountainside. Colombano, reminding the young man of the miracle of Moses in the desert, commanded him to strike the rock so as to replicate the miracle of the water. Suddenly, “a spring began to flow from it, which is still flowing to this day.”¹⁴

The allusion to the perpetuity of the spring generated by the saint, which remained available to the inhabitants of the locality, is a common narrative device used to attribute greater credibility to the episode or to associate it with the genuine needs of the population. In a similar way, the Life of Gualtiero tells of the saint and some of his companions, who were traveling to Jerusalem across arid lands lacking all water and were suffering terrible thirst. Gualtiero stopped to pray, he then struck the earth with his walking stick, and out came clear salubrious waters that not only served to slake the thirst of the pilgrims but also, from that day on, produced a perpetual spring.¹⁵

In some cases, the collective or social needs are not fulfilled as a secondary happy outcome but rather are the original motive of the miraculous gesture. Leufredo, traveling to Tours to visit the church of Saint Martin, passed through the territory of Vendôme and in the evening arrived at a village where he asked for water. The host replied: “Alas, holy man, our town is suffering from a terrible shortage of water: we do not have a well or a spring.” The holy man turned to his brothers, saying that they should get to work and ask God’s help to make water come out of the earth. As soon as he finished the prayer, he struck the earth with his stick a good ten times, and out came a spring “that endures to this day.”¹⁶

The frequency of such miraculous interventions—oriented toward the resolution not only of contingent situations, such as those of the hermit on the mountaintop, but also of those of a structural and enduring nature, such as the siege by the monks and peasant villages—mirrors a particularly urgent and disregarded request. To produce water, as do the saints, also serves to astound and convert unbelievers.17 Similarly, they dominate natural forces by invoking or stopping rain, modifying the direction of the flow of water,¹⁸ or preventing water from flooding the land. In some cases, intelligence rather than faith is the subject, as when a pious figure found in thick vegetation springs that were unknown to the local inhabitants.¹⁹ In others, the protagonist becomes the labor, the effort of man who, tools in hand, finds the means to overcome the environmental hardships in order to make the area livable. This is the direction toward which a passage in the Life of Senzio moves: when he saw the inhabitants of the Tuscan coast afflicted with insufficient water, he took the initiative and provided the example himself by taking up a shovel and starting to dig in the earth. Suddenly, out came “extremely cold water [aqua frigidissima]” that still now, the biographer guarantees, exists on that spot.²⁰ This kind of “work miracle” reminds me of a splendid expression of Cassiodorus, minister of King Theodoric of Ravenna in the sixth century, who, in a letter, compares the public administrators responsible for constructing aqueducts to Moses (him again), who made water flow out of rock: Cassiodorus remarks, “What Moses did with a miracle, others can achieve with work [Hoc labore tuo praestas populis, quod ille miraculis].”²¹

In contexts like these, the image of water defines itself in terms of pure necessity. The same idea is implied in penitential books: by indicating a diet of bread and water as the model for mortification of the flesh,22 they presuppose that one can do without all the rest but not without bread and water. The contrast is between necessity and pleasure. To satisfy the first is legitimate and, in fact, obligatory; to renounce the second is possible, even meritorious. The problem is that the line of demarcation between necessity and pleasure is very fine and often imperceptible; when one eats or drinks, the two go together, inextricably bound. It is precisely from this observation that a culture of deep suspicion developed in the Christian tradition toward the daily gestures of eating and drinking, so innocuous at first glance. Augustine explains this very well: any discussion of the sin of gluttony is complicated by the difficulty of understanding, in any particular case, whether it is necessity that legitimizes the resulting pleasure or whether it is pleasure that surreptitiously disguises itself as necessity. On this, Augustine confesses that he has not yet arrived at a clear idea: “consilium mihi de hac re nondum stat.”²³ The temptation of pleasure is always lying in wait, and medieval texts abound with admonitions intended to separate necessity from pleasure, which is to separate the inseparable, to decipher the indecipherable. And because by nature this is impossible, the fear of pleasure (bitter enemy of holiness) ends up creating diffidence even toward the most necessary necessities, such as water.

