Four

When Rustic Food Becomes the Fashion

During the Middle Ages, the identity of cheese as a humble food comes under discussion and is found worthy of acceding to the patrician table.

During the Middle Ages, a laborious and not unambiguous process of ennoblement took place that progressively modified the social and cultural image of cheese. Significant in that process was the part that food played in the diet of monastic communities, which were often associated with the nobility and were well endowed with economic resources, thus anything but poor. Nonetheless, they represented themselves as poor, grafting onto the notion of “spiritual poverty”—in other words, humility—the notion of true poverty. An essential element of the monastic dietary model was the renunciation of meat, prohibited more or less rigorously by all orders. Meat was thus systematically replaced by substitute foods such as fish, eggs, or cheese. By this route, cheese acquired an importance that may have been unforeseeable. And in this way, monastic culture assumed the position of mediator between “high” and “low” dietary practices, introducing models of popular consumption into distinctly elitist social milieus. On one hand, this confirmed the status of cheese as a humble foodstuff, a substitute for another—meat, held to be vastly more prestigious and far tastier (for this reason, abstinence constituted for the monks a meritorious deprivation). On the other hand, it conferred on cheese an important position in the alimentary system.

This same culture of abstinence promoted in monastic circles thus contributed to generating new attention to cheese, for which, in time, a taste came to be acquired. “Is it possible to cite a single noteworthy cheese that is not monastic in its distant origin?” asks Leo Moulin. In reality, those “origins” are often nothing more than mythic (which, moreover, risks obscuring the fundamental contribution of the peasant world to the construction of the monastic dietary model). Myths themselves, however, are historical realities reflecting a common impression that, not entirely gratuitously, identified monastic centers as centers of the (re)development of gastronomic culture.

For the rest, the abstention from meat (and the subsequent success of “lean” foods, as they were called, which for cheese is truly a nutritional paradox) was not the exclusive privilege of monastic communities. More moderate in other periods and fashions, this type of obligation was imposed during the Middle Ages on the whole of Christendom and was observed within specific alimentary rules set by the liturgical calendar: on days of vigils and of weekday abstentions, dairy products were quickly accepted as substitutes for meat, and as of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries they were also permitted during Lent.

This was not how the bad reputation of cheese came to an end. The ruling classes willingly did without, as we can deduce from the cookbooks (always geared to the upper classes) that appeared in Europe between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. If cheese was occasionally used in cooking as an ingredient in sauces and stuffings, it had a hard time getting on the table and being appreciated as a product in its own right. It was nonetheless possible to introduce certain changes. French cookbooks of this period mention cheese in fewer than one out of ten recipes. Even more “reticent” (to use Bruno Laurioux’s term) was the gastronomy of the German world, while the English appear to have been downright “refractory.” In Italy, however, there are signals that lead us to see a more notable presence of cheese in the taste of the elite. For example, the thirteenth-century Libro della cucina proposes a very simple recipe for spit-roasted cheese served to “the master” on a thin slice of bread. But it is above all in combination with pasta that cheese finds growing popularity, evidently acquiring particular popularity where pasta, in Italy primarily, becomes a foodstuff of wide consumption as of the Middle Ages. The fantasy of a land of “Bengodi”³ is a dream typical of the popular imagination. It is a place at whose center is “a mountain entirely composed of grated parmesan,” on whose summit macaroni and ravioli are cooked nonstop and then sent sliding down the slopes so that they reach the bottom well coated in cheese. Analogous to this is the comparable use of cheese in middle-class homes and in the courts of nobility.

Is it possible then to conclude, along with Laurioux, that “the taste for cheese is Mediterranean?” As it happens, the first European treatise specifically devoted to dairy products was written by an Italian doctor, Pantaleone da Confienza, professor at the University of Turin, who published a highly original Summa lacticiniorum in 1459. It is a veritable encyclopedia devoted to the environmental, economic, hygienic, dietary, organic, and gastronomic aspects concerning the production of milk, butter, and above all cheese, or rather cheeses, whose extensive varieties (diversitas) are listed for the first time, and to which thirty-two out of the forty chapters of the treatise are devoted. The author discusses the various means of producing the clotting of milk, the diverse nature of cheeses determined by the kind of milk used, the systems of salting and conservation, the various grades of aging. He describes and evaluates the principal cheeses of Italy, France, Germany, England, Brittany, and Flanders, most of which he claims to have sampled.

Pantaleone’s Summa contains two noteworthy innovations. The first is a refutation of all the scientific literature preceding him when he presents for the first time a decidedly positive view of the contested product. Naturally, he does so with caution to avoid direct confrontation with the unimpeachable masters of medical science (Hippocrates and Galen) and their medieval disciples. He does this with great rhetorical ability and in perfect scholastic style, as when he discusses the affirmation made by Isaac, the great Jewish doctor of the tenth century, who wrote, “Cheese is universally [universaliter] unhealthful, heavy on the stomach and hard to digest.” Without questioning the authority of the text under discussion, Pantaleone simply overturns the assumption, contending that the adverb universaliter does not comprise general validity but serves only to exclude particular cases, meaning daily use. With similar skill the Piedmontese doctor introduces a series of distinctions among types of the product and the “nature” of individuals, maintaining that there is a right kind of cheese for each kind of person. Some cheeses are suitable for older people, some for young, and each temperament requires its own kind, be it choleric, phlegmatic, melancholic, or sanguine (the four principal human “complexions” classified by traditional science). He even indicates certain uses of cheese for therapeutic purposes. The conclusion is crystal clear and unqualified: “In the final analysis, I see no reason to believe that all cheeses are to be eliminated, as advocated by some authorities, and that individuals in good health should not partake of it.”

