Medieval Tastes: Food, Cooking, and the Table

THE ORGAN OF taste is not the tongue but the brain. Better yet, it is the brain that directs and judges the sensations of the tongue. What the tongue perceives is flavors. In the nineteenth century, four fundamental flavors were codified: sweet, bitter, salty, and sour, each of which activates receptors located in specific zones of the tongue—sweet in the front, bitter in the back, salty on the right, and sour on the left.¹ But if the tongue perceives these flavors, it is the brain that recognizes them and judges them “good” or “bad” according to criteria of evaluation that someone taught it: criteria that are passed on and learned, criteria that are variable in time and space. What in a given period is deemed good may in another seem bad; what in one place is considered a delicacy may in another be regarded as disgusting. The social stratum, the professional group, or the family can also develop particular tastes and transmit them to its members. For this reason, taste is an element that constitutes human culture.² The tongue represents its biological foundation. The brain, determined by culture and society (and thus by history), decodes and interprets messages related to taste.

All this biologists now take for granted, but it was already perfectly evident to ancient scientists and philosophers and to medieval thinkers and treatise writers as well.3 Augustine, basing himself on Aristotle, had explained that corresponding to the five “external” senses, there was an “internal” one that analyzed and evaluated information, leading it toward the spirit.⁴ In these complex mechanisms, the brain is the “supreme judge,”⁵ responsible for the conclusive and synthetic evaluation of the gustatory experience. Taking up the theories of Greek and Hellenistic physicists, Augustine, the founder of medieval science, defined the nervous system as a sensory path (via sentiendi) that connects the sensory organs to the brain.⁶ He goes so far as to locate the exact part of the brain (anterior, he claimed) that presides over such mechanisms of sensory transmission.⁷ “It is the brain, by means of the five senses, that discerns,” repeats Gregory the Great,⁸ another great father of medieval culture, referring back to Augustine. It is the brain that stores sensory data “in the belly of the memory” (a superb metaphor for someone working on food). Thus, the mouth feels, but it is “the spirit that tastes through the mouth.”⁹

Among the five human senses,¹⁰ taste has had a singular history. On the one hand, it was elevated to a means of knowing reality—the prime means of knowing reality. On the other, it was disdained, placed in a “low” position on the overall scale of values. In the history of Western culture, beginning in antiquity, a hierarchy arose among the five senses that distinguished the “high” senses (sight and hearing) from the “low” (touch and taste), with smell in an intermediate position. On one side are the “clean” senses—the “intellectual” ones, so to speak—that maintain the distance between subject and object; on the other are the “dirty,” “material” senses, which provide physical contact with the object, to varying degrees. We are still today prisoners of this hierarchy when we attribute to the arts of sight and hearing (the figurative arts and music) a position of indisputable high value, whereas we have a hard time granting the same status to such arts as engineering and cooking, based on the “material” senses. True, today many speak of cooking as an art—but rarely without a patronizing smile.

At the origin of these difficulties and this hierarchical ladder is the ancient prejudice against the body, typical of Western culture at least since Plato. This prejudice was reinforced and consolidated by Christianity, which, after inventing the idea of sin, attached it to the physical nature of man, to his material dimension, constructing a utopia of spiritual man freed from his instincts and his body, insofar as possible.

Jerome, one of the Church fathers, the first ideologue of medieval monasticism, explains that the five senses are like so many “windows” that acquaint man with vice.11 Others use the metaphor of the door. The senses are seen as the occasion and the vehicle of sin because they lead man into an awareness of his body—and of the physical (and also intellectual) pleasures that it can provide. From this viewpoint, all the senses are dangerous. But one of them, taste, is more dangerous than the others, for it is the only one we cannot do without: without vision, without hearing, without touch, without smell (Jerome explains), we can live, theoretically; without taste, no, because we must eat. And it is precisely through the inescapable experience of eating that man has his first occasion to experiment with pleasure, venturing onto a path that will be hard to leave.

