Cheese, Pears, and History in a Proverb

The medieval concept of taste as an instinctive form of knowledge achieved through the perception of taste was slowly replaced by a notion of “good taste”—a cultivated knowledge that could be learned and taught. Taste thus became a mark of distinction, giving rise to the idea of denying knowledge to anyone who was not socially worthy.

Is taste natural or cultural? Instinctive or acquired? During the Middle Ages, the prevalent idea was to consider it a natural capability that allowed one to know directly the essence of things, expressed by or emanating from their flavor. It was precisely flavor, along with the nature of the foods, that was held to be the primary means of knowing (or recognizing) their use with regard to the needs of those who ingested them, determined by the greater or lesser pleasure of their taste. Pleasure thus became the infallible guide to health, because, Avicenna said, “if the body of a man is healthy, all the things that give greater pleasure to his mouth are the ones that nourish him best.” So also wrote Aldobrandino da Siena in the thirteenth century. And in the following century, the Milanese doctor Maino de’ Maineri was similarly convinced that what tasted good was good for one, “since condiments make food tastier and consequently more digestible.”

The mechanism is simple: on one hand, need (the physiological requirements of the one who eats) generates desire (to eat something); on the other hand, the nature of a food generates its flavor; if desire and flavor have a positive encounter in the process of tasting—which is to say, if the food pleases—then the nature of that food is suited to the physiological need of the one who eats it.

With the question of taste couched in such terms, it was not possible to deny anyone—not even peasants—the ability to accede to an instinctive knowledge, natural, precultural, that does not arise from theory or even practice. Who teaches animals to do certain things? Montaigne ponders this in one of his Essays, reflecting on their ability to orient themselves, to feel, to evaluate, in short, to know in a noncognitive way, yet, in some cases, with greater speed and accuracy than is achieved by reason. “There must be a particular sense,” Montaigne continues, “that teaches hens, before any experience, to be afraid of the sparrow hawk but not the goose or the peacock, though they are larger animals; that informs chickens of the hostility of cats, but not to fear dogs.” And the following example seems made to order for us: who teaches “hornets, ants, rats always to choose the best cheese and the best pears even before tasting them?”

In short, animals at times know more than people, and what are peasants if not animals, or at best, men in a primordial state? A prototype of this human/animal species is Marcolfo, in the Dialogo , who is portrayed with all kinds of bestial attributes: pendulous, almost horselike lips, the rough beard of a billy goat, the face of an ass, hair like the spines of a sea urchin. His woman has long hairy eyebrows like the back of a pig, chin hair like a she-goat, asinine ears, the aspect of a snake.

These wild creatures, veritable “human animals,” whose appearance reveals their animal nature, nonetheless possess a culture of their own, a kind of primordial knowledge. And in a domain such as food, the competence of the peasantry, sharpened by the needs of daily life, is incessantly confronted with the knowledge (and the demands) of the ruling classes. From this arises the need of the elite to reaffirm at all times their difference, attributing to it a “rational consciousness” which they do not recognize in the peasantry. Count Giulio Landi, in his praise of piacentino cheese, wrote, “However much the populace may recognize its goodness, not for that can they provide the reason why it is so good.” Instinctively, the populace can know that a food is good, but not why.

But just a moment. This idea can be turned around. The populace may not know why a food is good, but it does know it. Herein lay the danger. The notion of taste as an instinctive capacity could threaten the system of social differences, the ideological bulwark and reassuring utopia of the ruling classes. To the worst of pigs go the best of pears: this devastating saying, still listed today in anthologies of Italian proverbs, seems to express the dismay of having failed to exclude the animals—and by extension the peasantry—from a taste for good things.

Medieval culture had believed the problem to be resolved by inserting—though forcing the issue somewhat—the theme of social difference into that of instinctive knowledge. As we have seen, the idea communicated by scientific, medical, and philosophic considerations was that since knowledge is instinctive and people are diverse, each person naturally likes different things.

This is not a new idea. It can also be found in medieval culture where it cohabited with instinctive knowledge (the two notions will always live side by side). It happened that, up to a point—between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, first in Italy and Spain, then in France and other countries—this idea of cultivated taste asserted itself and from a minority view became the dominant one in figurative usages as well. The ability to (learn how to) appreciate is not only applicable to the choice of foods—in the specific meaning of the sense of taste—but, metaphorically, to anything that makes daily life “beautiful” by filling the senses—sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste—with sensations that only an exacting, trained intellect is capable of enjoying.

