Series Editor’s Preface
A true and dazzling polymath, Massimo Montanari combines philology, sociological class analysis, anthropology, and cultural and gastronomic history in this delightful and readable book, fluently translated by Beth Archer Brombert.
“Do not let the peasant know how good cheese is with pears.” Taking this simple unassuming proverb (and proverbs do constitute a collective anonymous repository of folk wisdom), Montanari shows how the antinomy of the lowly peasant food, born of lactic decomposition, and the tree-born and rare fruit, worthy of the royal table, were enmeshed in a dialectic not to be synthesized or commingled at the table by the lower classes. Peasants should remain blissfully ignorant of the gastronomic delights of cheese with pears!
In this eminently accessible historical narrative, Montanari traces the evolution of attitudes to cheese, that simple elemental nomadic food worthy of primitive “barbarians,” the “meat of the peasantry,” the saying went. Dieticians warned of a peril to health and to the digestive tract of aristocrats and peasants alike. Montanari here includes an impressive summary of medical theory from Galen to the early moderns. In the hierarchy of foods treegrown fruits were always “socially” superior to the earthbound root vegetables and cheeses. Disdain for cheese was since time immemorial proverbially useful for the convenience and reinforced exclusionary snobbism of the ruling classes.
Centuries later, in the courts of Europe, aristocrats who were raised indulging in the healthful and rare delicacies of the pear became gastronomes, broadening their palates into trying new tastes and hitherto neglected combinations. And so this delicious combination of cheese and pears made its way onto Italian menus, until now it seems an inevitable and decreed delicacy: “Oncques Deus ne fist un tel mariage / Comme de poire et du fromage [Never did God make a better marriage than the one between pear and cheese].”
For the reader of this excellent translation, it might be helpful to contrast the subject of Montanari’s Italian folk proverb with an equally proverbial class distinction, dating back at least to 1393 (Gower: “Lo, how they feignen chalk for cheese”). As defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, this saying takes things “differing in value though in appearance not unlike.” It is usually used as a sign of lack of discernment typical of an Anglo-Saxon peasant!
What is relevant here is that, unlike the more aristocratic attitude of the Italian proverb, cheese in England is the socially superior component in this antinomy. As a wise philologist stated in 1579, the proverb made black of white chalk and white of cheese. The OED is fine for tracing the philological history of chalk versus cheese; would there were a Montanari to reveal the social history behind this English elevation of cheese.
—Albert Sonnenfeld