This holds, Jerome declares, not only for individual human beings, who learn from childhood to taste flavors and in this way become attached to the material side of life. It also holds true for humanity as a species, as progeny: our progenitors, Adam and Eve, fell into sin because of a gluttonous temptation, failing to resist tasting the forbidden fruit. Jerome interprets original sin not (or at least not only) as a sin of intellectual arrogance but (perhaps also) as a sin of the flesh, a yielding to gluttony and, immediately after, to lust. Once Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, they discovered their nudity. This kind of interpretation, not justified by the biblical text but accepted and repeated throughout the Middle Ages by a host of biblical commentators, mirrors the Christian obsession with the body, with pleasure, and above all, with that pleasure (gluttony) for which taste, “the window of taste,” is the vehicle. This explains the centrality of abstinence and fasting in the rules of monastic life, as well as the obsessive insistence of Christian regulations on penitential and Lenten practices.¹²

Another founding father of western monastic culture, Giovanni Cassiano, introduced an important variant into this reasoning, further qualifying it:13 among human vices, there is a precise hierarchy because they do not all arise at the same time; instead, they follow each other like a chain reaction. The first—because it is unavoidable, tied as it is to the need to eat—is the vice of gluttony. From this is born the love of the body and consequently lust. This love of the body and of material things leads to avarice, that is, to the love of possession; to anger, if someone contests what we want; to sloth, if we do not succeed in obtaining what we want; and so on. Finally, even arrogance is related in a way to gluttony. This happens, paradoxically, when one seeks (as do the best among monks, along with ascetics and hermits) to forget the body, to raise oneself up to God by means of fasting. One then considers oneself superior to others, and that is the sin of arrogance.

If this is what the founders of medieval Christian thinking wrote, it would seem to leave little room for a positive view of the sense of taste. And yet that same culture, in the field of science and especially medicine, developed a notion of taste—going back to ancient ideas of the Aristotelian mold—that entrusted to that very sense man’s highest cognitive capacity for apprehending the external world. Only taste, we read in certain medieval scientific texts, allows one to know the true essence of things.

Of particular interest is an anonymous text of the thirteenth century (which collected widely held opinions) entitled Tractatus de quique sensibus sed specialiter de saporibus, or, more simply in another manuscript, Summa de saporibus.¹⁴ The text begins by saying that the nature and properties of things can be known in three ways: by color, by smell, or by taste—in other words, by eyes, nose, and tongue. Through hearing, such knowledge is impossible because the sounds emitted by a thing are not part of its “substance” (the Aristotelian distinction between “substance” and “accident” is one of the constant points of these theories).¹⁵ Touch, however, is deceptive, always at risk of perceiving the nature of things in an altered way, as demonstrated by two examples: hot water is felt as hot, whereas its true nature is cold; ground pepper is perceived as cold, whereas its true nature is hot. The properties of things (proprietates rerum) are determined in reference to the physics of Aristotle and the medical theories of Hippocrates, reorganized and developed by Galen. The nature of things derives from the combination in varying degrees of the four fundamental qualities of hot and cold, dry and moist, determined in turn by the four constituent elements of nature—earth, water, air, and fire. Any scientific reflection, from antiquity to the seventeenth century, turns around this basic concept.

So then, to return to our text, hearing and touch are excluded a priori as senses suited to knowing the nature of things. At this point, one turns to sight and admits that in some measure it is capable of transmitting knowledge. But even sight can be mistaken: for example, we see something white and believe it is cold (whiteness being filia frigiditatis). Instead, it could be hot, as in the case of garlic. Sight, in reality, captures only colors, shapes, and other “external” properties (exteriores), which are not substantial but “accidental” with regard to the nature of things. Smell is somewhat more accurate, often allowing us to know the properties of things—but not always, and not perfectly (non perfecte). A strong aromatic fragrance invariably convinces us of the hot nature of the thing, which can instead be cold, as in the case of camphor.

Complex compositions produce sensations (infert passionem) by means of eight fundamental flavors, which act in different ways: two of them, sweet and unctuous (dulcis et unctuosum), act “with delight [cum delectatione]”; that is, they produce a reaction of immediate pleasure. The other six (salsus, amarus, acutus, acetosus, ponticus, and stipticus) act “with revulsion [cum horribilitate],” meaning that they produce a reaction technically defined as physical discomfort—leaving aside the greater or lesser level of appreciation that the taster experiences. This discomfort can stem from two contrary physical actions: either the “dissolution and separation of the joined parts” (a kind of laceration of the taste buds) caused by flavors of a “hot” nature, such as salty, bitter, and sharp, or by a “cold” nature, such as vinegar; or the “wrinkling and shrinking of the parts” (a kind of contraction of the taste buds) caused by a sharp (pontico) or astringent flavor.