If even water can be pleasurable, one has to approach it with caution. Monastic rules advise against excessive consumption of water²⁴ because even water can “inebriate the senses” (we read in the Regula Magistri). It can affect sexual desire, encouraging the production of semen, quite simply because it can give pleasure. In the hagiographic writings, we find a certain Livinio of Ghent who practices mortification of the flesh by mixing his bread with ashes “and with an extremely sparing taste of water [parcissimo aquae gustu].”²⁵ The practice of penitence can lead to total renunciation. Abbot Lupicino, according to his biographer, did not drink water for eight years, not even during the height of summer heat, when his stomach and his legs pulsated from his dreadful thirst and unbearable dryness. His only concession was to moisten bits of bread in cold water and eat them with a spoon.²⁶ The pleasure of water must have obsessed Lupicino in particular, as another story of his life (related by Gregory of Tours) attributed to him a most original technique for hydrating his parched body. The abbot had a bucket of water brought to him, and he immersed his hands in it. Amazingly, his flesh managed to absorb it as though it had passed through him by mouth. With this kind of natural drip, Lupicino satisfied his thirst, while preventing the satisfaction of his taste buds.²⁷ Another excessive saint, Emano, ingested salt in place of water, mocking his own body and parched mouth: “Take this, insatiable mouth, and let it replace the sweetness of water [hoc sit tibi pro dulcedine aquae].”²⁸

Also, bad water could be a means of penitence. According to the Storia Lausiaca, the Egyptian hermit Pior, “having dug in the place where he lived, found bitter water and until he died he remained in that place, accustoming himself to the bitter taste of that water to prove his steadfastness. After his death many monks competed to stay in his cell but did not have the strength to hold out for an entire year.”²⁹

More moderate was the spirit of penitence in those who used water to diminish the flavor of foods. Beverages, explains Guillaume de Saint-Thierry, in certain cases increase the tastiness of the foods that accompany them; in others, they decrease it, “attenuating the flavor.”30 Francis of Assisi also availed himself of this quality of water to mortify the pleasure of the palate: he added ashes to his food or diluted it with cold water to make it less appetizing.³¹

In contrast to these uses of water, which we can define as “antigastronomic,” are more normal strategies of consumption, directed toward the choice of good water, simultaneously good-tasting and healthful (two concepts closely related in the Middle Ages).³² The water most recommended by dietary manuals was rainwater, uncontaminated by the impurities of the soil: “est pluvialis aqua super omnes sana,” the doctors of the Salerno school assured.³³ This was an ancient idea; “for drinking, water from the sky must be preferred to any other,” we read in the treatise on agronomy by Palladio written in the fourth century,³⁴ but we can go back even further to Pliny and other ancient authors. In fact, there was no lack of organization in the Middle Ages for collecting and keeping rainwater in appropriate cisterns.³⁵ Nonetheless, the water most often discussed is from wells, springs, rivers, and even lakes—water drunk with caution out of fear of contamination. “Do not drink stagnant water or water that does not flow freely” is one of the few recommendations that a knight makes to his son before dying.³⁶ The custom of flavoring water with acidic fruit juice (raspberries, blackberries, blueberries) also helped produce a light fermentation, which disinfected it.³⁷ Similar results were obtained by boiling: “use cooked water [aquam coctam usitare]” is a recurrent recommendation in dietary calendars, which also suggest cutting it with wine or enriching it with herbs and spices.³⁸ In addition, it was common to add vinegar to water. Medieval documents attest to the persistent use of posca, the traditional drink of Roman soldiers³⁹ (which they gave Jesus on the cross out of compassion, not contempt: here, the historian of food can trust only the gospels of Matthew and John rather than that of Luke).⁴⁰

The practice of drinking water with wine, normal in the Middle Ages, goes back to Roman times, not only for gastronomic reasons but also, in some measure, for hygiene because the alcohol content of wine helps to counteract the bacteria in water. To drink only water, as did certain monks to signify the mortification of the body, could produce undesirable effects on the health.41 Moreover, mixing water with wine corresponded to the rules of dietary science, which, in keeping with the Hippocratic-Galenic tradition, classified substances into four principles or qualities: hot, cold, moist, and dry. Water, cold and moist,⁴² could reequilibrate the humors during the summer, but in general, it was not advised to drink it at the end of the digestive process, which was understood then as a true “cooking” of the food in the stomach.⁴³ This “cooking” required heat, and water, with its coldness, interfered: “cold, in point of fact,” we read in a translation from late antiquity of a text in the Hippocratic tradition, “constipates the humors of the body and numbs it.”⁴⁴ In short, water cools the stomach and prevents it from digesting food, leaving it “raw,” as we read in the Flos medicinae of the Salerno School: “Drinking water is very bad when one eats, because it cools the stomach and leaves the food raw.”⁴⁵

