Cheese, Pears, and History in a Proverb

Our story began with a proverb. The moment has come to introduce another, documented for the first time in Dieci tavole di proverbi (Ten tables of proverbs), a collection of maxims in Venetian dialect, of which we have one edition dated 1535 (but there must be another going back to the beginning of the century):

Formaio, pero, pan, pasto da villan
Formaio, pan e pero, pasto da cavaliero

Cheese, pear, bread, meal for a peasant
Cheese, bread, pear, meal for a knight

This is a typically Italian proverb and has survived to this day. As of the sixteenth century it had already crossed the Alps, but as a proverb imported from Italy. So declares the sixteenth-century anthology of proverbs in Castilian by Hernando Nuñez de Guzman (Formajo pero pan, pasto de vilan / formajo pan pero, pasto de caballero), and the seventeenth-century Dictionnaire des proverbes français, which records only the first line (fromage, poire et pain, repas de vilain), acknowledging it to be an Italian proverb.

It is essential to note that the two lines of the proverb—even if they circulate separately at times—are understood to be a single proverb subdivided into two parts. In the Dieci tavole of 1535, the list of proverbs is numbered, and only one number covers the two expressions. It is therefore in this context that we must seek their meaning.

At first sight, the proverb astounds us. To bring together knight and plebeian in the consumption of bread, cheese, and pears seems to recompose the social universe annulling differences and conflicts. This is how Lapucci interpreted it in his anthology of proverbs: “This is a meal as suited for people of rank as for simple folk since it is delicious but not expensive.”

But such a reading is not convincing. In the society of the late Middle Ages and early modern era in which the proverb was conceived and formulated, the idea that plebeians and knights could eat the same food is (at the risk of repetition) downright impossible.

Is this, then, merely a joke, a nonsense rhyme? This cannot be excluded, but it seems hardly plausible when serious ideological themes, heavy with meaning, such as those regarding the social connotations of eating habits, come into play. It is hard to joke about a theme like that. Giulio Cesare Croce could parody it, but the parody soon ends in tragedy when his hero, Bertoldo, dies after having eaten food unsuited to a peasant.

I believe that Loux and Ricard are right when they maintain that proverbs always have a meaning, even when they elude us simply because the cultural coordinates within which they arose are no longer part of our mental world. Especially when the subject is food, “the proverbial discourse is detailed and precise,” and most important, the relationship between the elements involved seems endowed with a meaning of great “joint coherence” even more than their individual meaning. One has only to discover it. “The essential function of the proverbial discourse is to relate, to make known the ties between elements that are habitually discrete.”

Even the order in which the words and the things appear does not seem left to chance. Questions of rhyme or assonance can have their importance, but the structure of the line can hardly ever be reduced to wordplay. In the example quoted, it seems to me that it is precisely the syntax, the construction of the line and the position of the words within it that can reveal the meaning of an operation seemingly incomprehensible, like attributing to the same foods the ability to signify two social identities that are strikingly antithetical. With this in mind, I would like to propose a grammatical dismantling of the two expressions while taking into account a few fundamental loose ends that have come to light in the course of our investigation. The pair cheese + bread is certainly to be understood as one of the principle alimentary symbols of the peasant identity. The pairing of cheese and pears is probably to be understood, given the prestige of the pear, as a sign of social difference.

Let us try to understand this second plausible hypothesis, beginning with the second line of the proverb, which seems to confirm it with aphoristic evidence. Here the point of departure is provided by the pair cheese + bread (= peasant fare) to which the pear is added. It is this very addition that justifies the leap of meaning: the symbolic process is exactly the same as that of ennoblement, amply discussed earlier. This is why the meal is pasto da cavaliere, fit for a knight.

The first line, however, poses a problem. But even here the meaning does not seem inaccessible. Here the point of departure is the pair cheese + pear to which bread is added. When that happens, it means that the protagonist is not satisfied with this kind of snack and has to fill up: he is either hungry now or afraid of being hungry later. He therefore does not belong to the patrician world. His is the meal of a peasant. Even in literature, to eat pears and cheese “with bread” is a sign of poverty, as in a passage from Danae, a play by Baldassare Tacconi written at the close of the fifteenth century.

The validity of this interpretation, which assigns a specific significance to the order in which the foods are presented in the text, seems to be confirmed by another Italian proverb that makes its appearance at the end of the sixteenth century in the anthology by Francesco Serdonati:

Noci e pane, pasto da villano
Pane e noci, è pasto da spose

Walnuts and bread, food for peasants
Bread and walnuts, food for newlyweds

This proverb is still heard today in Italy with an important dialectal variant that substitutes for “food for peasants” the more brutal “food for dogs”: Paen e nouç l’è un magné da spous; nouç e paen l’è un magné da caen (bread and walnuts is food for newlyweds / walnuts and bread is food for dogs). Even in this case it is unlikely that we are faced with a play on words, a simple assonance of rhyme (moreover absent in the pair villano/spose). Too important to be lacking significance is the contrast between the two terms and between the opposing circumstances they evoke: a wedding banquet as a moment of uncommon abundance and quality of food; and the cheerless daily reality of what animals or peasants eat. Here, too, it seems possible to recognize the precise syntactical value of the parallels, suggested by the order in which the foods appear. To enrich bread with walnuts is fine dining because it signifies the transformation of daily food into a feast, as is usual for a wedding dinner (in certain regional traditions bread with walnuts is still today a symbol of a wedding). To add bread to walnuts, on the other hand, or to have walnuts and nothing else to go with bread, is the fare of hunger.