With respect to the notion of flavor, it was eighteenth-century science that identified four canonical flavors (sweet, bitter, salty, and sour). But medieval science, in the wake of ancient Aristotelian thinking, had an ampler notion of flavor that also included sensations of a tactile nature, such as those that precede the perception of spicy (acutus), astringent (stipticus, but also ponticus, which describes a somewhat less astringent flavor than stipticus), and fat (unctuosum). Today’s scientists are trying to recover this broader dimension, rethinking the notion of flavor as a complex ensemble of diverse sensations, unequally distributed in different receptors of the palate, that blend together taste and feel—and even smell.16 A fifth flavor, typical of Asian taste (the Japanese umami, a “flavor of meat” or glutamate¹⁷), has now been added to the canon, and even fat (unctuosum) is on its way to being recognized as a genuine flavor, whereas “hot” and “cold” (as in the heat of a chili pepper and the cold of mint) are bringing physics into chemistry, and tactile sensations are being placed among molecular mechanisms. The direction all this is taking seems to be the overturning of the eighteenth-century theory of four flavors and the resuscitation of premodern theories that were mistakenly thought to be buried.

The eight flavors of the treatise we have been examining can be found, with few variants, in ancient scientific texts (Aristotle was the first codifier of this¹⁸) and in other texts of medieval tradition.¹⁹ In some cases, the number changes. For example, the “Regimen sanitatis” of the Salerno school of medicine identifies nine, adding insipidus (the flavorless flavor, the taste of water²⁰) and subdividing them into three groups: “hot” (salty, bitter, and spicy), “cold” (vinegary, astringent, and sharp), and “temperate” (fat, sweet, and insipid—the best because they are the ones least in need of correction).²¹ But aside from differences of detail, the primary interest of ancient and medieval thinkers in flavors lies in the fact that certain qualities (cold, hot, and so on) in the flavors themselves correspond to the nature of the res gustanda. Flavor (to echo Aristotle) is not accidental but substantial. Flavor expresses and reveals the essence of things.

For this, the term flavor was normally used, in cookbooks as well as books on dietetics, in connection with sauces, recommended as “correctives” for the foods they accompanied. For a certain type of meat or fish, prepared in a certain manner, a certain sauce was recommended so that the quality of the first would be “tempered,” or compensated by the quality of the second, to achieve a balanced dish. For example, with a meat that is hot and moist, one should serve a sauce that is cold and dry.22 This kind of precept, found both in texts on dietetics and in cookbooks, plays on the term sapores, which indicates, contextually, the flavor and the nature of the culinary preparation. The nature of the thing (and thus its ability to exercise influence on the level of nutrition) manifests itself directly through its flavor.

Knowledge of things (edible, not edible, partially edible, edible on condition of being modified and “adjusted”) is acquired through the sense of taste, which belongs to humans, and the perception of flavor, which belongs to the thing. The act of eating is what produces the contact that activates the sense of taste, making it recognize the flavor and, behind it, the essence of the thing. Flavor reveals that essence and thereby becomes an instrument of knowledge. The play on words sapore/sapere,^* very much in fashion (in Italy) today and used and abused even on the levels of journalism and publicity, in reality is much more than wordplay. It expresses—for those in the Middle Ages who spoke Latin and for those who today speak a language derived from Latin—the profound identity that medieval culture postulated between the two notions. Let us say it once again: flavor, by means of the sense of taste, reveals the essence of things.

But there is more. Medieval dietetic thinking, expressed in fundamental treatises and in small compendiums for daily use, was governed by a basic certainty that we can explain very simply this way: ciò che è buono fa bene (or, loosely, what tastes good is good for you).²³ In this way, pleasure becomes the infallible guide to health “because,” wrote Aldobrandino of Siena in the thirteenth century,²⁴ “as Avicenna said, if man’s body is healthy, all those things that taste good in his mouth will nourish him best.” The words of the Milanese doctor Maino de’ Maineri, in the following century, were also very clear: “by means of condiments [foods] become tastier and as a result are more digestible. In fact, whatever is more pleasing is better for the digestion.”²⁵