And the second great innovation: “I have seen with my own eyes,” Pantaleone writes, “kings, dukes, counts, marquesses, barons, soldiers, nobles, merchants, plebeians of both sexes,” willingly nourish themselves with cheese, “and so it is obvious that all of them endorse it.” In that sentence lies the invalidation of a centuries-old prejudice: cheese is good for everybody—nobles and plebeians. Obviously, our distinguished doctor adds—as though to confirm an inalterable distinction—only the rich and famous (divites et notabiles personae) can allow themselves to follow the rules dictated by science (to choose cheese according to one’s temperament, to serve it at the beginning or the end of the meal according to the grade of maturity) and to observe the “commonplace” (the oft-repeated Salerno aphorism) that recommends parsimonious consumption: “Caesus est sanus quem dat avara manus.” The poor, however, Pantaleone continues, “and all those who are forced by necessity into eating cheese on a daily basis, are not obliged to uphold this rule, being compelled to eat it at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of a meal.” For them at least an additional consideration is offered: “Many are so accustomed to cheese that even an excessive amount cannot harm them.”

During the same period that Pantaleone published his Summa on dairy products, cheese achieved a degree of success in Italian intellectual circles, among humanists who, in Rome and elsewhere, while reexamining advice already proposed the previous century by Petrarch, discovered pleasure in the simple foods of the poor, borrowed from “rustic taste” (the rusticanum gustum praised by Gaspare da Verona). It became a genuine fashion, linked to the recovery of ancient texts and to the model of life they proposed, which was the Roman ideal of sobriety and moderation transmitted by Latin literature and ambiguously presented as “peasant” values. This new model of simplicity, essentialism, and moral rigor revived certain aspects of the monastic tradition in a new secular key, but with the same equivocations: the valorization of “the culture of the poor” from a privileged and protected social position. Typically monastic but relived in a new way, it was the practice of replacing meat with peasant foods—“of the common folk,” as defined by Petrarch—such as vegetables or cheese, which were considered more wholesome.

It was in this climate that Antonio Beccadelli (1397–1471) wrote In Praise of Cheese (Elogio de caseo), in which he imagines that the cheese itself is speaking, relating how it was made by a shepherd in order to be sold in town. And in this same climate Gaspare da Verona, in his biography of Pope Paul II, praised the pontiff’s refined dietary habits by specifying that he “enjoyed eating dairy products and fresh cheese at every meal.”

The change in attitude toward cheese, clearly perceptible in the fifteenth century, is due to the appearance during the two preceding centuries of quality cheeses, highly reputed products esteemed in the marketplace and associated with particular places of origin, as well as to particular techniques of fabrication. Pantaleone himself bears witness to this when he singles out among Italian cheeses a few excellent ones such as Florentine pecorino⁴ or “marzolino” made in Tuscany and Romagna; “piacentino” (called parmesan by some), made of cow’s milk in Emilia and also in the regions of Milan, Pavia, Novara, and Vercelli; and the little “robiola”⁵ from Monteferrato. He then pauses to discuss the cheeses of various valleys in Piedmont and Savoy before going on to French cheeses, among which he particularly remembers craponne and brie (the latter of which must have enjoyed a degree of international renown, since it was even mentioned in fourteenth-century Italian cookbooks).

Pantaleone himself seems to have been aware of this change in the quality of the products. “Perhaps,” he wrote, “the poor opinion that [Isaac, the Jewish doctor] held of cheese was because he did not like it, or had seen and tasted only inferior products, which in fact are very bad.”

If in the last centuries of the Middle Ages certain cheeses began to be offered as gifts among the upper classes as a sign of worthy homage, and on occasion of self-aggrandizement (so Laurioux thinks), this indicates that the social status of cheese had indeed changed. By the fifteenth century the problem had definitively been resolved. The tortuous path of the ennoblement of cheese had reached a point of no return. In the next century, it appeared to have become solidly entrenched in the dietary habits of the upper classes, no longer as a mere ingredient in the preparation of dishes, but also as a product in its own right to be served at the table during a meal. In 1549, Cristoforo Messisbugo, writing on behalf of the duke of Ferrara, listed among the indispensable provisions in the court pantry “hard, fat cheese, tomino, pecorino, sardesco, marzolino and provature, and ravogliuoli.” Bartolomeo Scappi, in 1570, reports that menus for the papal court regularly contain “splits of marzolino, Florentine raviggioli, thick slices of parmesan, cheese from the riviera, romagnolo, romanesco, caciocavallo, provature, mozzarella.” Grated parmesan has in fact become de rigueur for dressing pasta, mixed—for those who can afford it—with costly spices, primarily sugar and cinnamon.

But prejudices die hard. One might even say that the very success of cheese in the high gastronomy of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries revived the diffidence, suspicion, and polemics concerning this product with fresh intensity. Never was the discussion more alive than during that time.