Wine, on the contrary, with its heat helps the digestion: “To digest, drink good wine.”⁴⁶ Therefore, if one really wants to ingest water, it would be wise to drink some wine on top of it: “Wine drunk after water serves as a remedy,” recommends Adamo of Cremona.⁴⁷ But even better would be to mix the two liquids before drinking, so as to equilibrate their contrary qualities. Wine tempers the cold nature of water (an effect obviously intensified if the mixture is made with heated water),⁴⁸ and water in turn modifies the hot nature of wine. Both beverages benefit from this mixture.⁴⁹

By insisting on the hygienic and dietary aspects of the problem, I do not mean to discount the social and symbolic aspects: hygienic preoccupations (which seem to me undebatable) are superimposed on cultural prejudices that aim at combatting the “banality” of water by altering it with additives of various kinds and playing with the temperature when served—modifying in essence the “natural” state of the product. From an overall view, I would say that the dietary concern was precisely what constituted the meeting point between hygienic preoccupations and sociocultural attentions.

Consideration of alimentary, dietary, and, generally speaking, gastronomic uses of water has slowly brought us closer to the question of taste and flavor, a question (as already noted) that is contradictory by its very nature. The idea that the Middle Ages inherited from ancient science is that water in itself has no taste but potentially contains them all—in the same way that although it is formless, it is virtually the matrix all forms.⁵⁰

That all flavors are present in water had been maintained, with various nuances, by Empedocles, Democritus, and Anaxagoras. Their theories were conflated in Aristotle, who defined flavor as the result of a modification produced in the aqueous humidity of the earth’s dryness by the action of heat.51 Thomas Aquinas, commentating on Aristotle, confirms that water in itself would have a natural tendency to be insipid but is nonetheless the root and principle of every flavor. He adds that if water itself has a flavor, that is because some element of the earth has been mixed into it.⁵² For that reason, Guillaume de Conches explains, water can assume any flavor, depending on the substances that have been dissolved into it: “If it flows out of sandy and stony soil, it will take on a sweet taste [dulcis]; if it crosses a salty stretch, it carries away a salty taste [salus]; if the soil is muddy, its taste will be flat [vapidus]; if it runs over sulfurous or calcareous rocks, it becomes bitter [amaro].”⁵³

Another way of classifying the flavors of water—more theoretical and more abstract, in a manner of speaking—is to evaluate the orientation of the spring. Cassiodorus explains in a letter that the waters going east and south are generally sweet and clear (dulces et perspicuas), light and healthful; those instead that go to the north and west emerge too cold (nimmis frigidas) and are excessively heavy and dense (crassitudine suae gracitatis incommodas).⁵⁴ We find considerations like these in scientific texts of late antiquity, by Oribasius, up until those of the early Middle Ages⁵⁵ and on into the modern era,⁵⁶ and all tend to isolate specific flavors of water (sapores aquarum), variably pleasing to the taste, variably good for the health of the body. No less than wine and any other beverage or food, water is evaluated, judged, and selected. It is perceived not at all as an indistinct reality but as a differentiated universe rich in nuances.

Among the positive attributes that describe the taste of water, the most common is assuredly that of sweetness. Good water is sweet; bad water is salty or bitter. “No one can enjoy sea water,” Augustine writes.⁵⁷ And it is truly a miracle that the Lord performs every day, making the salted waters of the sea evaporate in the air, “cooking” them in the heat of the sun, and transforming them into the sweet water of rain.⁵⁸

Even temperature is an important factor. If tepid water is nauseating,⁵⁹ cool water restores and quenches—to confirm this, it is useful to go back to the biblical metaphor: “like cold water for him who is thirsty.”⁶⁰ Satisfaction of the palate guarantees beneficent effects on the body’s health: an idea consolidated in the scientific literature is that the pleasure of food and drink certifies their conformity with physiological needs.⁶¹ In this sense, aside from being pleasurable (in that it is a pleasure), “cool water is salutary,” as we read in one of the many pseudo-Hippocratic texts that have been transmitted since the Middle Ages, so long as it is not “too cold,” in which case it becomes “inimical and hostile.” Hot water, on the other hand, “weakens everything.”⁶²

The discussion can also become overtly gastronomic. Water, Cassiodorus writes, “gives flavor to foods.” On the subject of the works ordered by Theodoric to restore the aqueduct of Ravenna, Cassiodorus comments that no food is pleasing if not accompanied by the sweetness of water: “nullus cibus gratis efficitur, ubi aquarum dulcium perspicuitas non habetur.”63

The flavor of water appears to be understood not only qualitatively but also quantitatively: excellence is intimately associated with abundance. Water that miraculously flows from the rocks to provide for the needs of a monastic siege is defined as plentiful, beautiful, limpid, and flavorful. The onlookers ask themselves where it came from, how it could have “such and so much flavor [talis et tantis saporis].”⁶⁴