Conviction of this kind, diffused, shared, almost taken for granted, arose precisely out of the logical route we have traced: on one side, there are humans, endowed with a sense of taste; on the other, there is food, endowed with flavor, which reveals its nature. If the encounter between taste and flavor is positive for me—if, in other words, eating a particular thing arouses a pleasurable sensation—that means (medieval doctors thought) that this thing, its particular nature revealed to my senses by its flavor, corresponds to my desire to eat it. In turn, that desire is the expression of the organism’s need. Therefore, if my sense of taste finds something to be good, that means that its nature (revealed by its flavor) is suited to my need (revealed by my desire). Generally speaking, finding a flavor pleasurable is the sign of a physiological need, and it is precisely the desiderium (the appetite, the desire to eat) that is the revelatory symptom of that need: “from the desire you will surely know it” because “that is the sign to which you should entrust your diet.” These words are from the Salerno “Regimen.”26

This presupposes that I am capable of listening to my body, its demands, and its reactions and that I am not influenced by other suggestions that could orient my choices differently. In the Middle Ages, as today and always, food choices did not depend exclusively on hearing one’s body but were also based on considerations that, by their nature, are extraneous to the act of nutrition, such as social conventions, prestige and power (eating certain things because they are a status symbol and refusing others seen as vulgar), faith (a given religious faith can require or prohibit certain foods), reasons of hunger or the market (giving preference to a food because it is more economical or available), intemperance (why not?), and so on. In a world like ours, dominated by alimentary publicity, it is not hard to understand how choices can be influenced by considerations and sentiments unrelated to hearing the body. This may indicate that the picture drawn by medieval doctors was utopian. But who would deny the importance of utopias as the engine of history?

What is good is good for you. This great utopia of medieval scientific thinking coexisted and conflicted with the other great utopia, Christian morality, which taught exactly the opposite: what is good—that is, what arouses pleasure in the body—is bad (for the spirit) because it distracts you from “true knowledge,” that of otherworldly reality. On the one hand terror of pleasure, on the other the idea that pleasure can be a guide for life. They seem to be two separate cultures, ostensibly irreconcilable. Instead, we are dealing with the very same culture, declined in different ways. The same condemnation of physical pleasure presupposes the idea that such pleasure, and the sense of taste that induces it, is the intermediary of a privileged relationship with the world, which should be negated or, better still, transferred to another plane.

Even in Christian texts, pleasure and taste appear (metaphorically) as instruments of perfect knowledge—of a different and truer reality. Augustine, in his commentary on the Psalms, wrote that one cannot speak of the sweetness of God if one has never known him, just as it is impossible to affirm the sweetness of a food if one has never tasted it.27 The same image recurs when Gregory the Great writes that “the food of knowledge” cannot be known merely by hearing about it; it has to be tasted thoroughly, savored “all the way to the marrow.”²⁸ Gregory the Great, again—to describe the patriarchs of the Old Testament who intuited the coming of Christ but evidently could not know him—used a metaphor that brings us back to the heart of the scientific ideas from which we started. The ancient fathers, he wrote, prophesied the mystery of the incarnation and managed to smell its fragrance: they were “like ships that transport fruit”; they could enjoy the perfume of those fruits but not experience their flavor because they were carrying them to others. “That fruit which they could smell while waiting, we can see, we can pick, we can eat to satiety.”²⁹ The metaphors on divine reality, although seemingly opposed to the science of the body, only confirm it, based as they are on the certainty that for humans, taste is the prime means of knowing the world. To taste is to experiment: sapore è sapere (flavor is knowledge).

The idea of taste transmitted by medieval culture was that of an instinctive, “natural” taste. If the experience of pleasure was determined by the satisfaction of an individual physiological need, each taste was a thing in itself and not open to question. The refined scholastic disputations did not include the evaluation of flavors because de gustibus non est disputandum. But, in fact, that created problems for the ideological system constructed during the Middle Ages by the ruling classes and by intellectuals (philosophers, physicians, and scientists) who saw food as being an instrument of social difference and therefore as reflecting various qualities that were “objectively” determined. With a bit of forcing, the problem was resolved by superimposing the theme of social difference on that of instinctive knowledge, redesigning—with an obvious conceptual oxymoron—the notion of individuality in a collective key. The idea that emerged was that because knowledge is instinctive and because people are different (socially different), different things are naturally pleasing to each of them: the taste of a peasant is not the taste of an aristocrat.