According to Luca Vercelloni, all this was encouraged by the passing of the term “taste” into metaphor, no longer to indicate taste in its alimentary meaning (subjective and instinctive), but rather in its esthetic meaning—metaphor that only recently succeeded in “retroactively redefining the primitive meaning of the term, assigning a cultural quality even to taste in the palatal sense.” My impression is that the notion of good taste involves, from the outset, the ability to choose food, and perhaps for that reason it was not the figurative use that gave rise to the idea of good taste but, on the contrary, the early development of this idea in the domain of gastronomy that encouraged its extension into other areas. This is the hypothesis advanced, with extreme caution, by Jean-Louis Flandrin. While admitting the possibility that “metaphoric use may have fostered . . . the appearance of good taste in things alimentary,” he asks, “how could such a metaphor [that of intellectual taste] have been created and cultivated . . . by a society that was indifferent to culinary finesse and sensitive perceptions in the domain of food?” In the final analysis, it is hard to know “if the idea of good taste—or of its opposite, bad taste—first appeared in the realm of food or in the world of arts and letters.” It is the first hypothesis that he finds more appealing.

One important detail: by itself, the notion of good taste in no way excludes instinct. A spontaneous, intuitive dimension is attributed even to intellectual judgment (Voltaire defined taste, in the sense of good taste, as a kind of “immediate discernment, such as that of the tongue and the palate”). But the idea of good taste that finally established itself is of a mediated knowledge, a “culturally remodeled” taste that, Vercelloni writes, matures over “a long cultural apprenticeship.”

And so, it was no longer true that “what pleases is good,” but “what is good is what pleases (or what one learns to like),” in other words, “good” is what is conventionally so considered by connoisseurs. The medieval adage de gustibus non est disputandum, which recognized the same legitimacy for all tastes determined by the natural instinct of each individual, in the modern era came up against a “progressive loss of credibility,” while the idea that not all tastes have the same value and that some people more than others—so-called experts—are competent to judge gained strength. In this way, taste was defined as a “mechanism of social differentiation.” Never as in the Renaissance, wrote Hauser—referring to artistic taste, but the argument has a broader range—has it been proposed to create “a culture exclusively programmed for an elite, from which the majority was to be excluded.” This is the cultural mechanism that Flandrin called “distinction through taste,” an idea that was long held unthinkable even if, in my opinion, it was not necessary to await the seventeenth century (as Flandrin maintains) to see it arise. In Italy, as in Spain, it could be anticipated at least a century earlier.

The meat of the story is this: the peasant does not appreciate delicate pears (at the time, moscatella were held in particularly high regard), because his nature is “coarse and wild,” exactly like the pears he feeds to the pigs. It is almost an archetype of Croce’s Bertoldo, “accustomed,” as will perhaps be remembered, “to eating coarse food and wild fruit.” A Catalan proverb also comes to mind, “Sire, you eat the pears that we throw to the pigs” (Mon senyor, mangeu les peres, que les tinc de llançar al porc).

Again, Cosimo de’Medici, along with his brother Lorenzo, is the protagonist of the novella written by Tommaso Costo more than a century later. The two gentlemen for their entertainment often invited a very rich peasant to dine with them. “One day at the end of the meal, they were at the fruit . . . the peasant peeled every fruit before eating it. When he did so to the moscatella pear, the two great men could no longer endure it and said to him, ‘Why such zealous peeling? Don’t you see you are wasting the best part?’ The peasant impertinently replied, “On my lands everybody peels them, all but the pigs.”

At first glance the two stories appear to be similar, but looked at carefully they reveal different attitudes toward food. In Poliziano’s account the peasant is excluded by nature from appreciating moscatella pears, which his instinct directs him not to eat. Costo, on the contrary, describes a parvenu—the “very rich peasant”—who tries to imitate the style of living and alimentary models of the aristocracy but does so clumsily. He exaggerates his supposed refinement, which makes him look ridiculous in the eyes of his hosts who, in this instance, find it absurd to peel that particular kind of pear, thereby wasting the most delicious part. The message has therefore changed. It is not taste but good taste that differentiates people. If in Poliziano’s story the master and the peasant inevitably end up eating different things, here they eat the same thing—but only the master knows the secret of how really to savor and appreciate it.