All this does not alter the fact that in general water considered the best is tasteless and odorless, without any suspended substances. “What is the best water?” asks the twelfth-century Liber de digestionibus of Sorano; the reply is “clean, transparent, without any smell or taste, light in weight and, after resting for some time, does not release any impurities.”⁶⁵ Pliny had already written that “salubrious waters should have no taste or smell.”⁶⁶

From this point of view, the identity of water is defined negatively, in the sense of absence: its true nature is to be without smell, taste, or color. The meeting between this basic idea and the multiple evaluations of the flavor of water ends by producing a kind of conceptual oxymoron that conveys two contradictory notions: perfection and incompletion. Water is perfect in its natural state, meaning odorless, tasteless, and colorless—when it corresponds to the basic requisite of absolute simplicity (liquor simplicissimus).⁶⁷ Similar values expressing notions of purity, lightness, and noncontamination, are implicit or explicit in every description of water fit to drink. Water, Cassiodorus writes, is a gift all the more precious when “it retains its natural purity.”⁶⁸ On the other hand, completely tasteless water would be incapable of quenching thirst (as anyone knows who tries to drink water in the mountains where it is still low in mineral salts). Let us consider this metaphor of Massimo of Turin: the catechumen, not yet a true Christian, is “like water without taste or smell, that has no value, no usefulness, nor does it please him who drinks it, or allow itself to be preserved.”⁶⁹ This is to say that only water with taste and smell can be considered precious because it is pleasant to the palate and more readily suited to storing.

A few centuries later, in a text by Galbert of Bruges, we read that the assassins of the Count of Flanders were subjected to this singular punishment by God: wine began smelling acidic, fetid, and tasteless to them, bread putrid, and water insipid—and in this way disgusted, they were forced to suffer hunger and thirst.70 The expression used—“aqua insipida eis nihil prodesset”—presupposes that only water that is not insipid can quench thirst.

If the perfection of water is ultimately perfectible, then it is not perfect. The simplicity of water is also its limitation. This connotation, in particular, is expressed in the metaphors in medieval literature that juxtapose water and wine, almost as though the latter represented the complement, the perfection of the “unfinished” nature of water. Ambrose, commenting on the Gospel passage of the marriage at Cana, writes, “as the steward pours the water, its smell becomes inebriating, its color changes and it takes on a new form, and thus does faith increase with the new flavor.”⁷¹ Changing smell, color, and flavor, water miraculously acquires a new and more complex identity, losing its “inferiority”: “from that inferior water,” writes Maximus of Turin, “he wants the guests to enjoy the flavor of an excellent wine.”⁷²

The addition of flavor ennobles the watery substance, and the transformation of water into wine assumes the metaphoric value of adding meaning. “We were water and have become wine,” writes Augustine—which is to say that we were insipid and God gave us flavor, making us wise.⁷³ According to Baldwin of Ford, “fear without love does not yet have the flavor of wine, but is like insipid water.”⁷⁴ And according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, the conversion of water into wine is the image of an “insipid and watery” heart that “acquires the flavor of wine” by means of the sweetness of contemplating God.⁷⁵

The paradigm of the event remains that of Cana: by converting water into wine, writes the Venerable Bede, Jesus “saturates their insipid mind with the flavor of celestial knowledge.”76 The same words reappear in Alcuino,⁷⁷ whereas Maximus of Turin explains that the apostles, admiring the transformation of water into wine, are transformed themselves and change nature, “and just as water turned into wine is seasoned with flavor, color and warmth, so their insipid knowledge acquires flavor, their pallid grace acquires color, their frigidity is warmed by the heat of immortality.”⁷⁸ To the already noted qualifications of tasteless, odorless, and colorless, the notion of cold is added here, an implicit echo of medico-dietary science that has already been discussed. Only a portent can give water more flavor than wine, which is what happened to the virgin Lidewig, who, through the exceptional grace of God, while drinking the water of the Moselle, found it so tasty “as to surpass the flavor of wine.”⁷⁹

The question of flavor deserves additional reflection. In medieval culture, flavor was regarded not as a simple attribute (Aristotle would have said “accident”) but rather as a “substance” of things and, even more, as the means by which things can palpably manifest their individual nature.⁸⁰ Flavor thus assumes a formidable cognitive ability, which justifies (in an ontological sense, so to speak) the etymological relationship of sapore and sapere (flavor and knowing): by virtue of flavor (or taste), I am capable of recognizing the essence of a thing. The insistence on the theme of flavor that recurs in evangelical commentary is therefore not strange: in Cana, water acquired the flavor of wine, which means its nature changed. “Aquam in vini saporem naturamque convertit.”⁸¹ There is no dearth of differing opinions, but even those who argue that Jesus succeeded in changing the flavor of water without modifying its nature⁸² only confirm—in fact, reinforce—the prodigious, unnatural character of the episode.

