Six
The Ideologyof Difference and Strategies of Appropriation
Since people are different, they must eat in different ways. On this irrefutable axiom, alimentary customs and precepts were established during the Middle Ages and the ancien régime. However, the acceptance of humble foodstuffs for upper-class tables was accompanied by a particular strategy that modified the image, making it “socially correct.”
Let us pick up the threads of our inquiry. In the last centuries of the Middle Ages, the traditional image of cheese as a vulgar, plebeian food came to be modified by a number of circumstances—its longtime promotion by monastic mores; the appearance on the market of quality products; the humanist vogue of simple rustic foods—that accounted for its admission into good society.
But that society did not believe that all men are equal. Until the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man this remained an abstruse and incomprehensible concept. Medieval society and that of the ancien régime were entirely permeated with an ideology of difference that touched on every aspect of daily life. Literary and scientific literature continued to rehash the need to follow a diet suitable for the “quality of the person,” determined not only by individual characteristics but also, and above all, by social position. To confuse the food of a peasant with that of a gentleman would endanger both the health of the individual and the social order.
Doctors had no doubts about this matter. Suitable for the stomach of the upper classes are delicate, refined foods; for that of the peasantry, coarse, heavy foods. As explained by Giacomo Albini, a fourteenth-century doctor in the service of the Prince of Savoy, to consume foods not intended for one’s own rank inevitably leads to suffering and sickness. Dietary manuals, describing the nutritional benefits of foodstuffs, were careful to distinguish between those “for courtiers” and those “for plebeians,” according to Michele Savonarola, a fifteenth-century physician from Padua and author of an important dietary work on All the Things One Eats.
For this reason, one must take more or less seriously a text, at first glance a prank, entitled The Very Clever Wiles of Bertoldo by Giulio Cesare Croce, which introduces into the court of King Alboino a “commoner,” Bertoldo himself, presented as a hero of popular wisdom, with whom the sovereign has an ambiguous relationship, at the same time admiring and contemptuous. Published in 1606, Croce modeled his work on the medieval Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolfo (said to date from the tenth century), but he ended it much more dramatically: “While [Bertoldo] stayed at that court everything went from good to better. However, accustomed as he was to eating coarse foods and wild fruits, he no sooner began to enjoy those refined and exquisite dishes than he fell gravely ill to the point of death.” The doctors, “not knowing his nature,” sought to treat him with remedies “given to gentlemen and knights of the court,” ignoring Bertoldo’s supplications “to bring him a pot of beans with an onion, and turnips cooked under ashes, because he knew that such foods would make him well. But those doctors never obliged him. And so his life came to an end.”
Only beans, onions, and turnips could have saved Bertoldo. The first of the “sententious sayings” he is presumed to have spoken before dying is a proverb—“He who eats turnips avoids getting into scrapes”—that was catalogued precisely at that time by Francesco Serdonati, author of the oldest anthology of Italian proverbs, who comments: “He who is accustomed to course food should not seek dishes that are too refined, for such a change could be harmful.”
In short, food should sustain and nourish—in the literal sense—the identity of the one who eats it, for it not only expresses that identity but also creates it. It should moreover represent that identity in a dramatic manner. Since the upper classes are continually in search of signs that confirm and valorize the differences between the classes, the first, easiest and most immediate way of doing this is to play on culinary practices and symbols. Consequently, for a food to be considered acceptable by the gentry, appropriate strategies must be found to alter its status, thereby making it “socially correct” and compatible with the prevailing ideology. These strategies, consisting of procedures and signs, material and symbolic practices, ennoble humble foods and make their approval by the upper classes possible.
Important documentation of all this can be found in the cookbooks of the late Middle Ages and early modern era, written by court nobility or by the urban upper middle class. Recipes in those texts demonstrate the culture of the elite classes, but to our surprise, they seem to be infused with flavors and seasonings borrowed from peasant fare. Garlic, onions, and turnips, vegetables branded “rustic food” in the literature of the time, systematically appear in preparations “for gentlefolk.”
And that is the point: the appearance of “lowly food” on upper-class tables was achieved with much caution and shrewdness, geared to bridging the distance between image and reality, between an ideology of difference—with which the entire culture of the period was imbued—and familiarization with the intermixing of culinary usages, as confirmed by the cookbooks.
If we think of the alimentary system as a form of language, an initial means of signaling differences, we find ourselves on a lexical level, that is, individual words, or in this case, the base product. If cheese has become a shared taste among the elite, it will not be hard to distinguish different types of cheese, some for noblemen, some for peasants. The prized brie that Italian cookbooks call for to enrich a pea soup is not merely a denomination of origin but also the exoticism of its provenance, a sign of recognition by high society. Similar praise of “the refinement of parmesan,” lauded in literature in the ways already seen, went in the same direction: the choice of high quality products for lordly dining. The culture of difference is also manifest in documents that list provisions. In the court of Mantua in the fifteenth century, cheeses of various types were stocked, some for the prince’s table and others for the workers who farmed his lands. In June 1458 Battista di Villanova, the farm manager, informs the Marquess Barbara Gonzaga that he has just ordered 130 pesi, weights, of cheese, “carefully selected and of high quality” to be sent to court, and another sixteen intended for the threshers at the farms in Luzzara and Paludano. For them, he adds, “I have ordered that they take the worst.”
Other strategies of differentiation—always for the purpose of adjusting the meaning of the culinary discourse—operate on a morphological level (the enrichment of a lowly product with ingredients accessible only to the few), or a syntactical one (modification of the way a product is used, giving it another place in the order of service during a meal). An example of a morphological variant: a simple polenta with vegetables or of some other “lowly” grain can be ennobled by the addition of costly spices. An example of a syntactical variant: this same polenta can be served as a side dish with costly meat, rather than as a dish by itself. In either of these examples the foodstuff loses its “peasant” nature.
These strategies come into play in the way cheese is used. Let us recall what Columella wrote: cheese “serves not only to nourish peasants but also to grace elegant tables.” This is as though to say that it is precisely the diverse syntactic role (nourish/grace) that confers diverse meanings to foods. Let us go back to what we said about cheese as the conclusion of a meal, the food that “seals” the stomach. If a food is not the meal itself (as was often the case for peasants) but is eaten only to end it, its meaning has already changed. According to this logic, the mechanism of habituation is of crucial importance, as we have seen in at least one instance: cheese added to pasta (done by everyone, peasants and noblemen alike) is ennobled by being mixed with such precious condiments as sugar and cinnamon.
At this point, a question arises: could eating cheese with pears not be a later practice of ennoblement?
To reply to this we have to ask: what was the social status of pears—and consequently its symbolic meaning—in the alimentary culture of the Middle Ages and the early modern era?