But these nimble grammatical acrobatics run the risk of creating ambiguities and misunderstandings, which is why Francesco Serdonati isolates the second part of the proverb and proposes a reading that we did not anticipate: Cacio, pane, e pere / Cibo da cavaliere is merely a restatement of the line we quoted above, but he comments: “The parsimony of our ancestors is thus evident, for they respected noble persons who obligated themselves to be content with modest foods.” In short, he sees cheese, bread, and pears as modest foods, not luxurious ones, with which knights of old nourished themselves (attested to by verses in the Paradiso in which Dante nostalgically evokes the uncorrupted customs in Florence in the days of his ancestor Cacciaguida).

Playing on the ambiguity of the proverbial line, Serdonati turned the terms of the argument upside down. He evidently preferred to use the proverb in order to propose other considerations that at that moment were more pressing. We are taking note of this now but will have to examine it further: with regard to proverbs, the relationship between creation and use of the text is especially dynamic. The very nature of the lines—brief, concise, schematic—carries a high quotient of uncertainty, which leaves ample room for interpretation by the one who speaks them, annotates them, uses them. This does not obviate the fact that every text has a story, sometimes an author, and a meaning one might call “original,” which is what we are looking for in these pages. But every text has to confront the readings that are proposed from one time to another, and this, too, we must take into consideration.

It was not just the subtlety of the syntactic nuances that made the proverb of the knight and the peasant difficult. The basic idea itself—that diets that appear to be similar can be substantially different—was not so readily digested and communicated. For this reason, I believe, already in the sixteenth century another version of the proverb was circulated that was more readily understood because it seemed to lack contradictions. Once again, it is Serdonati who confirms this, proposing under F for Formaggio the two separate parts of the proverb (already listed under C for Cacio):

Formaggio, pere e pane non è pasto da villano . . .
Formaggio, pane e pere è pasto da cavaliere

Cheese, pears, and bread is not a meal for peasants . . .
Cheese, bread, and pears is a meal for knights

The second part, however, with the insertion of the negative (non è pasto da villano), has overturned the meaning of the original proverb, eliminating any ambiguity and reinforcing the message, making it tautologically self-confirming: This is (not) because it is.

The new version goes back to 1611 when Orlando Pescetti published a new anthology of Italian proverbs “condensed under certain headings, and platitudes in alphabetical order.” He, too, affirms that however you align them, cheese, pears, and bread are not peasant fare.

The two variants from then on live parallel lives. Giulio Cesare Croce, in 1618, preferred the older one: “Formaggio, pere e pan, pasto da villan.” Francesco Lena, in 1674, preferred the new one: “Cacio, pane e pere, cibo da cavaliere. Cacio, pere e pan non è cibo da villan.” Even today, both are in use.

Why so many variants, ambiguities, uncertainties? It will be said (and we have said it) that this is typical of proverbs. But in my opinion, there is more. Things are complicated because in this story of cheese and pears, much more than in other analogous stories, the boundaries between peasant and knight are objectively difficult to trace. Cheese can be gentrified, but it nevertheless remains a plebeian foodstuff. Pears can be considered a food of the elite, but it is foolhardy to think of them as an “exclusive” food.

The imaginary and the real contradict each other, in this case, even more harshly than usual. Pears (here is the problem) are not inaccessible. They are not spices, costly exotic products that alter a dish (perhaps even of peasant origin) prepared for the patrician palate. In the final analysis, it is the peasants themselves who grow pears as employees on the lands of the proprietors, or as renters or sharecroppers. It is they who on occasion sell them at the market (the peasant woman from the countryside around Imola who brings pears to sell in the city, in a fifteenth-century novella by Sabadino degli Arienti, is hardly an uncommon or strange character). In short, for pears there is a dimension of quotidian normality that collides with this exclusive image. With disarming simplicity, Piero de’ Crescenzi writes that the pear tree “is a very familiar tree.” And the botanist Constanzo Felici continues: “pears are widely known in all countries and on all tables.”

But if the pear is a “widely known” fruit, how can the ruling classes entrust it with the delicate function of distinguishing between people, of confirming, through alimentary and gastronomic models, the ideology of difference? What is one to do if different kinds of men eat the same kinds of food? If the king eats pears and so does Bertoldo? If Bertoldo eats cheese and so does the king?

One way to avert the risks, primarily symbolic, resulting from an excessive similarity between alimentary models among knights and peasants was to introduce the idea of exclusive connoisseurship, the special ability to discriminate between cheese and cheese, pear and pear, assigning to each the products best suited to that individual. All this took place at the same time as did a fundamental change—during the very arc of centuries that we are examining—in the way the notion of taste was conceived.