The shift from the idea of taste to good taste carries with it contradictory consequences, which Tommaso Costo’s story allows us to intuit. Distancing itself from the paradigm of natural spontaneity, taste acquires a more aristocratic and elitist character. But if taste becomes a question of connoisseurs, based on the notion of learning, no one—at least in principle—can consider himself excluded from the outset. Flandrin incisively observes that while it is true that the literature of the modern era insists on the spontaneity and naturalness of “the sensations of taste,” reserving it for a few elite, it is also true that “no one in these considerations of taste has advanced the idea that it could be hereditary and thus only belong to persons of noble origin.”

With the new notion of good taste, the perspective has changed. The ideology of difference no longer rests on an immutable ontological given, but on the ability and capacity (aided perhaps by instinct) to learn. Evidently, this precedes the development and affirmation of bourgeois culture. But even the hypothesis that the peasant might like the food of the master (which would overturn the “natural” order of society) is no longer beyond the imaginable.

For this very reason it became important to negate the knowledge of anyone socially unfit to possess it. To reveal to these Bertoldos the secrets that might refine their taste and transform them into so many knights would be neither appropriate nor desirable. This concept was already expressed in the fifteenth century by Gentile Sermini with regard to the flavor of sweetness, then considered a mark of social difference: “Let the peasant not taste sweet, but sour, yes; as a rustic is, a rustic stays.” In the sixteenth century this is clearly restated by Francesco Berni in a Capitolo that interests us particularly because it is dedicated to a fruit, the peach, which we have already seen in a proverbial saying, can play the same symbolic role as the pear.

Berni’s lines, written at the beginning of the sixteenth century, define the peach as “the queen of fruits,” a veritable panacea made “just for the benefit of mankind.” But few knew this, only “those with taste” because peaches “contain an underlying mystery . . . that cannot be taught to crude people.” This esoteric “mystery of the peach” holds the idea of an understanding that cannot be shared and that should not be shared, precisely so as to preserve a cultural identity (or what might be called a “sapient” identity) that consolidates and confirms class membership.

In the sixteenth century, the debate over the education of the peasantry was the order of the day. Camillo Tarello, an estate owner in the countryside of Brescia, does not fail in his Ricordo d’agricultura (memoir on agriculture) to emphasize that “all men naturally want knowledge.” This is demonstrated by the experience of “our first relative, Adam,” who, out of a desire for knowledge, did not hesitate to disobey divine law, with all the resulting misfortunes. It is therefore against nature to want to deny learning to peasants. They should, first of all, share with each other the agrarian principles in the Ricordo, and specifically the method—innovative for that time—for remedying the paucity of harvests by planting forage in rotation with grain crops. Beyond this precept, which will be widely accepted and exploited only two centuries later, what is notable is Tarello’s insistence on the need to disseminate among the peasantry this new knowledge. “Since my Ricordo is to be put into practice through the intermediary of illiterate people, it seems to me that it would be very wise for the priests of every hamlet, every village, and every estate to read from it in public once a month for the benefit and intelligence of the farm workers,” and to the advantage of the landowners themselves, who would profit so much more from their lands. But since the idea does not strike him as generally accepted, he presses on: “The result of being read to, though a new idea and a reasonable one, should not seem futile to anyone.” To teach the peasantry was a novel idea not commonly shared—far from it. For most, the ignorance of the peasantry was quite desirable.

The terms of the debate were still heated two centuries later when Francesco Scottoni, a Franciscan, was preparing a new edition of Ricordo d’agricultura enhanced by his notes and illustrations. The year is 1772, and Scottoni, examining in depth Tarello’s “social proposal,” reexamines the necessity for providing peasants with adequate instruction and equitable contracts that will assure their cooperative effort and therefore their greater commitment to the cultivation of the lands. For this they requested long-term rentals, rather than the few years that had been the common practice. “It is not possible,” Scottoni writes, “to condone a system propagated by those who, out of ignorance, want the Peasant to be poor, mistreated and ignorant.” And since, he adds, to know substantiates to want and to be able, it will be necessary to place education alongside “the hope of changing one’s condition,” the will and the ability for the peasant to work his own lands efficiently. In conclusion, he says, “it is obvious that the education of the peasant is much more productive than the present system of ignorance in which others want to keep him because with their despotic ideas and maxims, they place him among things, not persons, and treat him as a fait accompli because they do not want to grant him a way out.”

In short, most landowners regarded the system of ignorance in which peasants were held as a function of their own interests. A few far-seeing intellectuals sang outside the choir, but the culturally prevailing idea remained that of withholding education from the peasantry. Promoted in an organic and coherent form between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, this idea, as late as 1772, was still defined as current.