This conviction lasted way beyond the Middle Ages, the elite continuing to lull themselves with the idea that the peasant would not like refined food—his body would reject it, or he would end up like poor Bertoldo, forced against his will to eat courtly food, which is precisely what caused his death in the tragicomic story by Giulio Cesare Croce, and we are now in the seventeenth century.30 In the meantime, however, things got more complicated because the idea of instinctive taste, which opens the door to knowing the world and its rules, was overtaken in the first centuries of the modern era by another idea, that of good taste—in other words, a knowledge that is not instinctive but cultivated, filtered by the intellect.

This is not a new idea. It already existed in medieval culture, where it cohabited with the idea of instinctive knowledge (the two had always lived side by side). But at a certain point, between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—first in Italy and Spain, then in France and other countries—this idea of cultivated taste, initially limited, took hold and became prevalent. Moreover, it lent itself to a whole series of figurative uses: the ability to (learn how to) evaluate applied not only to the choice of foods—to the sense of taste, literally speaking—but also to everything that makes daily life “beautiful” and “flavorful”—filling the senses of seeing, hearing, touching, and smelling, metaphorically speaking, with emotions that only someone with rigorous intellectual training could appreciate.

According to Vercelloni, who examined this mechanism in a recent book,³¹ this transference of images presupposed the “liberation” (or release) of the idea of taste from the specific sphere of alimentation. This kind of emancipation, the appearance of a metaphoric use of the idea of taste, was the condition for the passage of an exclusively alimentary notion to a notion at the same time more ample and more intellectual, defined culturally rather than instinctively. Only in a second stage, by then on the threshold of the contemporary world, did this change make it possible to “redefine retroactively the original meaning of the term,” assigning a cultural character to taste in the palatal sense.

But the argument can be turned around, thanks to the fact that the connection between the idea of taste and the sphere of knowledge seems deeply rooted in medieval culture—which is why I do not find improbable a different route, to some degree opposite. It is not the metaphoric and figurative use of the idea of taste that made possible its release from the alimentary sphere; on the contrary, the early development of this idea in the field of gastronomy would have favored at a certain point its extension into other fields. This is a hypothesis suggested with great prudence and in a different perspective by Flandrin, who was a pioneer in the history of taste. Although admitting the possibility that “the metaphoric use favored … the appearance in the alimentary field of the idea of good taste,” he asked himself “how an idea like this [of ‘intellectual taste’] could have been created and cultivated … by a society that was indifferent to the refinement of cooking and to the sensitive perception of food.” It is indeed hard to establish “if the idea of good taste—or bad taste, which is its obverse—was born in the alimentary world or in the artistic and literary world,” but it is the first hypothesis that seems more appealing to him.32

A qualification is necessary at this point: by itself, the notion of good taste does not at all exclude instinct. Even the faculty of intellectual evaluation contains a spontaneous, intuitive dimension (Voltaire would define taste, in the meaning of good taste, as a kind of “immediate discernment, like that of the tongue and the palate”³³). But the idea of good taste that ultimately prevailed in the modern era is that of a mediated knowledge, a taste “culturally remodeled,” as noted by Vercelloni. “What is good is what pleases” will no longer be true, as medieval doctors and philosophers had thought; instead, “what pleases (or what one has to like because is has been deemed good by connoisseurs) is what is good.” The medieval adage de gustibus non est disputandum, which granted equal legitimacy to all, determined by the natural instinct of each individual, in modern times faced a “progressive loss of verisimilitude,” while the idea that not all tastes have the same value and that some people more than others—the so-called experts—are competent to judge them gained acceptance. Taste in this way became a “device for social differentiation.” It always was, but in the Middle Ages, people deluded themselves into thinking (or pretended to believe) that this “device” functioned “naturally.” In the Renaissance, as Hauser wrote referring to artistic taste, the argument had a wider range: the idea was to create a “culture reserved for an elite from which the majority was to be excluded.”³⁴ This is the cultural mechanism that Flandrin calls “distinction by means of taste”—an idea that had long been unthinkable, even if there was no need to wait until the seventeenth century (as Flandrin maintains) to see it appear. In Italy, as in Spain, it could have been anticipated at least a century earlier.³⁵