The transformation of water into wine is a proof of holiness that was particularly dear to medieval culture, not only because it replicates the miracle at Cana but also because it corresponds to the widespread diffidence toward water, various examples of which have been provided. On the other hand, in at least one case, it would seem that an inverse miracle occurred when wine was amazingly transformed into water. The episode is related in the Chronicle of the Monastery of San Michele della Chiusa. Giovanni, the protagonist, was a hermit who had withdrawn to live in solitude on Mount Pirchiriano. Fascinated by his fame, Count Ugo d’Alvernia came to see him with many followers. After a difficult climb, the visitors were tired and thirsty, but there was no water to drink. There was only a little wine in the cruet that the hermit kept by his side, barely enough to celebrate mass. The saint invoked the power of the archangel Michael, and a miracle took place: “the cruet began to erupt like a spring that gushes from the depths, and everybody who had come drank to their satisfaction.”83 That wine was turned into water in this instance is not all that explicit and can be doubted.⁸⁴ Not for nothing, in a later version of this episode, in which the visitors are not Count Ugo’s gentlemen but ordinary pilgrims, is the “remedy for quenching their thirst” found in merum, the crude wine in the cruet that multiplied with stupefying abundance, so that they all left “restored.”⁸⁵ But this “normalizing” of the miracle, brought back to a more consolidated typology, does not make the first hypothesis⁸⁶ less fascinating, justified in the Chronicle by words and expressions intimately related to the world of water: after prayer by the saintly hermit, the cruet literally floods those present “like the stream of a spring that gushes from the depths [quasi ab imo scaturiente vena fontis].”⁸⁷ This is the typical vocabulary that in hagiographic texts signals the miraculous finding of water sources: “ab imo terrae venam fontis scatutire.”⁸⁸

Thirst can also be quenched with wine—even better than with water, Baldwin of Ford seems to think.⁸⁹ However, the image of liquid bursting from the vein of a spring cannot but evoke the idea of water—at times, more desired than wine: “such is the absence of water to which we are subjected,” we read in the Lives of the Egyptian anchorites, “that we use it with parsimony such as no one uses with the most precious of wines.”⁹⁰

I return to the “impossible question” from which I started: Is there a “flavor of water”? Or must we simply admit, along with Aristotle and Thomas, that water makes it possible for other flavors to exist but has none of its own? To this impossible question, medieval naturalists had an incredibly ingenious reply: add insipid to the other flavors.

The “system of flavors” in practice during the Middle Ages derived directly from Aristotle, who, examining the sense of taste, identified eight fundamental flavors: sweet, fat, sour, pungent, tart, acidic, salty, and bitter (then to make them fit into a septenary canon, symbolically preferable, he eliminated fat, including it in sweet as though it were a subspecies).⁹¹ This classification was modified in various ways by medieval authors. For example, they separated tart into two flavors of differing intensity (stipticus and ponticus), or they stressed spicy (acutus),⁹² which had achieved a new gastronomic centrality with the growing use of spices in cooking.⁹³ And then the great invention: even insipidus was admitted to the paradigm of flavors, which rose from eight to nine, and at times to ten, depending on the text.

The first writer to speak of this is Guillaume de Conches in his Dragmaticon, a dialogue on physical substances written around 1125: “Among the nine flavors, one is insipid, which is that of water [unus est insipidus, qui est aquae proprius].”94 By the next century, the “promotion” was consolidated: whether the “Regimen sanitatis” of the Salerno school, or Bartolomeo Angelico (De proproetatibut rerum), or works devoted to the subject such as the anonymous Summa de saporibus, all include insipid among the fundamental flavors.⁹⁵ The Salerno “Regimen” explains that insipid “is called that because it does not affect the tongue very much, which does not, however, indicate that insipid is without flavor [sic nominatur, / quod lingua per eum parum immutatur; / nec tamen insipidus sapore privatur].” The fact that this flavor does not produce any “reaction” in the body, rendering it inefficacious both for medicine and for food,⁹⁶ does not prevent it from having, like all other flavors, specific humoral qualities—obviously, those of water were cold and moist.⁹⁷ In the overall picture, it is classifiable, along with sweet and fat, among the so-called temperate flavors, which, because of a particularly balanced nature, have less need for corrective interventions intended to modify their characteristics.